There were more than a hundred tourists milling outside the studios in the noonday rain, a few minutes ago. The magnetism of the place is indisputable and, though the wise heads at Terra Firma, are talking of marketing an Abbey Road brand, once the place is closed to musical activity there will be nothing left to attract the crowds.
What draws people to Abbey Road is the cover of the Beatles album that they mimic in posed foursomes on the famous zebra crossing. But they are also drawn by the wisp of a chance of seeing a celebrated musician arriving for a session. When the music stops, Abbey Road will revert to real estate and the tourists will find another site for souvenir shots.
The latest reports have it that the National Trust is considering buying the site, adding it to the Liverpool boyhood homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon that it already owns. The Sun newspaper – which this morning reports us steaming to war with Argentina – is backing DJ Chris Evans’ campaign to save Abbey Road. The Daily Mail – not yet fully mobilised – opposes any intervention.
The optimum solution is a sale that would convert the building into a national House of Music – part museum, part venue for live performance. Even a hedge fund analyst (and I’ve met a few) ought to see the potential there for rights ownership and profit.
News that the hedge-trimmers who own EMI are putting the Abbey Road studios up for sale comes as no surprise round here. Living round the corner, as I do, I have seen a thinning of the trail of musicians making their Monday morning slog to work, and the great orchestral pantechnicons are rarely seen nowadays in the courtyard.
It’s not just to do with the shrinking record industry. Many of the facilities provided by Abbey Road can now be emulated on a laptop in a musician’s back-bedroom. The ceremony of going to studio is no longer a necessity of musical life.
Still, I’ll be sorry to see it go. I used to drop in to the canteen to catch up with musicians between sessions and always appreciated the informality of the place. It was not always so. Old-timers told me they used to get turned away by the doorman if they turned up for a session without jacket and tie. The grand old days of Elgar conducting Land of Hope and Glory are preserved on Youtube for all to share.
The outer wall of the studio complex attracts hundreds of tourists every day, all years round, many of them leaving grafitti that declare their love for the Beatles, who enshrined the house in legend.
What will number 3 Abbey Road fetch on the property market? The way prices are heating up round here, I’d guess £30-40 million.
Not a bad return on the 1929 purchase price of £100,000, but nowhere near the £120 million that Terra Firma need to raise by June to service a Citibank loan – and when the sale boards go up they will offer a sorry symbol of an industry that is coming to an end.
Hats off to a pair of chums who start the week with a smart career move.
Peter Alward has become director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, carefully stepping over a hole where three million Euros used to be before his predecessor made off with it; and, even more carefully, recalibrating the balance of power between the founder’s widow, Eliette von Karajan, and its chief conductor, Simon Rattle.
Both know that Passion Pete is not a man to be underestimated. At EMI Classics, which he ran for a decade before the company was sold to hedge-trimmers, he was the only classical label boss to develop a new artists line – an initiative which introduced such young comets as Ian Bostridge, Thomas Ades, Alban Gerhardt, the Belcea quartet, Ittai Shapiro and Alisa Weilerstein. He was also very good at saying No – and meaning it – to big beasts of the podium. Salzburg is in for a good time.
Also on the up is composer John Woolrich, who is about to be named director of Dartington International Festival and Summer School in the rolling hills of Devon. Dartington has been run for the past 11 years by the ingenious Gavin Henderson, who kept spirits high and finances in order through one of the most prestigious contacts book in the kingdom. It was at Dartington that Piotr Anderszewski made his conducting debut and I achieved a rare concert billing in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw.
John W has a tough act to follow, but he beat off a very strong shortlist and he is full of ideas. Those hills are going to ring with a remarkable diversity of sounds.
Hats off to a pair of chums who start the week with a smart career move.
Peter Alward has become director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, carefully stepping over a hole where three million Euros used to be before his predecessor made off with it; and, even more carefully, recalibrating the balance of power between the founder’s widow, Eliette von Karajan, and its chief conductor, Simon Rattle.
Both know that Passion Pete is not a man to be underestimated. At EMI Classics, which he ran for a decade before the company was sold to hedge-trimmers, he was the only classical label boss to develop a new artists line – an initiative which introduced such young comets as Ian Bostridge, Thomas Ades, Alban Gerhardt, the Belcea quartet, Ittai Shapiro and Alisa Weilerstein. He was also very good at saying No – and meaning it – to big beasts of the podium. Salzburg is in for a good time.
