EMI Music Companions series editor Michael Rose each volume £25 in UK
These little books are the answer. And what is the question? Not so much a questions, really, as a sigh - I'm sure you've heard it as often as I have - "Oh, but I don't know anything about classical music and I don't know where to start." The truth, of course, is that you start by listening, and the beauty of these biographies is that each is accompanied by three CDs of carefully-chosen music. It's not a new idea, by any means - but if it's badly done, you end up with an indifferent book, a collection of meaningless snippets of music and an extremely cross reader/listener who has failed to plough through the first and is annoyed by the patronising preachiness of the second. These Everyman/EMI volumes are, by contrast, a joy: the books are well written and beautifully produced, each one a treasure in itself, with lavish colour illustrations, informative notes on the musical extracts and intelligent suggestions for further reading and listening. The CDs, where possible, feature complete works - just imagine, whole symphonies, complete string quartets, entire piano sonatas - and the performances are taken, quietly and without fuss, from EMI's awesome back catalogue. You wouldn't expect a beginner to know, for example, that the recording of Don Giovanni from which a good half-hour is featured on Mozart: Volume 2 (The Letters) is one of the best opera recordings ever made, namely, the one conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini 1959 with soloists Eberhard Wachter, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Joan Sutherland. On the other hand, what better place for a beginner to begin? By the same token you get Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert and Peter Frankl, Jaime Laredo and Dmitri Alexeev playing Brahms. Other titles already available include Bach, Mozart Volume 1 and The Piano; in the pipeline are Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Ravel and The Violin. Roll over, beginners: I suspect that, like the marvellous little volumes from Everyman's Library, these "Music Companions" will have just as much appeal, in the long run, for the connoisseur.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist