[I don't know the original sender of this item, and obviously I am not
responsible for its phrasing, but the burden of the message is important
enough. JG]

   Slipped disc
   Norman Lebrecht on shifting sound worlds
   
   The sad news has just reached me of the deaths, within days
   of each other, of the last two stalwarts of the Decca golden
   age - Jimmy Lock, the chief sound engineer, and Christopher
   Raeburn, the label's driving-force producer.

   Jimmy was in the throes of selling his north London house
   and moving to work in a Portuguese studio when he was found
   dead by a visiting estate agent. He had joined the label
   in 1963 and advanced the famous Decca Sound into digital
   and beyond. Sir Georg Solti, I seem to recall, had great
   respect for his ears and great affection for his character.

   Christopher joined Decca in 1954 and, as I related here,
   was conscripted almost immediately into John Culshaw's Ring
   project in Vienna, the first studio recording of the Wagner
   cycle. He could have succeeded Culshaw as head of the label
   by chose not to compete with the shadowy Ray Minshull. From
   1975 he was Decca's director of opera productions. His
   greatest discovery was Cecilia Bartoli but he also worked
   happily over the years with Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland,
   Renee Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu and other Decca properties.
   Unusually for a Decca man, he was notably fond of female
   company. He stopped taking phone calls early this month,
   dying discreetly of lung cancer.

   Why are you reading of their deaths here? Because no-one
   at Decca has put out a press release on the passing of these
   company lions. Decca, as I've reported, has been eviscerated
   by corporate paper-shifters at its Universal owners and no
   longer functions coherently.

   Decca, sad to say, is deader than Jimmy and Chris, whose
   work will live on. The label has lost its classical core,
   its educational drive, most of its staff and the last relics
   of its soul. Hard-copy evidence of the Decca Sound and the
   Decca style will outlast the label's bonus-seeking executioners.

   http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2009/02/more_deaths_at_decca.html

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
[log in to unmask]

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