2007 - Page 4 of 7 - Slippedisc

Someone asked for my view on Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts. Here goes:
Paul Potts: Once Chance
album released Monday 16 July
review by Norman Lebrecht (Evening Standard)
Nothing deceives like the evidence of our eyes. A month ago, Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from Port Talbot with wonky teeth and a waistline problem, convinced 13.5 million TV viewers and countless more on YouTube that Britain’s Got Talent and he was it.
Premium phones lines glowed red when he sang Nessun Dorma and Simon Cowell, the pop-picker at the heart of the enterprise, thrust him into Air Studios for a debut album that is released on Monday, preceding a national tour in the New Year.
What appealed to viewers, the quality that plucked our heartstrings, was that Paul was such an obvious loser. Bullied at school, unskilled at work, a virgin at 30 who met his wife in an internet chatroom, he reached for a dream and scratched it with a fingernail. His performance of Nessun Dorma aroused more football memories than operatic, but who cared? This was the ordinary man’s David Beckham moment and none could begrudge him that glory.
Remove the visuals, however, and the music leaves the ordinary man viciously exposed. Nessun Dorma, the CD’s opening track, is not just clumsily phrased and vocally strained but utterly charmless. Paul comes over like a Venetian gondolier who won’t take no for an answer. Several notes are on the edge of sour and the aftertaste is rank.
The rest of the album is made up of package-tourist ballads and motorway favourites like Frank Sinatra’s My Way, rendered in tourist Mediterranean. Paul’s range of expression so limited that sincerity is reduced to a binary alternative of sigh or shout. Time to Say Goodbye is the second track and I wish he had made it the last. The rest is dreary to the point of somnolence. Haste was plainly of the essence. An extra week with a vocal coach might have helped him inject more colour into the tributary Caruso song or more feeling into Stanley Myers’ Cavatina. This is amateur night in a very small town.
A magnifying glass applied to the booklet’s back page reveals the LSO as the accompanying orchestra. I guess they won’t be advertising that in their next Barbican season. All the echo chambers at Air and all the remastering skills of Cowell’s team, cannot disguise the sad truth that this is a singer with nothing to say, nothing to add beyond his ordinariness. Sad, really. It was all a visual illusion.
NL

I know we’re supposed to suspend critical judgement at charity gigs, but a chance sight of Sarah Brightman attacking Nessun Dorma at the Shanghai corner of Al Gore’s Live Earth made me want to save something more endangered than a little old planet.
Transposing Puccini’s tenor aria for non-operatic soprano was a tacky idea. It substituted warble for vibrato, evoking the gooey feeling you get when coffee cream has been poured mistakenly into a cup of tea. Ms Brightman cannot manage anything emotionally more complex than the loves me/loves me not music of middle-period Lloyd Webber and was left gulping for air where she should have been vocally in mid-line. The orchestration must have been arranged at a local copy shop and the Chinese audience, as seen on TV, were presumably supposed to know no better.
True, Shanghai was the hardest nut to crack in Al’s bowl. Neither the Chinese government nor the national media were much interested in signing up to good eco behaviour and the show consisted mostly of local pop stars. Ms Brightman was there to add cosmopolitan glamour but all she brought was a soiled aria, a second-hand plastic rose. Even Ms Streisand, in her opera album, never sunk so low when aiming so high.

A farmer’s wife on BBC’s Newsnight was complaining bitterly the other night about the Blair government’s bias against the countryside. Not only had it banned fox-hunting and bungled compensation for the mad cow and foot-and-mouth disasters, it was now refusing to grant subsidy to celebrate Edward Elgar’s 150th anniversary. This made it anti-rural and unpatriotic.
Interesting thought. For the past two months the Daily Telegraph has been whipping up an editorial froth on an almost daily basis about the greatness of our national composer. It has argued, with more heat than light, that Elgar ranks among the most important composers that ever lived and is deserving of the biggest imaginable birthday fest. Some of the Telegraph’s terriers have come nipping at my ankles for daring to suggest on the BBC and in print that Elgar is, apart from three undeniable masterpieces, of little consequence to the modern world. He was reactionary in every way, innovated very little and, apart from breaking England’s musical drought, means little to other people – proof of which can be found in the stern silence with which his anniversary year is being greeted in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Now, along comes our country spokeswoman and confirms my point. Elgar, in her view, is an emblem of rural England – as Thomas Koschat is of Austrian Carinthia, for instance, and Hugo Alfven (if I’m not mistaken) of Swedish Dalarna.
I couldn’t agree with her more, but where does that leave the http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/06/02/do0207.xml, “>Telegraph jingoists, shouting vainly that Elgar is the greatest, when the world simply does not want to know?

