This was forwarded from another list by a whacky Montanian in his one-room
shack in the mountains. It came in a hand-carved box, and I was very
careful opening it ...
New York Times
February 28, 1999
By ALLAN KOZINN
The good news from most of the world's major classical-music labels is
that the gloom of recent years has largely been dispelled. Granted,
classics account for only 2.3 percent of the American record market,
just less than jazz (2.5 percent), according to Soundscan, a company
that tracks sales.
But the executives who run most of the major labels say their divisions
are profitable and the future is secure.
The bad news is that this profitability has been attained through
a series of bloodlettings in recent years. Staffs have been cut,
artists have been jettisoned and project lists have been pared. All
these things have happened before, of course: the marketplace has
long dictated expansions and contractions that occur with almost
tidal regularity.
But in the last five years, the rules of engagement have taken a
radical turn. Now, the standard repertory -- the Romantic symphonies,
chamber works and operas that were formerly a safe haven -- has become
a target.
This is the latest development in a corporatization of artist and
repertory decisions that began in the late 1970s, when pop-dominated
labels rebelled against the expectation that their profits would
subsidize the classics. A series of takeovers in the 1980s and 1990s
looked promising: when Bertelsmann took over RCA and Sony acquired
CBS, their recording programs increased exponentially.
Warner joined the fray, buying Erato, Teldec and Finnadar. And
Seagram's, having just bought Polygram, has assured Deutsche Grammophon,
Philips and Decca/London that they will be unscathed.
But the multinationals have shown a tendency to micromanage, and
companies that were profitable and healthy quickly stopped taking a
benign view of divisions that produced less startling yields. Even
freak hits like the Three Tenors disks, which helped subsidize more
serious, slower-selling recordings, became mixed blessings: they
persuaded corporate number-crunchers that classics (italics)could(end
italics) sell in the millions if only artists and label executives
would choose the right projects.
Right now, definitions and expectations are shifting wildly in the
classics world, and as executives try to determine their companies'
missions -- and as performers juggle conscience, artistry and ambition
in a struggle to find their places -- the business has become peculiarly
amorphous.
Conductors in particular are waking up to a hostile new world, as
several whose recording careers seemed solid have been cut adrift.
Charles Dutoit and Christoph von Dohnanyi, who recorded plentifully
for Decca/London, have lost their exclusive contracts, and now work
project by project.
Leonard Slatkin, long RCA's great American hope, was dropped at the
end of last year, when the company decided to throw its full weight
behind the more recently signed Michael Tilson Thomas on the ground
that Thomas' dynamic personality and his unusual repertory ideas were
more easily marketed.
Slatkin brought the company his share of novelties, from Leroy Anderson
vignettes to works by Ginastera and John Corigliano. But he also
recorded the Tchaikovsky symphonies, and had hopes of making his way
through the rest of the standard canon; that, in today's climate, is
an unhealthy desire.
The likelihood that a conductor will get the go-ahead to record, say,
a Beethoven cycle for a major label in 1999 is virtually nil. Label
heads are unanimous on this point. And it seems not to bother
consumers much, either.
The principal reason record companies are reluctant to keep recording
the warhorses, after all, is that people are not willing to buy the
newest interpretations -- certainly not enough to justify the enormous
recording costs, which are around $200,000 for an American orchestra
(without soloists or chorus) and roughly a third as much in Europe.
Why have these recordings lost their appeal? An undiplomatic answer
is that in the core repertory, few of today's conductors are able to
create the kind of excitement that made their predecessors' recordings
hot commodities.
And the fact is, times have changed. In the 1950s, when LPs were
new and the business was coming of age, Beethoven and Brahms cycles,
let alone Mahler and Bruckner recordings, were sparse enough that
each new release was an event. People bought those disks, memorized
their interpretive quirks, engaged in impassioned debates and waited
for other performers to weigh in.
