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 [log in to unmask] http://www.classical.net/