Electronic Telegraph
   Wednesday 2 June 1999

   Norman Lebrecht on the rise and fall of the Hamburg-based yellow
   label - Deutsche Grammophon

   IF A WEEK is a long time in politics, a decade can be an eternity
   in music.  Those of us who were old enough to drink, smoke and buy
   classical CDs in 1989 will remember a world stalked by the giants
   Karajan, Bernstein and Solti, a boom economy and a prelapsarian
   innocence in which crossover was something that happened between
   Belisha beacons.

   At the end of each month, six major labels and a dozen minnows would
   issue a sheet of new releases that sent us riffling through Gramophone
   reviews and rushing for the racks.  There was a must-have quality
   about the product.  A serious music-lover was expected to form and
   defend an opinion on the latest Decca pianist and Tennstedt's Beethoven
   Seventh.  Classics held a place near the centre of cultural debate
   and people got hooked around the same age as they took up drinking
   and smoking.

   The chief pedlar to this genteel and generally harmless addiction
   was Deutsche Grammophon, the Hamburg-based yellow label which accounted
   for one-fifth of all sales and seemed at times to act upon some higher
   command.  Karajan was its centre of gravitas, but around him flourished
   the earliest of early-music labels, a good deal of modernism and the
   firefly batons of Abbado, Bernstein, Gardiner, Jarvi, Kleiber and
   Levine.

   DG's release sheet was the one by which all others were judged.  To
   trace the collapse of classical recording you need only compare the
   swell and pomp of DG's output in June 1989 with its thin gruel this
   month - four disjointed new releases, including a Hungarian gipsy
   fiddler.  No wonder the habit has been broken.

   As leader in its field, DG had furthest to fall when the CD boom went
   bust and consumers refused to transfer their faith to a new generation
   of maestros.  Ten years ago, Philips had 13 conductors making 40
   records a year; today, it has only Valery Gergiev under contract.
   Decca has Riccardo Chailly, Sony employs Esa-Pekka Salonen and BMG
   retains Daniele Gatti.  EMI keeps four or five conductors, limiting
   them to three projects a year.  DG, however, is lumbered with the
   glories of its past and the follies of its bumbling descent from
   Parnassus, one that threatens to degenerate into farce.

   In the dying embers of the boom, DG signed an 80-disc contract with
   the Italian conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli, who wore broad-brimmed hats
   and talked in Freudian apophthegms.  By the time his 10th disc hit
   the shops, it was clear that the public had as much interest in
   Sinopoli's take on Mahler as it did in Sanjay Gandhi's.

   Still, a contract is a contract and DG, unable to persuade the
   Italian to cut their losses, is obliged to make dozens of discs with
   a conductor who has yet to exert a grip on the public imagination.
   Meanwhile, the cost of booking top European and US orchestras has
   shot up to quarter of a million dollars a symphony, and the best way
   to produce money out of records is to stop making new ones and reissue
   the old.

   The excitable chap who signed up Sinopoli was replaced as head of
   A&R in Hamburg by Roger Wright, a cool British brain.  Wright made
   a stab at recasting DG in a modern light, giving Abbado and Pierre
   Boulez the go-ahead to freshen up the rep.  But addicts were not
   tempted by Webern and Nono in sufficient numbers to restore prosperity,
   and the German leopard had enough hardliners in head office to avert
   a meaningful change of spots.  Wright slipped away to run BBC Radio
   3, making way for an American, Michael Fine, with a pinchpenny,
   fringe-label background.

   DG's president, Karsten Witt, was occupied meanwhile in trying to
   sack one-third of the staff and move the firm to Berlin.  He failed
   on both counts and soft-landed last month as chief executive of
   London's South Bank Centre.  Pressures intensified as DG's corporate
   parent, PolyGram, sold out to Universal, which is seeking a 200
   million saving this year to cover the purchase price.

   A fortnight ago, Universal's head of classics and jazz, Chris Roberts,
   flew out to Hamburg and announced a "restructuring" in which Fine
   and his marketing director were made redundant.  Nothing unusual in
   that, except that dicky-birds started whispering that the two chiefs
   had been trying to save DG by selling it to a German competitor for
   just under 200 million, which is neatly the amount that Universal
   require to pay off their loan.

   This operatic sub-plot cannot be officially confirmed and all lips
   have been soundproofed by lawyers.  Whatever did transpire, DG is
   now short of a full executive trolley and drifting in choppy waters.

   But rivals would do well to suppress any smirks of schadenfreude.
   Classical recording was led to its summits by Deutsche Grammophon.
   When DG stumbles, the rest go into freefall.

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.