But after 50 years -- more if you factor in reissues from the 78-rpm
era -- the catalogs are awash in recordings of the standard works.
In trying to determine who might buy a new Beethoven cycle, the record
industry looks at a model of the market divided into three segments.
"Core collectors," who have traditionally sustained the business,
can be expected to buy at least 40 new disks a year.
Recordings that appeal to them generally sell fewer than 10,000
copies. "New listeners," who have come to classics recently, might
buy six or seven, but are more strongly drawn to new works -- say,
Kronos Quartet recordings -- than to the standard repertory. Still,
they can push sales toward 70,000 copies.
Beyond them lies the Promised Land, or more prosaically, the mass
market: buyers uncommitted to classical music but who, with the
right media push (a PBS special or a film connection) can be induced
to snap up recordings by the millions. The champion here is James
Horner's "Titanic" film score, on Sony Classical, which has reportedly
sold 9.3 million copies.
The problem for a label with a new Beethoven cycle is that none of
these groups have much use for it. Core collectors own cycles on
CD by Toscanini, Walter, Bernstein, Szell, Karajan, Furtwangler and
Mengelberg, and perhaps period-instrument traversals by Frans Bruggen
and Roger Norrington, along with individual symphony recordings.
New collectors gravitate toward classic accounts as well, partly
because of the aura of reverence that surrounds them and partly
because, as reissues, they are comparatively inexpensive. Forget
the mass market.
The preference for reissued older recordings serves labels' interests,
too. These sets were recorded when costs and royalty rates were low,
and have long since been amortized. And with classic status translating
to steady demand, they require only the slightest promotion.
Reissues, in fact, are now mentioned in the same breath as crossovers
when executives speak of the lifeblood of the business. At RCA,
which now releases only 30 new recordings a year (down from 120 three
years ago), reissues make up 75 percent of the annual release schedule.
Having enjoyed recent successes with boxed sets devoted to Sviatoslav
Richter and William Kapell, the label is planning a 99-CD Rubinstein
box (to be priced at about $1,500) for September, and a big Heifetz
box and a more expansive Richter set for next year.
The ratio of new releases to reissues is less extreme elsewhere.
Still, most labels know the value of their archives: Sony Classical's
beautifully packaged Masterworks Heritage series has set a high
standard for the presentation of historical recordings; EMI has sold
Maria Callas every which way and is reviving its Great Recordings of
the Century line; Deutsche Grammophon's Originals series was a
nostalgic hit as well.
But the masters of "secondary exploitation," as it is called in the
business, are on staff at Philips. Having cobbled together a complete
Mozart edition in 1991, using recordings from all the Polygram labels,
Philips is now issuing a 200-disk series, Great Pianists of the 20th
Century, which surveys the work of 73 pianists, with recordings
licensed from all the major labels and plenty of material not previously
available on CD.
The hunger for old recordings is so pronounced that orchestras have
started mining their radio archives to produce and market sets of
their own, with impressive results. On the heels of a pair of
high-profile mail-order sets from the Cleveland Orchestra, the New
York Philharmonic issued its "Historic Broadcasts," a 10-disk survey
of varied repertory, in 1997, and a 12-CD Mahler cycle this year.
Remarkably, "Historic Broadcasts," priced at $185, sold 5,000 copies
in its first year; at $225, the Mahler box sold 2,500 copies in six
months.
Where does all of this leave living, developing artists?
Instrumentalists seem to be finding support, and period-instrument
bands are flourishing. As for conductors, the ones willing to shelve
their Beethovenian dreams in favor of unusual projects are having an
easier time.
Who would have thought, a decade ago, that EMI executives would speak
with unbridled enthusiasm about a young English composer who writes
in an alternately accessible and thorny style? Yet the company lists
Thomas Ades' opera, "Powder Her Face," among its best sellers.
Deutsche Grammophon, which had an enviable new-music series in the
early 1970s but has since maintained a fairly staid image, has just
introduced 20/21, a series named for the changing century, with disks
devoted to Pierre Boulez, Toru Takemitsu, Mauricio Kagel, Elliott
Carter and Arvo Part.
