See LATE EXTRA below

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. 

 

LATE EXTRA: BBC Radio 3 have responded to this blog by invting Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge to reminisce about Raeburn and Lock on In Tune tonight. If you miss the live tx, you can pick it up later on streaming.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 

See LATE EXTRA below

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. 

 

LATE EXTRA: BBC Radio 3 have responded to this blog by invting Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge to reminisce about Raeburn and Lock on In Tune tonight. If you miss the live tx, you can pick it up later on streaming.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 

If you read the small print in The Times newspaper tomorrow, you will find the announcement of an engagement between Gus Christie, 45, master of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, and the soprano Danielle de Niese, supreme in steely and determined baroque roles.

The pair have been an item for about four years and De Niese, Australian born of Dutch and Sri Lankan parentage, has left critics and audiences breathless with admiration pretty much every time she steps on stage.

Last summer, she told my colleague Fiona Maddocks in the Evening Standard: “People keep referring to me as the chatelaine of Glyndebourne. I just love that expression, chatelaine,” de Niese hoots. “But I’m not. Actually I still live with my parents in New Jersey. Gus and I are having a lovely time getting to know each other. We see each other when we can. I’m travelling so much, that’s not always easy.’

It sounds like they’ve made it easy, after all.

Congratulations to Gus and Danielle. Life, like opera, is not always what you plan. 

If you read the small print in The Times newspaper tomorrow, you will find the announcement of an engagement between Gus Christie, 45, master of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, and the soprano Danielle de Niese, supreme in steely and determined baroque roles.

The pair have been an item for about four years and De Niese, Australian born of Dutch and Sri Lankan parentage, has left critics and audiences breathless with admiration pretty much every time she steps on stage.

Last summer, she told my colleague Fiona Maddocks in the Evening Standard: “People keep referring to me as the chatelaine of Glyndebourne. I just love that expression, chatelaine,” de Niese hoots. “But I’m not. Actually I still live with my parents in New Jersey. Gus and I are having a lovely time getting to know each other. We see each other when we can. I’m travelling so much, that’s not always easy.’

It sounds like they’ve made it easy, after all.

Congratulations to Gus and Danielle. Life, like opera, is not always what you plan. 

Coming up in Holland:
From march 9th till march 15th the Dutch Avro will host a new batch of free downloads (similar to the Concertgebouw downloads from last year). To honour Bernard Haitink for his 80th birthday, there will be a free download from a recording session with the Concertgebouw orchestra every day. There is no English announcement yet, so you have to do it with a google translate from the Dutch public radio website: http://tinyurl.com/cr79d8 You don’t need universal for your classical music these days…. 🙂

Greetings,

Rolf den Otter
 
Coming up in Holland:
From march 9th till march 15th the Dutch Avro will host a new batch of free downloads (similar to the Concertgebouw downloads from last year). To honour Bernard Haitink for his 80th birthday, there will be a free download from a recording session with the Concertgebouw orchestra every day. There is no English announcement yet, so you have to do it with a google translate from the Dutch public radio website: http://tinyurl.com/cr79d8 You don’t need universal for your classical music these days…. 🙂

Greetings,

Rolf den Otter
 

This just in from a veteran Decca producer:

 

Dear Norman,
I hope you are well, and have been reading your recent articles on Decca with mixed emotions – mainly sadness at the callous destruction of a once-great company.
They remind me of a story of a Viennese professor lecturing his class.  He present a large spider and announces: ‘This is Adolf, an extremely clever arachnid.  When I say “Hop!”, Adolf jumps 9.4 centimetres in the air.  He says ‘Hop!’ and, sure enough, the spider leaps, and one sees his eyes following the insect’s movements.  Once again, ‘Hop!’, and the spider leaps to his command.
‘Now,’ he continues ‘Here is an interesting phenomenon.  I am going to tie Adolf’s eight legs together with some fine cotton …’ which he then proceeds to do.  Then, he commands, ‘Adolf, hop!’.  Nothing happens.  He again commands ‘Adolf, Hop!’  The spider remains motionless.
The professor turns to his audience.  ‘Here is proof of my theory.  When you tie a spider’s eight legs together, it becomes stone deaf.’ 
I have the feeling that Universal Classics and Jazz have been delving into the same logical conclusions.
All the best,
Paul
 
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Since my column and subsequent blogs appeared over the last two weeks, Universal’s president of classics and jazz, Chris Roberts, and its managing director, Dickon Stainer, have each denied aspects ot it, without seeming to agree on what is really happening – for reasons that will soon become apparent.
 
Roberts, in a letter to the Evening Standard, says: ‘We are making changes, but they are to preserve the label’s integrity (sic) and give artists confidence that they will not be subsumed by “efficiencies”.’ He does not mention the assisted departure of Decca chief, Bogdan Roscic, and blurs the abolition of Decca’s crossover list, its financial mainstay.
 
Stainer, in a comment to Classical Music magazine, confirms that crossover is being taken away from Decca but insists its London office will continue somehow as ‘a creative centre’.
 
Why the difference? Insiders say that Roberts in New York and Stainer in London don’t talk to each other. The death of Decca is an incidental casualty of their fallout.
 
It is not the first time that artists have fallen victin to the intrigues of the bonus culture. I expect we’ll see more of this before heads finally roll at Universal.
 
Watch this spot. And weep for Decca.
 

This just in from a veteran Decca producer:

 

Dear Norman,
I hope you are well, and have been reading your recent articles on Decca with mixed emotions – mainly sadness at the callous destruction of a once-great company.
They remind me of a story of a Viennese professor lecturing his class.  He present a large spider and announces: ‘This is Adolf, an extremely clever arachnid.  When I say “Hop!”, Adolf jumps 9.4 centimetres in the air.  He says ‘Hop!’ and, sure enough, the spider leaps, and one sees his eyes following the insect’s movements.  Once again, ‘Hop!’, and the spider leaps to his command.
‘Now,’ he continues ‘Here is an interesting phenomenon.  I am going to tie Adolf’s eight legs together with some fine cotton …’ which he then proceeds to do.  Then, he commands, ‘Adolf, hop!’.  Nothing happens.  He again commands ‘Adolf, Hop!’  The spider remains motionless.
The professor turns to his audience.  ‘Here is proof of my theory.  When you tie a spider’s eight legs together, it becomes stone deaf.’ 
I have the feeling that Universal Classics and Jazz have been delving into the same logical conclusions.
All the best,
Paul
 
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Since my column and subsequent blogs appeared over the last two weeks, Universal’s president of classics and jazz, Chris Roberts, and its managing director, Dickon Stainer, have each denied aspects ot it, without seeming to agree on what is really happening – for reasons that will soon become apparent.
 
Roberts, in a letter to the Evening Standard, says: ‘We are making changes, but they are to preserve the label’s integrity (sic) and give artists confidence that they will not be subsumed by “efficiencies”.’ He does not mention the assisted departure of Decca chief, Bogdan Roscic, and blurs the abolition of Decca’s crossover list, its financial mainstay.
 
Stainer, in a comment to Classical Music magazine, confirms that crossover is being taken away from Decca but insists its London office will continue somehow as ‘a creative centre’.
 
Why the difference? Insiders say that Roberts in New York and Stainer in London don’t talk to each other. The death of Decca is an incidental casualty of their fallout.
 
It is not the first time that artists have fallen victin to the intrigues of the bonus culture. I expect we’ll see more of this before heads finally roll at Universal.
 
Watch this spot. And weep for Decca.
 
Here’s a comment from Herbert Breslin:
 
Let’s face it. The thrust of Decca’s promotion, marketing, and publicity never materialized from London. For many years I was responsible for the public relations careers of Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Alicia de Laroccha, early Marilyn Horne and later Georg Solti. Without what my office accomplished, not one of these artists would have made the important, powerhouse career they did.
 
True, Decca produced the records and they were extraordinary. But the what then was taken over by me. Without the work by me as well as the work of important colleagues such as Edgar Vincent, Cynthia Robbins, among others, Decca Records would never have dominated the US marketing, Billboard charts and sales. 
Herbert Breslin
 
Norman Lebrecht adds:
Herbert’s right, of course. So long as Decca was an independent, self-standing label, it made good records and employed a range of people, in-house and out, to promote them. Terry McEwen, who effectively created classical Decca in the US and invented the phenomenon Pavarotti (against some opposition from London), was the mind behind this strategy. See Herb’s book for more, and mine.
 
Once Decca came under corporate control, these publicity skills withered. One of the so-called ‘efficiency’ arguments for gathering labels under one big roof is that centralised marketing will cost less and sow benefits across the board. Universal has given the lie to that.
 
Instead of records being driven by the excited imaginations of artists and producers, all big-budget projects at Universal arose from the whim of a corporate executive, serving some inarticulate policy paper that first got him the job. That’s the tragedy of Decca, and so much else in the dying sector. Classical records could have survived a while longer as a cottage industry at Decca, Philips, Erato, Teldec and more. It’s the corps that killed them.
 
Here’s a comment from Herbert Breslin:
 
Let’s face it. The thrust of Decca’s promotion, marketing, and publicity never materialized from London. For many years I was responsible for the public relations careers of Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Alicia de Laroccha, early Marilyn Horne and later Georg Solti. Without what my office accomplished, not one of these artists would have made the important, powerhouse career they did.
 
True, Decca produced the records and they were extraordinary. But the what then was taken over by me. Without the work by me as well as the work of important colleagues such as Edgar Vincent, Cynthia Robbins, among others, Decca Records would never have dominated the US marketing, Billboard charts and sales. 
Herbert Breslin
 
Norman Lebrecht adds:
Herbert’s right, of course. So long as Decca was an independent, self-standing label, it made good records and employed a range of people, in-house and out, to promote them. Terry McEwen, who effectively created classical Decca in the US and invented the phenomenon Pavarotti (against some opposition from London), was the mind behind this strategy. See Herb’s book for more, and mine.
 
Once Decca came under corporate control, these publicity skills withered. One of the so-called ‘efficiency’ arguments for gathering labels under one big roof is that centralised marketing will cost less and sow benefits across the board. Universal has given the lie to that.
 
Instead of records being driven by the excited imaginations of artists and producers, all big-budget projects at Universal arose from the whim of a corporate executive, serving some inarticulate policy paper that first got him the job. That’s the tragedy of Decca, and so much else in the dying sector. Classical records could have survived a while longer as a cottage industry at Decca, Philips, Erato, Teldec and more. It’s the corps that killed them.
 

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has written a tender-hearted feature about his former schoolteacher, Derek Bourgeois, a composer who claims a British national record for writing the most symphonies.

With 44 in his folder, Bourgeois is well ahead of the unstoppable William Havergal Brian, who composed 32 symphonies, two-thirds of them between the ages of 78 and 96. One of Brian’s works, the Gothic, drew a twitter of attention when it was taken up by a member of the Grateful Dead – I once discussed structure and tempo with Phil Lesh – but for the most part these mass-production outpourings seem destined to remain unheard.

Bourgeois, who had an early symphony performed by Adrian Boult, ascribes his neglect to the ‘avant-garde’, which seems unfair. He is a versatile composer with a solid career. A soundtrack for the BBC’s dramatisation of Mansfield Park lingers in my ear and there’s a trombone concerto on my shelf, recorded by Christian Lindberg. Does it not occur to him that, as he piles symphony upon symphony, musicians will shy away from sheer volume and give the whole lot a miss?

He is by no means the only man who cannot stop writing symphonies. The Finnish conductor Leif Segerstam, a full-bearded master of orchestras, has composed 215 symphonies, ten of them in the month of August 2008 alone. Segerstam is an exceptionally skilled interpreter, able to pull together a last-mi nute performance with a minimum of fuss. What is it that makes him carry on writing symphonies, and listing them at the Finnish Music Information Centre? Does he not appreciate that a snowball would stand greater chance of success and longevity in Dante’s Inferno? 

Myself, I blame Papa Haydn. The format he invented for the symphony is so inviting that, like a cake mould, anyone with the right technique feels obliged to fill it. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, certainly too many. ‘He was the father of us all,’ said Mozart. And so say Derek Bourgeois, Leif Segerstam, William Havergal Brian and all.

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has written a tender-hearted feature about his former schoolteacher, Derek Bourgeois, a composer who claims a British national record for writing the most symphonies.

With 44 in his folder, Bourgeois is well ahead of the unstoppable William Havergal Brian, who composed 32 symphonies, two-thirds of them between the ages of 78 and 96. One of Brian’s works, the Gothic, drew a twitter of attention when it was taken up by a member of the Grateful Dead – I once discussed structure and tempo with Phil Lesh – but for the most part these mass-production outpourings seem destined to remain unheard.

Bourgeois, who had an early symphony performed by Adrian Boult, ascribes his neglect to the ‘avant-garde’, which seems unfair. He is a versatile composer with a solid career. A soundtrack for the BBC’s dramatisation of Mansfield Park lingers in my ear and there’s a trombone concerto on my shelf, recorded by Christian Lindberg. Does it not occur to him that, as he piles symphony upon symphony, musicians will shy away from sheer volume and give the whole lot a miss?

He is by no means the only man who cannot stop writing symphonies. The Finnish conductor Leif Segerstam, a full-bearded master of orchestras, has composed 215 symphonies, ten of them in the month of August 2008 alone. Segerstam is an exceptionally skilled interpreter, able to pull together a last-mi nute performance with a minimum of fuss. What is it that makes him carry on writing symphonies, and listing them at the Finnish Music Information Centre? Does he not appreciate that a snowball would stand greater chance of success and longevity in Dante’s Inferno? 

Myself, I blame Papa Haydn. The format he invented for the symphony is so inviting that, like a cake mould, anyone with the right technique feels obliged to fill it. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, certainly too many. ‘He was the father of us all,’ said Mozart. And so say Derek Bourgeois, Leif Segerstam, William Havergal Brian and all.