- You may wish to jot this in your diaries and upbraid
me with it in twelve months' time but I am about to make the rock-solid
prediction that the year 2004 will be the last for the classical record
industry.
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- The unravelling has run faster than prestissimo. Major
labels which, a decade ago, pumped out 120 new releases a year are now
reduced to a trickle of two dozen. Epochal concerts are no longer recorded
for posterity. Classical stars have lost their license to twinkle.
-
- Where labels once fought bidding wars over shimmering
talent they now compete in shedding it. The latest on the dump pile is
the tenor Roberto Alagna, once trumpeted as the next Placido Domingo, now
a victim of poor sales. EMI has declined to renew Alagna's contract which
expired earlier this year. His wife, Angela Georghiu, remains under contract
but has no further recordings planned.
-
- The words 'record' and 'contract' can no longer be juxtaposed
in any meaningful way. EMI recently announced an exclusive seven-year deal
with the fine-toned Norwegian, Leif-Ove Andsnes. All it means is that the
hottest of current pianists gets to cut one disc a year, just the one,
if he's lucky.
-
- The precipitate collapse has decimated a generation of
skilled producers, assuredly the final generation. Decca has made its A&R
chief redundant. The last surviving suits are fingering their collars.
Sony and BMG are being brutally merged. Warner Classics awaits fallout
from the group's takeover by Edgar Bronfman's consortium. It has been,
said one vice-president, 'a year from hell.' Only in Britain, where the
public cannot tell the difference between a bare-chested belter and a genuine
opera singer, have sales held steady. In Germany, France and the US, classical
racks being replaced in stores by stacks of computer games. 'I don't know
what we have to do to sell a record,' lamented a leading executive. 'I
have just signed off the last opera we will ever record,' said another.
-
- Life has been no easier for cottage labels. The German
firm Haenssler, which employed Sir Roger Norrington and Sir Neville Marriner
to conduct symphonic cycles, ran into financial difficulties and had to
be restructured by its parent company, a Christian books publisher. Andante.com,
a French-financed venture which sold archive recordings and internet access
to live performances, stumbled into a protective alliance with another
French group, Naive. Hypothermia set in to classical sales. The lone exception
is budget label Naxos, which plans 150 new releases in the coming year,
plus 60 historical remasters. 'We are no longer in the same industry as
Decca and DG,' laughs its founder, Klaus Heymann. Naxos apart, there is
almost no activity left that is coherent enough to be described as 'industry'.
The day of classical recording is done and the post-mortem has begun.
-
- High in corporate towers, overpaid executives blame a
lack of compelling new repertoire, of charismatic artists and of public
tolerance for long-winded classics - in short, they blame everthing except
their own failure to invest in talent, allowing it to grow a personality
as it steadily acquires a following. They also misread the effects of social
and technological revolution.
-
- Artists and orchestras, for their part, blame the avarice
of label execs and the incessant pressure on them to promote records with
anodyne interviews and finger-numbing autograph sessions, precious time
that would have been better devoted to developing character in their art.
Hurt and confused, these artists refuse to admit their own assault on the
classical economy in the years when the money flowed. In the CD gold rush
of the early 1990s, the Berlin Philharmonic charged £65,000 for a
symphonic disc. Their fee remains the same today, but hardly anyone bothers
to make records with the world's best orchestras any more.
-
- Instead, record companies use 'buyout' bands like the
BBC Philharmonic which lease their work free of charge. The playing may
not be exquisite but it is economically attractive. Naxos pays artists
a no-royalties small fee, take it or leave it. These tight measures will
sustain a certain level of recording activity after the industry is defunct,
much as fountain-pens flicker on in an age of biros.
-
- These are sombre reflections and they are uttered with
regret. Classical records brought delight and enlightenment to millions
who never dared enter a concert hall. More than that, they fostered a sense
of community by allowing listeners to compare and contrast one interpretation
of Bruckner's fourth symphony with another, sometimes to a nerdish extreme
but inherently, invaluably, as a commonly shared cultural artefact. The
existence of Bruckner Fourths conducted by, say, Wilhelm Furtwaengler and
Otto Klemperer, presented two philosophically antipodal accounts of a mighty
score - and encouraged record buyers to assess these grainy treasures against
gleaming modern interpretations by Karajan, Tintner, Harnoncourt and Abbado.
-
- In the industry's heyday every self-respecting label
had its own catalogue version of every masterpiece, and every decade brought
a technological improvement which prompted a further set of recordings.
These were rhythms on which the industry ran happily for half a century:
sensible, profitable rhythms that made great music continually relevant
to changing times.
-
- Those rhythms were disrupted, distorted and ultimately
destroyed by digital recording, which delivered sonic utopia and exposed
the flaws in the process. Attentive listeners were able to hear underground
trains rumbling beneath Decca's Kingsway Hall, and botched edits in supposedly
authentic performances. Digital clarity revealed the artificiality of recording,
the fundamental fakery of producing an inhumanly accurate replica of all-too
human music. As the digital sheen wore off, so did the sales.
-
- Expectations of exponential growth were shattered and
desperate execs polluted their labels with pop-like ephemeralities. Neither
DVD nor super-audio CD will rekindle public interest.
-
- I shall miss the industry when it is gone, its grotesquely
inflated egos, its lavish Salzburg junkets. I shall mourn the good men
(and very few women) who gave their working lives to the pursuit of perfection
and were ruined when it arrived. I shall particularly regret the loss of
comparability, our future inability to concretize Simon Rattle's never-to-be-recorded
Bruckner Fourth in the context of past masters. Such, though, is the price
of progress. Every record comes to an end, but the music goes on. It always
will.
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- Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column.
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- (c) La Scena Musicale 2001 http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/031231-NL-recording.html
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