CLASSICAL INTERNET AWARD 2005

Selected By:
Classicstoday.com
ClassicstodayFrance.com
Klassik-Heute.com

The Classical Internet Award have been created with you, our readers in mind, to summarize the entire range of the prior year's new releases and offer the broadest possible selection of titles for every taste, unified only by an international consensus regarding the artistic excellence of each disc chosen. The editors of the three affiliated websites and their critics, several dozen people in all, have together made their recommendations from the vast number of significant discs issued roughly between the fall of the last year and the fall of this year.

All of the winning titles listed below have been listened to, discussed, and enthusiastically reviewed by a majority of the participants in the selection process and reflect a general consensus. Beyond that, we believe that it is important to bring to your attention worthy releases that both you and we may have missed over the past year, particularly as online retail outlets have grown to the extent where finding and purchasing these titles is easier than ever. The CIA Award, then, offers all of us a perfect chance to take stock and catch up, and share our opinions about the year's best recordings, with the result, we hope, that you will find the results valuable and relevant to your personal listening habits.

Finally, we have decided not to artificially inflate the award's "value" in an abstract sense, by limiting the number of winning titles to the bare minimum in each category. How can you compare chamber music, say, by Mozart chamber music by Schulhoff, or Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins to Dvorák's songs, even though they belong in the same broad classification? The simple answer is, "You can't" without an unacceptable degree of randomness, personal subjectivity, and politics intruding into the process. Therefore, if we felt that more than one disc deserved to win in each general category, we let the results speak for themselves. We hope that you agree that we have achieved our objective of creating a list manageable in size, uniformly high in quality, but comprehensive in scope, with something in it for musical lovers everywhere.