The walls seem to be closing in, more quickly than ever, on collectors of classical recordings.
Artist rosters are being slashed — again. American orchestras that once recorded for three or four labels now record for none. More layoffs are said to be afoot for RCA/BMG. The quintessential French recording label, Erato, no longer has a Paris office, thanks to corporate consolidation of the Warner conglomerate that owns it. Then there are new, disturbing wrinkles on the retail end of the business. Tower Records is rumored to be in financial distress — and in many sizeable communities, no alternatives exist to fill the vacuum. Amazon.com continues on nervously despite its plummeting stock value with a catalog that isn't as extensive as it looks. Earlier this summer, the French website Paradise Lost, an excellent window on Europe-based historical labels, closed without explanation. "At least," one fellow collector said, "I've stockpiled enough to keep me listening for a decade or so."
And all that was before Norman Lebrecht's proclamation in the pages of The Daily Telegraph that the classical recording industry is dead. "Tell us it's not true," I pleaded with a spokesman for Kevin Gore, who run the U.S. operations of Universal Classics, one of the few, remaining standard-bearers for core classical repertoire. Gore declined to comment.
So let's try, on our own, to be levelheaded here, starting with a closer examination of Lebrecht.
He has made his reputation by reporting artistic homicides, namely with his book Who Killed Classical Music? (originally published in the U.K. as When the Music Stops). Lebrecht's book brought up a lot of good points, like the horror of exorbitant artist fees in a non-profit business, but did so in a purple writing style that made one suspicious and with a lack of attention to factual detail that made one dismissive. Yet Lebrecht is to be treasured. His Cassandra-like rants may well have the positive effects of science fiction: by exaggerating what is, he makes people stop and think about what could be — and, with any luck, motivates them to move forward on a more considered course. He can also be extremely entertaining.
Normally, the mere existence of crossover goddess Charlotte Church would be considered a major symptom of artistic corruption in the industry, and news of her move into pop would be greeted with sighs of relief. Instead, Lebrecht characterizes the Welsh songbird as abandoning classical music like a rat leaving a sinking ship. Truth is, Church was never really classical in either her presentation or audience — and, in any case, her recent Charlotte Church in Jerusalem video indicates that she's headed for vocal trouble. If she turns to pop, there's a technical imperative behind it, and the loss to classical music lovers is nothing, aside from the legitimate sincerity she brought to a Puccini aria or two.
There's much that Lebrecht may not be parsing. Though RCA/BMG is laying off more employees on his side of the Atlantic, there's an imminent announcement of resumed classical recording activities by that company on the U.S. side of the pond. Though Warner Classics (which also includes Teldec, Erato and Finlandia) is consolidating its worldwide operations with layoffs in New York, Hamburg and Paris, it has also launched a contemporary music series, New Line, mixing famous but hardly best-selling names like György Ligeti with lesser-known newcomers like Matthias Pintscher.
Even during the heyday of the compact disc, recording executives admitted in unguarded moments that opera recordings were too expensive to make any money but were made for prestige and to keep important conductors happy. Operas haven't grown any less expensive, but Sony Classical, though increasingly known as the crossover king, is releasing new recordings of Tosca and Il trovatore conducted by Riccardo Muti. This fall, three different labels are issuing recordings of new American operas: William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge (on New World), Mark Adamo's Little Women (Ondine) and Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking (Erato). That never happened in the 1980s. This may sound like a few drops in the bucket compared with the voluminous CD output of that decade, but that was an unprecedented period of activity — and was anything but wholesome.
During one visit to Paris in 1985, every single performance I attended was being either taped or videoed. Two days after seeing an Offenbach operetta at the Opéra-Comique, I glimpsed the same production, maybe even the same performance, on a video monitor in one of the Métro stations. And it was not a production worth immortalizing on any level — not even close. The point is that lots and lots of useless recordings were made. As soon as artists became name brands, from Kiri Te Kanawa to Riccardo Muti, they were drafted to record everything. At one point, plans were laid for Te Kanawa to record Porgy and Bess (singing only one of the title roles, thankfully); she actually did record Tosca, a role to which she's even less suited. Muti recorded some 69 pieces during his decade with the Philadelphia Orchestra and many more with La Scala and the Philharmonia Orchestra. How many of those are now considered classics or anything close to them? Only his 1974 debut recording, Aida.
Contracts were huge. Remember James Levine's entire traversal of Mozart symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic? Of course not. Those endless, facelessly tidy recordings by Neville Marriner? Or the out-of-control Mozart glut that occurred in 1991 when the 200th anniversary of the composer's death collided with the popularity of the film Amadeus ? Like most companies who overextend themselves beyond their capacity for quality control, the classical industry is paying a well-earned price. And even though many major labels currently have release lists containing far more reissues than new recordings, you'll notice that lots of the stuff from the 1980s has been deemed, in the cold light of the 21st century, best left out of print. Increasingly, reissues are carefully chosen, with great care given to re-mastering and packaging, as with the titles from the old Westminster label brought out by Deutsche Grammophon.
