I have come across yet another “greatest classical recordings” list, from the BBC music magazine, topping out at no less than fifty selections. That’s an awful lot of “best.” Way too much.
Nobody is likely to find fault with the topmost selections on the BBC list. The Solti/Vienna Ring Cycle, set down over seven years in the Sophiensaal by Decca’s crack engineers. Benjamin Britten’s own recording of the War Requiem from 1963. Pablo Casals and the Bach cello suites. Schnabel and the Beethoven piano sonatas.
But then? All of a sudden individual preference starts to rear its head. I have no problem with the Glenn Gould Golberg Variations as #4, but the BBC list ranked the Callas/diStefano Tosca as #5—maybe good for Callas folks or opera folks, but hardly a definitive Tosca or all that good of a performance, period, unless you’re a Maria Callas fan, which I most definitely and emphatically am not. Nor does Tosca belong in the same rarefied heights, musically speaking, as Wagner, Britten, Bach, and Beethoven. It’s a bodice-ripper designed to elicit histrionics and ticket sales. To that end it succeeds admirably. To the end that it is great art, I think not. I’d be unlikely to rank it even in their top fifty, much less the top five. A “best” recording must be of “best” music as well; otherwise, the thing is meaningless.
Once those initial five some-odd items were out of the way, the BBC list sailed into strange waters. John Eliot Gardiner’s HIP version of the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers. Nice record and all that, but the all-time #17? Oh, come on. Martha Argerich playing Chopin? I just can’t see it. I’m not saying that it’s a bad recording, but in the top 50 of all time?
Which brings us to the simple truth that “the best” can be only a very few. That’s as true of recordings—Ring, War Requiem, Casals, Schnabel—as it is of composers. Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Joseph Haydn stand at the summit of our musical peak. Nobody else qualifies. Plenty of other composers wrote utterly wonderful and inspiring music—the list is long—but they remain out of the inner circle. I may like a composer a great deal, but that does not put that composer onto Olympus. A fifty-item list of “the best” makes no sense at all. But a list of four or five, or even one—that is best as it should be.