Anne-Sophie Mutter: I blame the record industry
mainFrom an interview with Gramophone magazine:
‘We have the problem of a record industry that is firing up one musician after the other, one product after another, because the market wants new faces, but in classical music things need to evolve slowly, and they need to evolve over a longer period. A musician needs the chance to grow – none of us became who we are overnight.’
UPDATE: She has more to say about film music in this John Williams interview.
She’s talking from a serious and very successful musician’s view, but record companies need to sell records. What sells today? Sex, flash, short skirts, cleavage, gimmicks… The days of Annie Fischer in her black smock, thick shoes hunched over the piano and playing without fuss is over. She might deliver transcendent performances, but 99% of the audience/record buyers won’t know the difference and could care less. Mutter should remember she was one of the earliest beneficiaries of today’s commercial realities with her strapless Dior gowns. Beethoven never sounded so good with those gowns, and DG sold a boatload of records off them. I am willing to bet she sold more records than Jimmy Lin, Issac Stern, Grumiaux, Perlman et al.
Who is Jimmy Lin? Cho-liang Lin?
Jimmy Lin Chih-ying ?
Yes.
Yes
Don’t forget that she made her name as a fully-dressed teenager in the Sweater Years.*
(*If you don’t know what I mean, check out her original covers of the Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn/Bruch, etc. with Karajan. Not arguing that the gowns didn’t help sales; but they didn’t start until she was already a big star.)
With Herbie behind her, she could have worn a burka.
I saw a marked up DG publicity poster in mid-80s in which she looked at camera winsomely with HvK’s hands on her shoulders, and said: “Frau von Karajan: Herbert and I are just good friends. I enjoy playing under him greatly.”
What is the first thing people think when someone says, “You have absolutely nothing to worry about?”
I doubt it!
Bruce: Actually, on those very covers she was precisely wearing “dull” 80’s woolen sweaters. Take and extra look for the “originals”…
P.S: Not that it’s so illuminatingly important
So true, and on those covers there were often three sweaters being worn. One by Mutter and two by Karajan.
Maybe to hide the shame…
Wilber: The shame of what? Being a beautiful woman and a legendarian musician?…
Maybe I’m underestimating her popularity but I doubt she sold more records than Perlman.
She looks classy by today’s standards!!
She’s also much better than all of the violinists you mention. Normally I’d agree, as a male musician it’s incredibly frustrating to see female colleagues willing to show more skin getting gigs more regularly than their less sexy but better playing counterparts often.
Yes! Kavakos for example.
It is going to get much worse while they treat classical music as an “industry” that needs to give what a broad market wants, which will never happen. This will only make this art form deteriorate faster than ever. Greedy companies.
Agreed. If classical music must die, then at least allow it to die a noble death. I don’t think we would even put nuns in mini dresses in an attempt to further promote the Roman Catholic Church.
The Archbishops voted for this change, but the nuns voted it down :).
Very interesting comment! Actually the proof of your point is that the orders of mind who have kept their habits – veils, etc. – are the ones who have survived the novelties, innovations and ‘progress’ and now are the orders attracting vocations. The ones who ‘threw out the baby with the bathwater’ to keep up with ever-changing fads are literally dying out. Sad but true. I like to think that true artists with eternal truths to share will always emerge….but of course they need to be visible/promoted amidst the maelstrom…
Good for ASM, it had to be said.
From the 1980 film “The Competition”, about an international piano competition and its entrants:
“If we lived in a world of sanity, nobody would even expect you to start concertizing until you were in your late twenties so you could keep studying and enlarging the repertoire and deepening as a person and growing up to be a national treasure. But, if you waited that long, no-one would ever book you. They want you fresh out of the egg or not at all. They must waste five hundred good pianists a year that way.”
Greta Vandemann (Lee Remick) to her student Heidi Joan Schoonover (Amy Irving)
Great quote, but “concertizing” grates…!
Addendum:
“I cannot see today’s mass-conscious celebrities as anything but a danger to art, whatever in their youthful years they may have left behind for us that is authentic and fine.”
— Virgil Thomson (1970)
Perhaps they should wait a bit before they engage artists. On the other hand, some artists were much better at the beginning of their career than later on, I am particularly thinking of Nigel Kennedy here. As one much missed radio personality in Australia, late Martin Hibble (from Britain by the way), once said that Kennedy was a fine violinist until he decided to be a public idiot instead.
glad to know someone else remembers and appreciates Martin Hibble.
I was friendly with one of his colleagues at ABC-FM (and he died recently too) who said MH was a ‘bon vivant who died much too young’. He had a heart attack while running the shower!
“Williams conducts Mutter and the Los Angeles Recording Arts Orchestra during sessions in a Culver City studio” for Deutsche Grammophon.
That’s where we are, folks.
Back to the Columbia Orchestra with Bruno Walter days. Why is that so bad?
Walter’s original NY Phil Beethoven recordings were mono. The LA free-lance orchestra stereo recordings cost Columbia less in addition to sounding lighter using fewer musicians culled from the studios and not used to playing together as a unit.
