How little labels changed our world
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
What small labels do best is backing the owner’s hunches. BIS in Stockholm produced symphonies by Alfred Schnittke when he was unheard outside Russia. Hyperion in south London resurrected 19th century piano concertos. Cedille in Chicago backs off-beat US composers. Manfred Eicher’s ECM in Munich is the engine behind Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli and Chick Correa. These labels are often thelion kings of classical recording.
We owe the rediscovery of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish refugee in Soviet Russia, to a father-son team in Colchester, England, operating from a mobile recording unit….
More here.
And here.
En francais ici.
In The Critic here.
Naxos isn’t little anymore but it certainly began that way. The wealth of great and worthy repertoire it has produced renders it foremost (along with BIS) in the above-mentioned company.
And you had much to do with this. I continue to enjoy your superb Naxos recordings as conductor of the National Orchestra of Ukraine.
Why don’t big labels make such discoveries? Because they are too busy making money, their mindset is entirely different – not focussed upon the music.
“How little labels changed our world”: ambiguous sentence with opposite meanings. Try ‘small’.
Big labels are answerable to their huge parent-companies – who know nothing about music and whose lawyer & MBA leaders are only concerned with quick-buck profits. Those labels focus on super-stars who can sell product – the music is quite secondary, and so musical discoveries take a backseat to “star” discoveries. So yes indeed, small labels are the saviors of recorded music!