Label news: Stutzmann gets record deal
OrchestrasThe veteran Alain Lanceron has signed Nathalie Stutzmann to Warner Classics & Erato.
Her debut recording will be Dvorak with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, out in August.
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Industry: why don’t we get more news coverage? Why aren’t we getting more reviews? Why aren’t we covered in the papers? Where is the attention?
*a bit later*
Industry: PRESS RELEASE: Announcing a massive investment in a brand new and groundbreaking recording of music from [checks notes] 150 years ago which has already been recorded 9 million times and is already available for free to anyone with an internet connected device
Maybe, just maybe, the industry is to blame just a little bit
My instant reaction, too: why not choose something less over-recorded for a debut album? Recording firms *ought* to be asking themselves: WWRvBD? (What would Robert von Bahr, of BIS, do?)
A worthy comment, but only to a certain extent. BIS has just completed a Mahler symphony cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra.
Dvořák’s American Suite is not a composition of his that has been over-recorded.
I do sense that perhaps a Beethoven symphony cycle on the Erato label is in the making during the course of the 2024-2025 Atlanta Symphony season, with the Missa solemnis possibly added, along with the Triple Concerto. Yes, those would be potentially “boring” releases, but if the orchestra has not released a commercial audio recording of the cycle in its history (it looks like only the 9th has been released, under Runnicles once and Shaw perhaps twice), then this projected project would be a bit understandable.
However, a commercial audio recording from the planned concerts for September 26-27, 2024 would be a much more interesting prospect for a release:
Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) Mahler
Symphony No. 6 Shostakovich
Nathalie Stutzmann, music director
Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano
Samuel Hasselhorn, baritone
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
I’m really dying to know what the business case is.
Is there a hometown effect that even if the piece has been recorded to death, enough people want to own or stream recordings by their hometown orchestra that it can be profitable?
Are there buyers and streamers out there who simply eschew old recordings, even if they’re just 10 years old, and if they want to own/listen to the Dvorak 9, then they just go for whatever is the most recent recording?
I also assume at this point orchestras aren’t getting paid much if anything to make recordings because everyone has accepted the reality that physical media sales are dead…unless you’re John Williams or Taylor Swift. So if making the recordings is relatively inexpensive, then maybe who cares what the reptiore is?
OK, smarty-pants – suggest a remedy.
Yes, most youth orchestras do a perfectly fine job with the “New World” Symphony.
The classical music audio recording “industry” is continuing to release many recordings each month, in multiple genres. And I doubt this recording with the Atlanta Symphony represents anything close to a “massive investment,” whatever that might plausibly mean in context. Satire, one might guess.
The most one can expect from a local arts website/newspaper nowadays is some intermittent reviews of the local professional orchestra, assuming that the community even has one.
Reviews of professionally-released classical music audio recordings have been mostly limited to the genre-specific websites and magazines for quite some time now (20 years at least?).
Dvořák’s American Suite has not had that many commercial recordings.
The people who routinely listen to YouTube recordings of orchestral music and do not buy any commercially released audio recordings (CD, download, streaming) of classical music are likely few and far between.
Put bluntly, who gives a shit what Atlanta or Stutzmann has to say about Dvorak?
It’s like announcing that the Morovian Philharmonic in Olomou will record Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
If the unique synergy of the finest regional orchestra incidentally of the American south with a glorious choral pedigree with Robert Shaw and a female French conductor of impressive vocal achievements is in recoding Dvorak, then neither party is even trying.
You could say that of probably 75 percent of new recordings by A-lists soloists, conductors, and orchestras.
I can understand a one-off recording of a Bruckner symphony by Nelsons/Gewandhausorchester, for example, but the posture of recording industry seems to be that everything must be a complete set. I shrug every time there’s a new “complete set” by him announced.
Good news for the Atlanta Symphony and their conductor! Would there typically be underwriting by a third party for a project like this?
This is fairly old news:
https://www.earrelevant.net/2023/11/stutzmann-leads-atlanta-symphony-in-all-dvorak-concert-doubling-as-recording-session-for-warner-classics/
Atlanta has been programming a healthy amount of contemporary music since before that became fashionable; I hope the Warner recordings will be more than Romantic-era war horses. But I’m guessing that the inexplicable reason behind performing all the Beethoven symphonies next season (with the 9th in fall 2025) is so that they can record them for a box set.
For those who may not have followed her illustrious career so far, Ms. Stutzmann already has many discs (as a contralto) on this label. She has long been a musician with compelling interpretations and performances to music’s & her credit.
Interesting. The Atlanta Symphony has about half of their principal positions empty, and very few auditions scheduled.
Factually false re:auditions –
The ASO held TWELVE auditions during this last season, and has just as many slated for next. Quite a feat to schedule so many, if you are aware of what is required to be aligned for one to take place.
Totally boring. One can do so much good with a new recording but original or even merely novel ideas are in very short supply among glitterati conductors. Smaller labels like Hyperion, Dutton, Toccata, or Naxos in its halcyon American Classics days remain far more interesting.
“Original” or “novel” ideas in commercially released recordings of orchestral works (or merely in concerts) today are arguably a key part of some of the problems in orchestral conducting today, if one wants to seek to define them. How about merely sane ideas. “Glitterati” conductors themselves are not anything like the sole area of concern.
Adding the American Suite to a commercial recording of the “New World Symphony” is an apt coupling – it is a bit strange that it has not been done comparatively much at all in the past.
Naxos has long been a major label in terms of the number and variety of its releases.
Having performed it a few times over the years, I have no desire ever to hear or conduct the “American Suite” again–a banal, repetitive work, an appropriate pendant to the glorious and always deeply moving “New World” only in its vague thematic recollections of the larger work. Even led by its most experienced interpreters with the collaboration of a top-line orchestra, I don’t think this would be an added value.
To each their own.
I am not saying that I agree with any or all of the following, but in a review of a commercial recording of the American Suite by the Royal Philharmonic and Antál Dorati on Decca, released in 1985, the reviewer/critic in Gramophone Magazine wrote the following:
“I don’t remember having heard the work before and must say it is quite delightful. The five pieces do show this American influence but, like Dvořák’s other works composed there, his own engaging personality predominates.”
As a counterpoint: I respect Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, but I do not like it much at all.
My position on this new recording by the Atlanta Symphony and its new music director, without having yet heard the recording: I have no problems with any new commercial audio recordings of standard repertoire by major US professional orchestras.
Naxos was and is much more interesting in its releases. The hoary choices under discussion are a sign of tired and unimaginative thinking from management and conductor. This one is a loser. No amount of tendentious pleading is going to change that.
Falletta and Buffalo (on Naxos) are showing how it can, and should, be done.
Are you an alien, bot, or AI? This doesn’t sound remotely like an actual human.
What an odd comment about Naxos in its “halcyon American Classics days.” The label has certainly taken on quite a chunk of international repertoire that most labels would and will not touch, and so its halcyon days started long before the American Classics series. And so it continues. It almost single-handedly broke the monopoly of the major labels and made a great deal of the classicial repertoire available to masses of new listeners, partly through excellent recordings, partly price and partly new distribution outlets and formats, as well as its activities in music education and for libraries. Let’s not forget Naxos has twice been named Label of the Year at the annual Midem awards!
I don’t suppose it would be one of the first three symphonies, which rarely get recorded? (I particularly like #3). Or some of the more obscure tone poems?
Oh boy, a French contralto turned conductor, leading the Atlanta Symphony in Dvorak on records. Enough said.