Brit Award for Classical Recording

The accolade used to be presented at the Brit Awards, an annual celebration of British and international music.^[2] The winners and nominees are determined by the Brit Awards voting academy with over one-thousand members, which comprise record labels, publishers, managers, agents, media, and previous winners and nominees.^[3]

The award was first presented in 1982 as "Classical Recording" which was won by Simon Rattle. The accolade has been defunct as of 1993.

New Zealand opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa became the only female winner in 1984. Only two other women were nominated for the award; Jane Glover for her recording of Violin Concerto by Richard Strauss and another violin concerto by Christopher Headington in 1992, and Cecilia Bartoli for her recording of Heroines by Giacomo Puccini in 1993. Te Kanawa was also one of only four non-British winners, along with Australian guitarist John Williams in 1983, Indian conductor Zubin Mehta for Carreras Domingo Pavarotti in Concert in 1991 and Hungarian-born conductor Georg Solti for his recording of Otello by Giuseppe Verdi in 1992, though Solti had been a British citizen since 1972. At least two musicians were nominated posthumously; Puccini in 1984, 60 years after his death, and Leonard Bernstein for his operetta Candide in 1992, two years after his death. The only musician nominated for two recordings in the same year was Colin Davis, who was nominated for his recordings of The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten in 1985.