OMG it’s a travesty!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_orchestra
It seems Mutter and Williams and everyone else had a great time there. Your point is? Are you really that uptight that you think classical music is a thin ivory tower that will fall over, if a classical musicians goes into the studio with a composer who is mostly known for his film work? Are you from the Classical Music Taliban? You think Sibelius is diminished, if Williams records with Mutter? Take a deep breath and relax.
And… the public gets the record labels they deserve. If people had other demands, the record labels would deliver them. Don‘t kill the messenger. The record labels deliver what the people want. They are not educational institutions.
Yes, I have to agree. And we will always have niche labels producing interesting music by people they rate as a labour-of-love for little or no profit.
The classical music business is not the pop music business. In classical music maturity matters. Middle-aged to very old musicians are as a rule more interesting than all those kids in diapers people have done so much fuss recently.
“more interesting than all those kids in diapers people have done so much fuss recently.”
But the MSM likes them, even worships them, in many different fields. That’s the problem. Age is being denigrated.
This type of generalization is not helpful. If what you said is true, then you should also explain why music lovers are to this day still fascinated by Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin, who died at age 35, 31, and 39, respectively.
That’s a very good point. However, did they need to strip to sell their wares?
It’s like Norma Desmond blaming the studios, in 2019.
Don’t blame the old recording industry, it is no longer an industry, it is no longer dominant, anyone can record and post on youtube, spotify, and if you have fans, you’ll have a following.
It is true, but not totally for classical music. It is still a hughe boost on anyone carrer to win a famous competition, and/or get a contract with a strong record company that can still merchandize much better than anyone in this kind of music. An outsider doesn’t have the same easyness to be booked by any great hall.
Not any more…the money is in performance and not recording. Many pop bands now view record sales as a means to drive ticket sales for their concerts.
The challenge is to monetize that following.
After this frightful Bach playing below, she ought to keep all opinions to herself :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcp8pvRkooY
Well I am glad that you think your opinion is more valuable
And here I thought sewing-machine Bach was a thing of the past, my bad.
Thank you, that was beautiful.
It’s really quite amazing when people are given the beauty that’s there even at the click of a computer mouse….
It becomes something akin to: “Look at her, her nose it too big, or gosh he’s got big ears, or who knows what I won’t go further with.”
Like people going on about Renee Fleming because the way her nature is works for her, and the music actually speaks. Instead, instead of the music speaking, it’s supposed to be how someone decided it’s supposed to be imprisoning it’s freedom to that.
What Anne Sophie does works, and she’s not trying to be someone else. Neither is she trying to ridicule other people into expressing their nature, or opinions.
That was supposed to read: “Neither is she not trying to ridicule other people into expressing their nature, or opinions.”
On this site there’s such a degree of bashing and ridiculing anyone who does something against another’s taste that I feel sorry if those portraying their believed objectivity are at all professional music educators.
That’s what so many teachers do, get in the way of the nature of their students, for the teachers lack of seeing what the music is for. And the composers they are blessed with wouldn’t have written music that transcended time would they have the lack of flexibility the teachers try to make out is in the music.
Everyone does things differently, everyone has a different nature. The music isn’t there to stifle that. One thing I notice about Anne Sophie Mutter is that she says that the music doesn’t communicate if it isn’t subjective, and that even if it isn’t in her preference of she doesn’t like it, if a person’s interpretations are convincing that should be honored, and that’s what the music is for.
I find a lot of the comments with people acting as if they have some sort of insight as to how something should be played akin to making remarks about the build that nature gave another person, what silly insecure adolescents do trying to see who fits into a subset in time of who is attractive or who isn’t according to some arbitrary fashion. Except it’s made out to be some profound sensitivity regarding what art is.
Apparently I can’t get that “not” in the right place. Again being wrong, it’s supposed to for the third time have been: “Neither is she trying to ridicule other people into not expressing their nature, or opinions.”
Brave words and pure reality. Besides the fact that a beatifull face isn’t a demand for real talents, but we only see new cute faces at front covers.
Too much coincidence…
The recording industry isn’t run by musically literate people – it’s run by MBA’s, lawyers, vacuous egomaniacs, quick-buck corporate raiders, and nincompoops.
So how do you like the job so far?
Everything else is OK, though? 🙂
Not entirely true. Naxos is the world’s largest classical recording company. It is still run by its founder Klaus Heymann, an octogenarian with a vast knowledge of music, a passion for new recordings of a very wide repertoire and a shrewd businessman who saw that the traditional classical recording model was killing itself. He had the wisdom to start up a small label where fees were a fraction of what the majors were paying and where new distribution outlets had to be found.
I see its October releases will include the Complete Flute works of Casterede, a CD of works by Moyzes and Ping Chang’s Oriental Wash Painting. Hardly standard repertoire. And its wide range of educational recordings with introductions to and analyses of works is hugely admirable.
Really??? Are we living in the same world? I look at my colleagues for the better independent labels – led by musicians, producers, technicians, with a hot love and total commitment for what they do.
