Music: The Year's Best

More people bought more phonograph records (300 million) last year than in any year since Thomas Edison recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb. If they were guided by the critics at all, record-buyers frequently found the critics disagreeing. Last week, for the first time, five U.S. music critics* sang in harmony. For a magazine called the Review of Recorded Music they picked the year's best classical recordings. Only Conductor Arturo Toscanini (see above) won two ribbons. The critics' choices:

Concerto: Brahms's lone Violin Concerto, by Joseph Szigeti with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra...