The music critic of the New Yorker has reproduced statistics from the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) purporting to show that classical recording is alive and well and healthier than ever.
Having just published a book that asserts the very opposite, I am not about to enter here into a detailed refutation. However, here are a few quibbles to the contrary:
1 No cultural industry in my long experience has yielded less reliable stats than the record biz.
2 Official record stats usually consist of units delivered, rather than actual sales, and never configure the huge volume of returns – the great unsold.
3 The decline of classical recording is best measured at the point of production: the record studio. In 1993, six major labels were resonsible for making 700 new classical recordings. Today, there only two majors still active – EMI and DG-Decca – and their combined output is fewer than 100 new releases a year, of which half are crossover. If you are looking for evidence of classical demise on record, start here.
4 Naxos, based in Hong Kong, is the only label to maintain consistent classical output, but it does so without artist promotion, denying the element of interpretative individuality which has fuelled the history and tradition of classical recording.
5 A host of small labels continues to produce classical records but at a risible economic level, close to or below subsistence – and often as vanity publishers, accepting free submissions and issuing them untouched by editorial intervention. Many orchestras and artists have been reduced to publishing their own work. Some of it is high quality, but it is unfiltered by objective or commercial consideration at the point of selection and destribution. It is, in other words, vanity publishing.
6 As is the uncritical regurgitation of RIAA press releases by the music critic of the New Yorker.
7 In my first university course in statistics, the lecturer warned us to be wary of ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, a statement variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, Mark Twain, Alfred Marshall and others. Numbers require informed analysis. You cannot analyse the state of recording by sitting at home and sifting review copies and press releases. The truth is out there – in the idle studios, in the shut-down record stores, in the shrinking space for classical debate in mainstream media. Some of us are still out there, still making a noise, making sure that a good artform does not go down without a fight. Or at least a loving epitaph.

EMI is the label that introduced us to Schnabel, Richter, Argerich, Barenboim and Pollini. Myleene Klass is a pop singer who was chosen for stardom on a television talent contest and has followed up with appearances on reality shows. She has just signed to EMI Classics.
It would be tempting to imagine that an EMI producer, straying beneath her window in South London as she practised Chopin, decided that he was hearing the next Argerich; or that Simon Rattle conducting her in a concerto, demanded that his label sign this phenomenal performer.
The reality, which Myleene is so expert at simulating, is sadly otherwise. We don’t need to be told why ‘classical’ record labels sign ‘talent’ like Myleene. We know all too well.
Don’t ask who killed classical recording. The evidence is inscribed in its own press releases (after the jump).

(more…)

EMI is the label that introduced us to Schnabel, Richter, Argerich, Barenboim and Pollini. Myleene Klass is a pop singer who was chosen for stardom on a television talent contest and has followed up with appearances on reality shows. She has just signed to EMI Classics.
It would be tempting to imagine that an EMI producer, straying beneath her window in South London as she practised Chopin, decided that he was hearing the next Argerich; or that Simon Rattle conducting her in a concerto, demanded that his label sign this phenomenal performer.
The reality, which Myleene is so expert at simulating, is sadly otherwise. We don’t need to be told why ‘classical’ record labels sign ‘talent’ like Myleene. We know all too well.
Don’t ask who killed classical recording. The evidence is inscribed in its own press releases (after the jump).

(more…)

In its endless quest for harmony and balance, the BBC put me between the hip-hop artist Tor and the former Hear’Say singer Myleene to discuss the pop-ularisation of classical music, in front of an audience made up mostly of radio production staff.
My role, I discovered, was to be the patsy. Tor and Myleene want old music to get real. Tor told of her great day out as soloist with the BBC Concert Orchestras; she wondered why the symphony bands weren’t doing more hip-hop (perhaps because that’s not what they are trained for).
Myleene, a former member of the Hear’Say pop group, kept banging on about young people (she is 29) having no patience for long pieces; the only way they will respond to classics is in short bits, and why can’t the BBC and people like me come towards them?
We batted inconsequentialities to and fro for a bit until I lost patience and demanded to know why classical, alone among all musical forms, is being urged to reform. I hear no demands for clubs to employ string quartets and rock stations to play sonatas. No-one’s telling P Diddy to put an ‘oud in his act.
I listen to and enjoy most musical genres; what I can’t accept is that one single form is being victimised on spurious grounds of elitism, exclusivism and aloofness.
Classical music, I raged on, is a museum culture. Museums are thriving with record attendance numbers and no concession to fashion (except the Victoria and Albert, which displays Kylie Minogue’s nightwear). Museums are where we find our common human roots. There is a desperate need to conserve these fortesses of civilisation from the battering rams of ephemeral fads. That’s what great art is there for, take it or leave it.
My hip-hop neighbour nodded sagely (I will definitely catch one of her gigs), and the session ended before popster Myleene could formulate a comeback. Was anything achieved? You tell me.
Meanwhile, Myleene’s battering ram has breached the walls of EMI Classics … read on.

In its endless quest for harmony and balance, the BBC put me between the hip-hop artist Tor and the former Hear’Say singer Myleene to discuss the pop-ularisation of classical music, in front of an audience made up mostly of radio production staff.
My role, I discovered, was to be the patsy. Tor and Myleene want old music to get real. Tor told of her great day out as soloist with the BBC Concert Orchestras; she wondered why the symphony bands weren’t doing more hip-hop (perhaps because that’s not what they are trained for).
Myleene, a former member of the Hear’Say pop group, kept banging on about young people (she is 29) having no patience for long pieces; the only way they will respond to classics is in short bits, and why can’t the BBC and people like me come towards them?
We batted inconsequentialities to and fro for a bit until I lost patience and demanded to know why classical, alone among all musical forms, is being urged to reform. I hear no demands for clubs to employ string quartets and rock stations to play sonatas. No-one’s telling P Diddy to put an ‘oud in his act.
I listen to and enjoy most musical genres; what I can’t accept is that one single form is being victimised on spurious grounds of elitism, exclusivism and aloofness.
Classical music, I raged on, is a museum culture. Museums are thriving with record attendance numbers and no concession to fashion (except the Victoria and Albert, which displays Kylie Minogue’s nightwear). Museums are where we find our common human roots. There is a desperate need to conserve these fortesses of civilisation from the battering rams of ephemeral fads. That’s what great art is there for, take it or leave it.
My hip-hop neighbour nodded sagely (I will definitely catch one of her gigs), and the session ended before popster Myleene could formulate a comeback. Was anything achieved? You tell me.
Meanwhile, Myleene’s battering ram has breached the walls of EMI Classics … read on.

The Times obituary of Ray Minshull, who died last month aged 72, was as bland, and as kind and as colourless as he could possibly have wished. There was not even a passport photograph at the edge of the page to break his social anonymity.
Minshull was a big man in classical recording. He was head of the classical division of Decca from 1967, and of the whole company from 1981, right through to his retirement in 1994 – after which the demolition began.
As successor to the visionary and charismatic John Culshaw, Minshull cultivated an impersonality that was almost pathological in its self-effacement. You could spend ten minutes talking animatedly to a potted plant and get more back from it by way of wit and information than from Ray Minshull at a major record launch. The best that could be said of him was that he saved Decca from the Visigoths; the worst, that he delivered it to them utterly defenceless.
Minshull’s facelessness was, of course, a front for other things. You can read more about them here, or here, or even hier.
It seems perfectly fitting that his determinedly dull obit should prop up page 77 of the Times on Saturday beneath a glowing appreciation of Laurence Picken, a Cambridge ‘bachelor don of the old school’ (let’s not even go there), whose chief discoveries were in the fields of ‘invertebrate excretory systems and 8th century Chinese music’. To come a distant second to a man who studied worm piss and Tang dances seems a finely tuned and possibly ironic tribute to this mumbling dinosaurus of the lamented record biz. Requiescat in pace.

The Times obituary of Ray Minshull, who died last month aged 72, was as bland, and as kind and as colourless as he could possibly have wished. There was not even a passport photograph at the edge of the page to break his social anonymity.
Minshull was a big man in classical recording. He was head of the classical division of Decca from 1967, and of the whole company from 1981, right through to his retirement in 1994 – after which the demolition began.
As successor to the visionary and charismatic John Culshaw, Minshull cultivated an impersonality that was almost pathological in its self-effacement. You could spend ten minutes talking animatedly to a potted plant and get more back from it by way of wit and information than from Ray Minshull at a major record launch. The best that could be said of him was that he saved Decca from the Visigoths; the worst, that he delivered it to them utterly defenceless.
Minshull’s facelessness was, of course, a front for other things. You can read more about them here, or here, or even hier.
It seems perfectly fitting that his determinedly dull obit should prop up page 77 of the Times on Saturday beneath a glowing appreciation of Laurence Picken, a Cambridge ‘bachelor don of the old school’ (let’s not even go there), whose chief discoveries were in the fields of ‘invertebrate excretory systems and 8th century Chinese music’. To come a distant second to a man who studied worm piss and Tang dances seems a finely tuned and possibly ironic tribute to this mumbling dinosaurus of the lamented record biz. Requiescat in pace.

Reading my review today of the new Simon Rattle release, the editor of Opera magazine John Allison spots an alarming similarity between Rattle’s cover and Christian Thielemann’s for the Schumann third symphony.
Compare and contrast.
bench1.jpgbench2.jpg
Is there only one park bench in the whole of Berlin? Is Rattle trying to snuggle up to the man that many Germans see as the next Karajan? Did they both visit the same corner-shop photographer with the dated background? Or was Rattle simply photoshopped into the scene?
Someone, somewhere, needs to come clean on this.

The new book went live last night with a well-attended lecture at the British Library and a big piece follow-up in the Evening Standard.
Jonathan Summers, the wonderfully erudite curator of recordings at the BL, said the audience was the biggest he’d had for any lecturer bar Mitsuko Uchida. What pleased me most was its diversity – every type of record fancier from bone-dry discographer to rock band member. Nice.
Whenever I talk about records in London, some distinguished old gentleman will come up afterwards and I will identify him instantly by his bearing as a survivor of Walter Legge’s Philharmonia Orchestra. There is something heroic to these musicians, something of the wartime RAF about them, an esprit de corps allied to a flinty derring-do.
There have been other great bands and there will be more, but these were the best of the best. They stood up to Karajan and they defeated Legge’s destructive wiles. They live on in legend – and, not least, on record.

The new book went live last night with a well-attended lecture at the British Library and a big piece follow-up in the Evening Standard.
Jonathan Summers, the wonderfully erudite curator of recordings at the BL, said the audience was the biggest he’d had for any lecturer bar Mitsuko Uchida. What pleased me most was its diversity – every type of record fancier from bone-dry discographer to rock band member. Nice.
Whenever I talk about records in London, some distinguished old gentleman will come up afterwards and I will identify him instantly by his bearing as a survivor of Walter Legge’s Philharmonia Orchestra. There is something heroic to these musicians, something of the wartime RAF about them, an esprit de corps allied to a flinty derring-do.
There have been other great bands and there will be more, but these were the best of the best. They stood up to Karajan and they defeated Legge’s destructive wiles. They live on in legend – and, not least, on record.

John Wilson, the ever-alert BBC presenter who was with me in China the other week, was so impressed by the confluence of civilisations that he came home with three half-hour Front Row shows, the first of which went out last Wednesday.
His industriousness and versatility were astonishing. John not only interviewed, narrated and recorded his material, he edited and produced all three programmes on the road – the kind of herculean effort that normally requires a team of three. Even if I had the technical know-how, BBC Radio 3 would never let me produce my next series, as well as presenting it this summer. It takes a very particular blend of skills to carry off both roles, and not everyone who attempts it does so to best advantage.
The instance it called to mind was the new Beethoven concerto cycle by Mikhail Pletnev in which the conductor is none other than Christian Gansch who is also Pletnev’s regular DG producer. Gansch, no slouch, is a former concetmaster of the Munich Philharmonic who took up conducting when the revered Sergiu Celibidache died. He makes, on the evidence of this record, a pretty good fist of conducting – which is to say he keeps the orchestra under tight rein while Pletnev teases him and it with dangerously delayed entires and angular phrasing.
It must be great for a soloist to know that his producer has his boot on the neck of the band, but for the listener it’s not that inspiring. A more independent maestro would have challenged the soloist to justify his waywardness and elicited a stronger performance.
I had to look twice at the sleeve to make sure Gansch was not producing on this occasion as well as conducting. Officially he as not, though I am sure he spent as much time in the control room as on the rostrum. Fortunately DG, unlike the BBC, can afford to attach an executive producer (Matthias Spindler) and a recording producer (Rainer Mallard) as well as a balance engineer, recording engineer and balance technician to what was, in effect, a live performance at the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, last September. No shortage of hands in this broth.
And you wonder why the classical record economy has collapsed…

John Wilson, the ever-alert BBC presenter who was with me in China the other week, was so impressed by the confluence of civilisations that he came home with three half-hour Front Row shows, the first of which went out last Wednesday.
His industriousness and versatility were astonishing. John not only interviewed, narrated and recorded his material, he edited and produced all three programmes on the road – the kind of herculean effort that normally requires a team of three. Even if I had the technical know-how, BBC Radio 3 would never let me produce my next series, as well as presenting it this summer. It takes a very particular blend of skills to carry off both roles, and not everyone who attempts it does so to best advantage.
The instance it called to mind was the new Beethoven concerto cycle by Mikhail Pletnev in which the conductor is none other than Christian Gansch who is also Pletnev’s regular DG producer. Gansch, no slouch, is a former concetmaster of the Munich Philharmonic who took up conducting when the revered Sergiu Celibidache died. He makes, on the evidence of this record, a pretty good fist of conducting – which is to say he keeps the orchestra under tight rein while Pletnev teases him and it with dangerously delayed entires and angular phrasing.
It must be great for a soloist to know that his producer has his boot on the neck of the band, but for the listener it’s not that inspiring. A more independent maestro would have challenged the soloist to justify his waywardness and elicited a stronger performance.
I had to look twice at the sleeve to make sure Gansch was not producing on this occasion as well as conducting. Officially he as not, though I am sure he spent as much time in the control room as on the rostrum. Fortunately DG, unlike the BBC, can afford to attach an executive producer (Matthias Spindler) and a recording producer (Rainer Mallard) as well as a balance engineer, recording engineer and balance technician to what was, in effect, a live performance at the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, last September. No shortage of hands in this broth.
And you wonder why the classical record economy has collapsed…