The demographics of this site are serious fans and pros, who are lamenting the passing of musical purity and seriousness, in favor of the twin gods of “relevance and accessibility”. But 99% of the consuming audience don’t know and don’t care. While people here may have 20 versions of Bruckner 8th and debate a singer’s mid-range/head voice etc., the rest of the people think they have heard the best voice ever–and partook in high culture and classical music–after watching Andrea Bocelli on a PBS fund raiser. If DG is going to release a retrospective album of Alfred Brendel vs. “A Night on Broadway” by Yujia Wang, how much promo $$ are they going to spend on each, which one will sell 50X of the other? Be honest.
“If DG is going to release a retrospective album of Alfred Brendel vs. “A Night on Broadway” by Yujia Wang”
If you’ve ever actually compared the two in the same repertoire, you would know this is a hilariously bad example to support your case.
Precisely my point. You know the difference. The other 99% don’t, therefore don’t care.
The other 99% such as yourself will simply believe what the marketing department of these recording companies tell them and believe Brendel is a grand master and Yuja Wang is known chiefly for her clothes? Is that what you are trying to say?
I’m afraid you misunderstood me. Your example is hilariously bad because Yuja Wang is a superior pianist to Alfred Brendel. You would know if you actually compared the two in the same repertoire (Brahms concertos, Mozart k.271, Liszt sonata, Brahms Handel variations, Schumann concerto, etc. etc.), instead of listening to the bullshit marketing from the record companies.
What I love about people like Brendel is that he’s a musician and intellectual to the core and not a ‘celebrity’ who’ll sell recordings (talented though these invariably are!).
Well, Yuja is a better pianist, but Brendel looks more intellectual. I guess some people just go for the looks.
On target.
“the rest of the people think they have heard the best voice ever–and partook in high culture and classical music–after watching Andrea Bocelli”
Sadly true. I’ve met quite a few but stopped challenging them, or most of them, some time ago because they can be so prickly.
I’ve always tried to be polite, using questions such as “why do you choose Bocelli/Watson/Jenkins over xxxxxxxx, who spends more time in the opera house?” Doesn’t help though – an accusation of snobbery usually emerges sooner rather than later.
More or less given up.
Their claims about snobbery usually says more about them than you. They make the claim because part of the reason they like Bocelli is they “want a bit of class” and “to seem sophisticated”. For if they liked the voice for what it is then surely they wouldn’t care whether Bocelli appeared on the opera stage. Afterall, nobody thinks less of Paul McCartney, someone else who hasn’t sung at Covent Garden.
“We have the problem of a record industry that is firing up one musician after the other, one product after another, because the market wants new faces, but in classical music things need to evolve slowly, and they need to evolve over a longer period.”
That is perhaps true for major labels, but certainly not the case for the concert circuit. I’m still seeing the same faces in concerts year after year. And frankly, who cares what the record industry does at this point? Many concerts are streamed; the record industry has become superfluous. The focus has returned to live concerts, as it should be.
There is no recording industry and very few celebrities around music these days
It’s all just about the music now I think we can say goodbye to personalities and the Pop world is really the poop world
ASM is absolutely right. However, taking a long step back and looking at the big picture: The giant marketers are only one part of the record business. If you do great music , you don’t have to go thru one of the majors . Eg the Labeques. ALSO, I think the majors do more good than harm. If some one does an initial listen to Yuja because she looks good, they will then be confronted with music that is fabulous, compelling, can’t get it out of your system . FINALLY, I think of music as a broad, “impure” art which naturally links up with fashion, glamour, theatrics, fame, personality, and a certain amount of PT Barnum. Even “severe” artists from the past played this game – by their rules. Watch Rubinsteins YouTube performances of Ritual Fire Dance. Hokum clothed in severity (also well played of course).
She’s very talented, I’m sure she knows what she is talking about.
Brilliant interview with John Williams and Anne-Sophie Mutter on yesterday’s CBS Sunday Morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skh9N2UH1Fo
That’s literally been the way since pop / rock started . . how many Beatlemania fans do you think would’ve sat through a Beethoven piece ( / or as the interview would probably say ‘anylistically appreciated’ it ) when I Want To Hold Your Hand came out ( not that I’m discrediting I Want To Hold Your Hand . . ) she just sounds like an old (wo)man yelling at a cloud . . . Pop is pop . . ‘popular’ designed to be appealing to a large mass ( this ties in with appearance which BTW 50+ years ago when Elvis was gyrating his hips on TV, not really a ‘modern day phenomenon’ ) . . . Most (non-technically trained people ) will only care whether it appeals visually, through audio or appealing to brain- sensors . . . not everyone intensively studies composition / music theory for 3+ years . . everything doesn’t have to be Symphony 9 . . I’m guessing she doesn’t perform any Philip Glass . .
Record industry? People buy records?
Absolutely, but of course a fraction of the old times. If you want good quality sound you buy an LP or a CD.
I never understood why she is so successful. Her playing is mediocre at best and not even close to liberace or Elton John. Just my two cents worth..
I get what she’s saying but at 2% of the market, I don’t think the record companies are getting greedy. They are bringing people along that a younger audience can identify with. I identify with the past masters but I understand the record companies. I will be willing to give the younger performers a chance.