When you say that face to face meetings are not really practical, I fail to say why not. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic Zoom and similar platforms have made face to face meeting enormously easy and eminently practical, indeed for many people they are now an indispensable part of their working and social lives. I can understand that having 24 people on Zoom at one time could be too chaotic and impractical, but doing it in blocks of say 4 or 6 people at a time based on time zone seems to me an easy and very practical way for MWI reviewers to talk to each other. Likewise for your reviewers that live in the UK, I can't understand why you would not all be willing, indeed chomping at the bit to physically meet up especially if it were something as infrequent as, let's say, once a year. When I read your appreciation of the late Brian Wilson in which you addressed this point John, I was struck by two things about how you seem not to get together regularly, namely how sad and why ever not? You all share a passion for classical music and its recorded legacy and life has few pleasures as enjoyable as sharing your passions with like-minded people. If the world learnt anything from the pandemic I would like to think it is just how precious is being in the physical presence of other people, or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.
As regards the subjective nature of your reviewers' chosen discs, I think your readers would be better served (and the overall choice would be more representative and fair) if more weight were given to agreed objective criteria such as technical quality, artistic excellence, fidelity to the score, presentation, originality, historical significance, etc. than to mere subjective caprice. Reviewers choosing as their disc of the year something that he or she (if there are any women among your reviewers) might not actually like to listen to should not at all be an anomaly.
As a possible improvement I would suggest taking a look at a piece Presto published yesterday in which they explained how they whittled down 100 discs to ten. In your case I think it would have been better if your 24 reviewers had been obliged to chosen one among the eight discs that received two votes originally. The result in that case would have been fairer and more representative than what we finally get which is a situation where over 90% did not choose the recording of the year and no disc received more than 2 from 24 votes, a situation from here that looks very wrong and skewed.
You raise a fair challenge, Robert.
The first thing to say is that the Recording of the Year has been chosen along similar lines for many years and we always try to be fair and balanced in our approach. Our reviewers live in various countries - the UK, Europe and North America - so face to face meetings (even online) are not really practical. Also, all our colleagues have their own areas of interest and specialisation; consequently, it's never possible for all reviewers to hear everything that other colleagues propose as their Recordings of the Year.
We use the number of nominations as a means of applying a judgement as to recordings that have particularly impressed reviewers during the year. This year we arrived at a shortlist of eight recordings. Then five members of the editorial team considered the original reviews of the releases in question and reached a decision based on the strength of the case that the reviewer(s) had made when first writing about each of the releases in question.
Inevitably, there's an element of subjectivity involved in any selection process such as this. We recognise that and we regularly consider how we might refine and improve the process.
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