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.