The current watchword with new recordings is selectivity, and that's healthy. At Harmonia Mundi USA, one of the more artistically distinguished independent labels, president René Goiffon is cutting the current catalogue of 4,000 in-print titles down to 1,000. Elsewhere, new recordings are underwritten in a way that the book-publishing industry would call vanity press. But that's nothing new. Such was the case with the Metropolitan Opera's Ring cycle for Deutsche Grammophon, and for a lot of other high-toned organizations not willing to admit it. The classical recording industry has never really been about making heaps of money, but rather about building career profiles. The Arditti Quartet is one of the most famous new-music string quartets of our time, but the extensive discography that made it that way never earned a dime. Is that a problem?
Many artists are taking matters into their own hands — which is, philosophically speaking, a breakthrough, since artists are making recordings out of a desire to be heard rather than out of contractual obligation. Self-produced chamber music CDs are so inexpensive that they need sell only 500 copies to break even. Emerson String Quartet cellist David Finkel has been making his own chamber music recordings for years, and they're excellent. Another cellist, Matt Haimovitz, a thoroughbred from the Deutsche Grammophon stable, recorded the Bach cello suites on his own Oxingale label. Goiffon, who has a lot of these independent efforts brought to his doorstep, regards them skeptically, because for every Haimovitz there are three pianists who have recorded themselves only because their mothers-in-law handed them $3,000. Even legitimate artists may not be helping the industry by releasing repertoire that's already over-recorded — and in performances that have been captured without the usual checks and balances, like a producer to tell the artists when their interpretive ideas have made it onto tape and when they haven't. Remember that many classics of the LP era were produced by people — Walter Legge, Max Wilcox, etc. — who could stand up to the crustiest of artists. That may be why these self-produced CDs regularly receive mixed reviews, and why none thus far have achieved classic status.
Also, conductors can't make recordings in this way, although some orchestras are making their own. For the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, such activities have been a major budgetary drain, perhaps because music director Hans Vonk isn't a major international name. Colin Davis is such a name, and his Berlioz performances with the London Symphony Orchestra, issued unedited and without patch sessions on the LSO Live label, seem to be doing just fine, even with multi-disc projects such as the opera Les Troyens. That may be a unique situation, thanks to financial concessions that are possible with a self-governing orchestra. Elsewhere, however, signature works of major conducting talents aren't being taped for posterity. At least for now.
Consider Christoph Eschenbach, whose conducting career has had the bad timing to bloom amid the downturn in recording activities. At age 60, his recorded output is meager compared to what it would have been had he reached this point in his career a decade ago. The world would be a better place with recordings of his interpretations of Mahler's Symphony No. 6 and Strauss' Arabella. One could argue that such works are better recorded with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which Eschenbach takes over in two years' time, than with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, with which he built his career. But the Philadelphia Orchestra has been largely absent from the recording world of late, and since it refuses to pay for its own recordings, one never knows when that will change.
Now for the retail end. All may be well with Tower Records currently; after a buying-freeze on independent labels, Harmonia Mundi, for one, is back to doing business with the huge chain, and that's a very good sign. But should Tower Records cease to be a force in the selling of classical recordings, communities without the benefit of a Borders, Barnes & Noble, HMV or Virgin store in their midst will simply have to depend on Web sites. Luckily, the independent-label distributors are sprucing up their sites, making them easier to use. They need to be. Because classical recordings have generic titles, a recent search for Handel's Gloria turned up discs of Handel sacred cantatas that could have included the piece, but didn't necessarily. Also, Web sites can bewilder less-informed buyers, and don't lend themselves to the impulse purchase that happens when you wander into a classical CD department to see what strikes your fancy. Online musical subscription services could be the answer, but that's a great unknown. Goiffon, for one, believes that classical-level sound quality in that medium is years away.
Suppose, though, we take Lebrecht at his word. In states of extreme idealism, I wonder just how bad that would be. Classical music, let's not forget, existed very well without much help from the recording industry until after World War II; people got to know new works by being in the same room with the performers. (Before then, recording technology was either too primitive or the world was too beleaguered by the Great Depression to allow recordings to have anything like the impact we know about now.) Perhaps the subliminal artificiality of the classical compact disc has helped bring about its own downfall. Most live recordings these days are heavily edited with patch sessions, creating performances that exist in a highly unnatural level of perfection that detract from the humanness of the experiences. Maybe the occasional dropped notes and tuning slip-ups of a live performance will be more authentic music to our ears.
On the live-concert front, classical music seems as popular as ever, albeit with regional fluctuations; opera subscriptions are zooming in places like Baltimore, Nashville and Philadelphia; conductors are getting smarter about how to position new music on symphony orchestra programs. And some operas simply don't register on recording: I was enthralled by Bolcom's A View from the Bridge in the opera house, for example, but preoccupied by the inorganic quality of the vocal lines when listening to the New World compact disc.
Maybe classical music will turn out to be a 21st-century version of the Grateful Dead, that durable counterculture rock group that was one of the world's largest concert draws for years, even decades, but couldn't sell any records — and so, for years at a time, didn't make them. In an interview a few years ago, Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen talked about how, in Southern California, classical music is the counterculture. He rather likes that idea. Perhaps that's how we'll be — and listening all the more intently at concerts because we know there'll be no instant replay.
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