The current (July 9) NYker has a review by Alex Ross of the "newest"
Grove Dictionary (New Grove Dictionary, Second Edition).  It's a generally
favorable review, taking issue, however, w/ what Ross considers occasional
disproportionate attention to some artists at the expense of others.  He
laments, in two places some specific omissions:

   "....There is [no] space for Paul Jacobs, Sanford Sylvan, Osvaldo
   Golijov, Lauren Flanigan, Bethany Beardslee, the label CRI, the early
   music group Pomerium and Glimmerglas Opera, among many other American
   musicians and institutions.

              *********

   "....Once upon a time, the Grove celebrated Lillian Evans Blauvelt,
   a Brooklyn-born singer who sang with the Wagner conductor Anton Seidl.
   Her voice was said to have been 'a pure soprano of exquisite quality,
   pure, clear, and brilliant, but with fine warmth and intelligence.'
   She is gone.  So are Rose Caron, a reigning diva of the Paris opera
   in the eighteen-eighties and nineties, and Giuseppina Pasqua, who
   pleased the implacable Verdi."

How pleased I was, on reading this, that I possessed the soft cover series
of *The New Grove* (1980) which I bought when it was remaindered by Borders
some years back, and smugly looked for the omitted entries in my earlier
edition.

Alas!  I found but two:  Paul Jacobs (whose recordings of the Debussy
Etudes I prize) and Bethany Beardslee, of whom I had not previously heard,
but whose write-up in the older Grove aroused my interest.

So, sad as these omissions may be, they simply comprise a perpetuation of
judgments that had been made in the preparation of at least one earlier
edition.

wm