The Edinburgh-based vocal group the Dunedin Consort yesterday hit the heights of their 11-year career when they won a coveted Gramophone Record of the Year award for their recording of Handel's Messiah.

The Dunedin's competition in the final three nominations for the Baroque Vocal category of the Classic fm Gramophone Awards featured the biggest hitters in the field: Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir for their recording of Bach Cantatas, Volume 15, and Rinaldo Alessandrini's Concerto Italiano for their recording of Monteverdi Madrigals, which the group had performed to acclaim at this year's Edinburgh International Festival.

The Dunedin Consort's triumph yesterday was an all-Scottish affair, as their recording of the Messiah, released late last year, features not only the 12 singers of the consort, with their co-founder and co-artistic director, soprano Susan Hamilton, but conductor, keyboard player and fellow director John Butt, a world authority on baroque music and Gardiner, professor of music at Glasgow University.

And while the Gramophone Award is a first for the Dunedins, it is also a first for Glasgow-based recording company Linn Records, whose esteemed producer Philip Hobbs both engineered and produced the recording.

The result, which is decided exclusively by the specialist reviewers of the Gramophone, the bible for classical music CD buffs and the leading publication of its type, carries enormous potential prestige and a world imprimatur for its winner.

Susan Hamilton, speaking from the awards in London yesterday, said: "To win an award like this for one of the most popular and most-recorded pieces of choral music is just amazing. It's amazing for the group, it's amazing for John Butt and the singers who have been so loyal to us, amazing for Linn Records and amazing for Scotland. It's good to think that we have given a fresh voice to the Messiah, and that that fact has been recognised."

Asked about the impact of the Gramophone award on the group, and its wider significance, Hamilton said: "This gives us the best calling card we've ever had, and it's now up to us to make sure we utilise it.

"In the next six months we'll be trying to get an agent to start selling the group, and we'll also be doing our damnedest to promote the group as much as we can. I'd like to think that in two or three years we'll be at the London Proms, doing tours and trying to show the rest of the world that Scotland can produce first-class musicians who can represent the level of music-making that goes on in this country."

Success doesn't come cheap. The Messiah recording, made in Greyfriars Kirk, carried a price tag of around £50,000 that, not so long ago, would have been prohibitive to the small vocal group. So the Dunedins came up with an initiative of sheer enterprise.

"We came up with the idea of running a public subscription to raise money," said Hamilton. "We priced every movement, and people purchased their favourite movement and got their names into the programme booklet as subscribers. The response was incredibly impressive and we raised over half the money that way."

The arts council came in with 10%, trusts and sponsors came on board, and Linn Records gave them 500 CDs to sell to boost the funds.

Not only were the costs covered, said Hamilton, but the disc sold like hot cakes. McAlister Matheson Music, Edinburgh's leading classical CD retailer, has recorded its most successful-ever sales figure the Dunedin Messiah, ousting Welsh bass baritone Bryn Terfel from that position.

"On top of all that, said Hamilton, "the CD is beginning to stock up a royalty and is making money."

That money is being plunged back into the Dunedin operation, and just last week, on the eve of the Gramophone Award announcement, the group completed its next recording for Linn Records, with the same forces, of Bach's St Matthew Passion.