Also on the up is composer John Woolrich, who is about to be named director of Dartington International Festival and Summer School in the rolling hills of Devon. Dartington has been run for the past 11 years by the ingenious Gavin Henderson, who kept spirits high and finances in order through one of the most prestigious contacts book in the kingdom. It was at Dartington that Piotr Anderszewski made his conducting debut and I achieved a rare concert billing in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw.
John W has a tough act to follow, but he beat off a very strong shortlist and he is full of ideas. Those hills are going to ring with a remarkable diversity of sounds.
This just in from Eric Dingman, president of EMI Classics:
I’d like to add some points for the discussion…
Perhaps useful to remember that the % swings dramatically in years when major Classic releases happen because of the relative small size of classics %-wise in USA. This indicates that there can be broader interest than the prevailing 2 – 2.5%
South Korea’s reputed 18% classics share of sales relates to the physical product sales which in SK are now only 50% of total music sales; within digital sales classics in SK is almost 0% – at total effective market share for Classics of 9% so opportunity to get ‘digital’!
The retail challenge for Classics (like that for Jazz) is that with a larger number of titles each selling smaller quantities versus same for Pop, Classics either needs a higher price to generate similar return per square metre of retail shelf space or it looses its shelf space first in favour of titles that turn faster & generate more revenue for the retailer (Pop, Films, Games).
Over the past 10 years as Classics prices reduced to drive sales (campaigning, introduction of more budget series), the margins the genre offers retailers has progressively declined and thus accelerated this negative trend. Good news is that there has been strong steady growth of digital and home delivery (physical) for Classics in most major markets; Amazon is now world’s largest buyer of Classical music, followed by iTunes.
Also on the positive side – and based on the belief that there is no shortage of great classical talent, and that music lovers can still be ‘won over’ to classics, I see the opportunity as:
a) labels, & venues making better, more effective connections to classical music lovers (eg which channels, marketing works best in these changing circumstances); and
b) creative, relevant and eye catching ways to introduce ‘true’ classical artists and repertoire to new audiences (versus assuming they will only respond to ‘cross-over) or thinking these new fans will simply walk into the opera house on their own.
To me the 10,000 people in Trafalgar Square last July for ROH’s La traviata on the BP Big Screen is great example of both !
Eric
NL adds: It’s late at night so I won’t append a commentary, but Eric has added a good measure of clarity to the debate and I’ll be happy to return to it as comments continue to come in.
The most pleasing aspect of Vilde Frang on first sight is her resistance to typecasting. On the eve of an international record launch, with hedge funds rising and falling on her success or failure, the Norwegian violinist has held out against makeover pressure.
She appears with rare wholesomeness in harvest-ready wheaten hair that falls below her shoulders and an unshadowed hint of plumpness in her cheeks. Before she plays a note, we know there is nothing affected about this artist.
Upstairs at London’s Foyles bookshop, for a browser audience unprepared for rigour at the end of a winter’s working day, she delivers Bartók’s sonata for solo violin with prodigious intensity, missing some of its world-weary humour but compensating with a brisk empathy for its rural song fragments. Written for Yehudi Menuhin by the cancer-stricken composer in American exile, the sonata is tough on fingers and intellect, half an hour long. The attention was unbroken by a single cough.
In a classical recital hall, Frang would have been applauded for courage and accomplishment, and punctuated by tubercular outbursts between movements. In a bookstore, she achieved communication with people unprepared for what she played.
These are promising signs for a young woman of 23, at the start of her career. Comparisons and antecedents can be eliminated. Although mentored by Anne-Sophie Mutter from the age of 10 with financial support and the loan of a French instrument, Frang has nothing like the Mercedes-smooth sound of her patron, nor does she present herself for any kind of catwalk. She looks more like a folk singer than a classical star, and that’s no bad thing.
What we see is what we hear – an organic artist, unmoulded by the music industry, ready to go wherever her gift may lead, and lacking in all pretension. Her debut recording of Prokofiev and Sibelius violin concertos is out this month.
