MUSIC / Persons of note: As part of the International Classical Music Awards, Independent readers will vote for a Personality of the Year. Robert Maycock looks for the elusive essentials

THIS is the one with no rules. You can vote for your favourite tenor, or for your music teacher; for a model of dedication, or a model of millinery. Nobody can tell you what the judges are looking for, because there are no judges. It is an award for readers to decide themselves, and naturally every reader knows exactly what to look for. 'Distinctive or well-marked character', says the dictionary. That's all right, then. Never mind that it goes straight on to propose another option: 'the integrated organisation of all the psychological, intellectual, emotional, and physical characteristics of an individual, especially as they are presented to other people'. Find somebody like that in the world of classical music, and you really do have one in a million.

So what makes a musical personality? Our convictions here are united on one thing: being famous for its own sake - famous for being famous - is not the point. We want to be stirred by stories of people who have made things happen, and by achievements so far out of the ordinary that lives are changed. Never mind that the crowds filled the stadiums, or that the record hit the top of the charts; listen to the music, the playing, the singing, that got them there. By definition, the winner of this award will be a well-known name. Readers are voting, not making nominations, and first past the post takes all. But the interest is in the way that the chosen man or woman has caught the imagination.

Beyond that, search where you will. In the vocal cords, for instance: no living musicians in the Western classical tradition can have reached out and touched more souls over the past year than Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti. A certain built-in resistance to the idea exists among high-minded, or at least less generous, musicians (perish the thought that it has anything to do with hype). But each one, in his way, embodies the essence of it all: great voice, supreme skill, and something more that speaks to all conditions. No fault of theirs if choosing them makes you feel unoriginal.

If that is the problem, anyway, there are other great tenors with different, maybe equal claims. Whatever his public fallings-out with colleagues, Alfredo Kraus remains a stylist without equal, in French opera as well as Italian. And there are other kinds of voice. Kiri Te Kanawa has broken through the confines of the cognoscenti, most recently this month at the Last Night of the Proms. Jessye Norman, at the height of her powers, is currently making her mark on Gershwin, Weill, and Rodgers. Olga Borodina made the kind of debut appearances at the Royal Opera (as Saint-Saens' Delilah) and the Edinburgh Festival that set the talk going at a pace usually reserved for rumours of love, greed, or cups of tea with ministers.

Personality lies not only in the performer, or the performance; in the classical domain, where composing is mostly a separate activity, it can rest in the notes themselves, and the human spirit they embody. Would anybody who knew them have voted for the personalities of Wagner or Beethoven to be awarded anything except a veto? Composers' egos have not necessarily changed. But with the personality of their music, it is another, more mysterious matter. Given the extraordinary and widespread impact this year of The Protecting Veil, for instance, we might expect a flood of votes for John Tavener.

This has, altogether, been a time when contemporary composers have begun to open ears that remained closed to new music in recent decades. You could think, too, of the powerful personalities embodied in Proms premieres by the former Soviet, Elena Firsova, and the Scot, James MacMillan; in operas on stage and television by Judith Weir and Harrison Birtwistle; and in the love-them-or-hate-them, repetitive scores of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman.

With instrumental performers, the personality emerges through an intricate fusion of technical skill and expressive power. Again, you could warm to the pianistic understanding of Mitsuko Uchida, whose recorded Mozart concerto cycle is about to reach completion, or the consummate violin-playing of Anne-Sophie Mutter, back refreshed after a year's sabbatical; the continuing impact in new music as well as old of the clarinettist and former Young Musician of the Year, Emma Johnson, or the urgency and communicative power of the percussionist Evelyn Glennie.

The vital spark may appear at its strongest in a capacity to cross previously closed borders: from jazz into the classics by Mike Westbrook, back in the opposite direction by Nigel Kennedy. It can be found disembodied, hovering in the air that links conductor and orchestra: consider this year the work of Yan Pascal Tortelier and Kent Nagano, newly appointed in Manchester to the BBC Philharmonic and the Halle; the vitality in his 80th year of Sir Georg Solti, and the continuing dynamism in Birmingham of the rather younger Simon Rattle. And it can be found spilling over into areas beyond the periphery of the music- making itself. Nobody, said Sibelius, would ever put up a statue to a critic. But they might vote for enablers - especially musicians of high distinction whose personality impels them to go beyond the bounds of duty, like the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, working with orchestras' education programmes, or the pianist Joanna Macgregor, suddenly at the centre of her own contemporary music festival in London.

Names have been named; they are not meant to make up a short-list or a set of official nominees. Somewhere along the line, they may define the elusive central idea. In the end, the crucial factor in the making of a musical personality lies at a meeting-point; those who meet there will include listeners as well as creators and performers. For the Personality of the Year Award, all three angles surely have to be in sight.

Winners in 18 further categories will be chosen by an international jury, chaired by Andreas Whittam Smith, Editor and Chief Executive of the Independent. Categories include male singer of the year, female singer of the year, instrumentalist, recording, composition (large-scale and small-scale), conductor, orchestra, early music group, opera production, chamber group, newcomer, best single event, best festival or concert series, radio broadcast, TV broadcast, publication of the year, and a choral award. Further reports about the awards will appear during the autumn

How To Vote

The International Classical Music Awards, held in association with Kenwood, the Independent and the BBC Music Magazine, will be presented at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on Friday 8 January 1993 and shown on BBC 2 on Sunday 10 January. The Personality of the Year will be chosen by readers of the Independent and the BBC Music Magazine.

(Photograph omitted)