About the Archive

Search help

Searching by keyword

Since the Gramophone Archive is so extensive (over 115,000 individual pages), try to make your search as specific as you can. Consider checking the spelling – Russian transliterations can vary (Rachmaninov, Rachmaninoff, Rakhmaninov are all possible permutations). Also bear in mind that abbreviations such as HMV would have included full-stops in early issues (thus H. M. V.).

A simple search like “Beethoven” will be returned with the option to further refine the search. Try and enter at least three words if you are looking for a specific review. If, for example, you are hunting for a review of Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 for Deutsche Grammophon, searches under “Karajan” and “Beethoven” will return too many results. “Karajan” + “Beethoven” + “Symphony No 5” + “DG” will return all his recordings of the work for DG, though bear in mind there are three different versions that can only be distinguished by format or review date.

If you use more than one word in your search you don't need to put quotes round the words. Our search automatically sorts results by relevance. You can further refine the results by decade, and then, within each decade, by year.

The text that is searched has been scanned from the printed page by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or in very recent issues from PDFs. The more recent the scanned pages, the more likely the OCR text is to be accurate. Older pages rarely give a 100% accurate reading. If you want to view the original scanned page, click on the green "View as Acrobat" instruction above the individual page image.

If you encounter a mistake in the text that has been OCR’d please take a moment to report the error and we will make the correction as soon as we can. With your help, we can improve the readability of the archive.

Searching for names

Remember that Gramophone’s style is to refer to people initially by their full name, and subsequently by their surname. You'll get better search results if you search by surname only, and then refine by place, date, record company etc.

Advanced search

If you use the "Advanced Search" feature (accessed from the main search box), you can ensure more detailed results by specifically the type of the feature (article, review etc), or you can specify a date range for your search.