Congratulations to Alain Levy for walking away from EMI with £4.6 million – that’s nine million greenbacks in America – in severance pay. That’s his reward for leading the company to a £246 million annual loss and into the hands of equity aliens who will strip EMI of whatever remains of its artistic motivation.
In the bad old days, Alain used to attack me for doing down the classical record industry. His payoff represents five years’ production budget for a mid-sized label like Hyperion. I wonder which of us was doing down the business and which of us was trying to save it from lunacy.

Universal, the corporate parent of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, has just appointed a new V-P in its so-called ‘core’ classical division – as distinct from the peel, pips and wrapping. She is Melanne Mueller, co-founder of Avie Records, an independent umbrella label that packages and distributes self-produced records by such as the San Francisco and Liverpool orchestras, the Rumanian pianist Luiza Borac and the Brook Street Band.
Melanne, with her partner Simon Foster, has done a brilliant job at maintaining artistic integrity and obtaining public attention for a steady flow of serious music, something Universal has long forgotten on both counts how to do. That’s presumably why she has been hired – not so much to restore integrity in a corporate behemoth as to raise production values and publicity.
At much the same time, SonyBMG which has been classically dormant for a year, has named Chris Craker to head a new International Repertoire Centre. Chris, a studio producer with some 400 CDs to his name, set up two small labels, Black Box and Onyx, both noted for a distinctive artistic sensibility and high performance. Chris tells me he is working on a schedule of 200 new releases for SonyBMG.
So does this mean resurrection at two defunct majors? Hardly. Whatever the good intentions of Melanne and Chris, and I have no reason to doubt them, they are entering an environment where marginal arts like classical music can get shut down on an overnight whim, as happened last year at SonyBMG and Warner. With overheads of huge executive salaries and grotesque infrastructures, classical records can never pay their way in the glass tower.
My guess is that Melanne and Chris will do their best, but they won’t be there long.

(more…)

A letter from an artists management agency in Los Angeles provides an accurate diagnosis:
Like many of even the best young musicians today, ‘x’ and ‘y’ are caught between eras in the music recording industry. Corporations like EMI and Sony will not offer them contracts… Gone is the time when music labels felt responsible to support and present the next generation of musical masters.
Without a doubt, concert artists need high-quality commercial recordings available in lobbies or music stores associated with their concert halls. Audiences expect to see professionally produced albums of these artists and they expect the artists to greet them and sign albums. Self-produced albums from the same musicians do not have the same effect. They sometimes make the artists look more amateur.
So what to do? This particular agency, Yarlung Artists, has launched its own label as a stop-gap. Other artists and orchestras deliver performances for free to cottage labels in the hope of gaining the oxygen of general distribution. Others still huddle their own-label efforts under such discreet and helpful umbrellas as Avie Records.
Few of these enterprises make it to front of store where the decrepit major labels use muscle and money to obtain prime position for crossover signings. Entering a record store these days is a dispiriting experience.
What is to be done? I guess the small and self producers need to agglomerate in some way, buy themselves some time with a good PR and start acting like they believe in the product.
Any better ideas?

‘The classical recording industry can’t possibly be in trouble,’ writes Don Rosenberg in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. ‘Compact discs keep piling up, like sonic mountains.’
What kind of logic is that? You might as well say city newspapers can’t be in trouble because there are piles of them every day at the vendors. Or that pizza deliveries must be the hottest thing on earth because so many fliers are shoved through your letterbox.
It must surely be obvious, even in the misty Cleveland heights, that the mainstream classical industry has shrunk in a decade from 700 releases to fewer than 100 and that most of the inflow that clutters reviewers’ desks consists of non-commercial vanity products, paid for by the orchestra, the artists or their anonymous best friends.
The facts of decline are laid out in my book, which has not yet been reviewed in Cleveland, and there can be no excuse for such wilful myopia.
Nor is the blindness total, since Rosenberg continues: ‘Most of (the discs) stay put in their plastic wrappers.’ Of course they do. A disc that may sell 100 copies cannot claim review space in a newspaper that sells 344,704 daily.
The Dealer got a new editor this week, the well-respected Susan Goldberg. She will doubtless wish to take a fresh view of its narrow cultural perspectives.