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.
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