Singers have it made, sort of. The Alagnas, Matthias Goerne, Ian
Bostridge, Cecilia Bartoli, Jennifer Larmore, Ben Heppner, Thomas
Quasthoff, Renee Fleming, Bryn Terfel and Anne Sofie von Otter, new
to the record bins in the last decade, are now bankable stars, churning
out recital disks.
Yet operas, like symphonies, are expensive and therefore less plentiful.
There, too, unusual works -- and works with links to other media --
have an edge: Deutsche Grammophon released Andre Previn's "Streetcar
Named Desire" within months of its premiere, thanks to the PBS
broadcast, which yielded the live recording.
The major labels have long been overdue to explore new repertory,
and if they lag behind independents in that regard, their marketing
and distribution power will help them take over the areas the
independents have pioneered. But the independents are unequivocally
devoted to classical music, something that cannot be said of most
multinational majors now.
Conductors and soloists know they can get a green light for projects
involving popular young composers like Ades, Aaron Jay Kernis, Richard
Danielpour, Tan Dun or John Tavener. But they also see a contrary
trend, which is that if they really want to see executives' eyes
light up, they should propose recordings built around film scores,
nonfilm works by film composers, or hybrids that draw on folk, pop,
tango and world music, perhaps bringing together stars from each
world.
Such projects "treat the recording as an art form rather than just
a preservation medium," in record company parlance. Fair enough:
Glenn Gould approached his recordings that way, as does the Kronos
Quartet. "We're extending the definition of classical music" is
another commonplace.
Who, at this late date, is against that? Yet the projects themselves
often have the aura of something dreamed up in a boardroom, with
sales projections discussed intently, and questions of their
appropriateness for a classical music label not at all.
It may be unfashionable to say so, but definitions and boundaries
are useful in music. To argue that distinct styles should inhabit
their own realms is not to imply the superiority of one over another,
to preclude honest cross-fertilization or to suggest that listeners
should not experiment. But record labels have implied charters, and
if they regularly abrogate them, neither the music nor its listeners
are well served.
Crossovers, like them or not, have become part of the charter. But
Sony Classical has started down a path that goes well beyond crossover,
and if other labels follow suit, classical labels as we know them
will be fundamentally altered.
Michael Bolton giving bad performances of opera arias is crossover;
but Marcus Roberts playing Joplin rags with wide-ranging improvisatory
freedom is jazz. Offering it on a classical label misleads listeners
who don't know Joplin and bypasses jazz fans who would appreciate
its subtleties.
Similarly, "Appalachia Waltz" is a folk music album, Yo-Yo Ma's
presence notwithstanding, just as Joe Jackson's "Heaven and Hell" is
progressive rock, and Eileen Ivers' "Crossing the Bridge" is Celtic
folk-rock. Nothing about these disks strikes the ear as classical,
yet because they are on a classical label, that is how Soundscan
registers their sales. The 2.3 percent of the market accorded to
classics, then, may be inflated by ringers.
Sony may be responding to corporate pressure to make every project
profitable, pressures that executives at other labels say they feel
as well. If they all respond as Sony has, the effect may be devastating
in years to come. Classical labels, after all, have always depended
on the depth of their catalogs, and the current passion for reissues
suggests that they always will.
The only way to insure the strength of the back catalog is to approach
new projects not just with a sense of their immediate sales potential
but also with an eye to their future usefulness, either as perennials
or as material that can be recompiled to suit different needs.
It is hard to imagine that collectors a few decades from now will
hanker after "Appalachia Waltz" the way buyers today seek out, say,
Rubinstein's Chopin. The question is: will future collectors look
back at the turn of the 21st century as a time of adventurous repertory
expansion or a time when record labels abandoned art music to chase
the quick buck?
Dave
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http://www.classical.net/
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