Donald Satz writes:

>we need to stop thinking of the traditional Majors as being major
>any longer.  If you leave aside the endless deleting and reissuing of
>inventory, the Majors don't put out as much classical product as the likes
>of Hyperion and CPO.  These *other* companies are now our major ones, and
>it's about time to stop being concerned with what Philips, DG, Sony, and
>the others of their ilk are up to.

This is very much to the point.  Hyperion, Chandos, CPO and the rest
have learned that by catering to today's matured market they can get by,
turning in modest profits at the same time as providing themselves and
their customers with high levels of artistic satisfaction.  Presumably in
time these companies will either wither gracefully, or succumb to the same
gargantuan rot that has terminally infected the Warner and Sony companies.
All things fall, as Yeats put it, and are built again.

The mystery is how little concert programmers, still catering stoically for
a moribund clientele and its terminal diet of Beethoven sandwiches, take
note of the repertoire which is selling so cosily and consistently in the
record shops - Bax, Rubbra, Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Barber et.  al.  A
friend told me a while back that the last Bax Symphony to be heard live in
London was in the mid-1980's, yet the first four CD's in the Naxos series
have all been classical chart-toppers!

This is just one example - there are many others, such as the appetite
for historical readings - of the bizarre gap between what is perceived and
measured as the "classical" market, and the actual reality of high-street
shop, mail order and internet interest and financial turnover.

Similarly, why so much concern about Tower and the rest (unless you happen
to be an employee)? Richard Branson recently threatened to stop selling
CD's at all in his Virgin Megastores unless the producing companies give
him better business terms.  In essence, high street sales are dropping, and
these top-heavy ocean liners are finding it harder to tack about and sail
into the internet wind compared with smaller, more flexible craft.  It is
probably too late for Tower, but they've had their turn, and nothing - not
even Marks & Spencer - lasts for ever.

The world will keep on turning, and so will the turntables.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"