Some time during the long summer, I bumped into Lang Lang in a radio studio and took a moment to congratulate him on his techno-comm skills. Lang Lang and his works can be found on every medium of electronic transmission invented up to and including last Thursday. He is tweeted, facebooked, i-Googled, B&N-ded and, in all likelihood, apped on an abacus. He has a brilliant website, updated 24/7.

There is one item, however, that he cannot touch. ‘I can talk about all the new ways of spreading music,’ he said, ‘but I can’t mention the i-Pad on air or in the press.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Sony…’ he shrugged.

Stands to reason. The Japanese corporation paid $3 million earlier this year to detach the Chinese star from his long-standing connection to Universal Music and is now in a position to call the shots. Sony has developed its own handbook Reader, a rival to Apple’s triumphant i-Pad. If you’re a Sony artist, you don’t talk about a competitor’s products.

Lang Lang looked a bit uncomfortable about this and I was tempted momentarily to ask if he kept an i-Pad under plain covers. It seems a shame to restrict an artist from using whatever he needs and talking about it wherever he pleases. But then that’s what happens when you take the golden hello.

The corporation owns you body and soul.

And you jump when the men in suits say so.

.

Some time during the long summer, I bumped into Lang Lang in a radio studio and took a moment to congratulate him on his techno-comm skills. Lang Lang and his works can be found on every medium of electronic transmission invented up to and including last Thursday. He is tweeted, facebooked, i-Googled, B&N-ded and, in all likelihood, apped on an abacus. He has a brilliant website, updated 24/7.

There is one item, however, that he cannot touch. ‘I can talk about all the new ways of spreading music,’ he said, ‘but I can’t mention the i-Pad on air or in the press.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Sony…’ he shrugged.

Stands to reason. The Japanese corporation paid $3 million earlier this year to detach the Chinese star from his long-standing connection to Universal Music and is now in a position to call the shots. Sony has developed its own handbook Reader, a rival to Apple’s triumphant i-Pad. If you’re a Sony artist, you don’t talk about a competitor’s products.

Lang Lang looked a bit uncomfortable about this and I was tempted momentarily to ask if he kept an i-Pad under plain covers. It seems a shame to restrict an artist from using whatever he needs and talking about it wherever he pleases. But then that’s what happens when you take the golden hello.

The corporation owns you body and soul.

And you jump when the men in suits say so.

.

Regime change at the leading classical record label stepped up a gear yesterday when Michael Lang, head of Deutsche Grammophon, was ordered to report to his parent company’s German HQ instead of the Universal New York office. This is a small but significant shift.

Lang, an American, was installed at DG as the executive arm of Chris Roberts, president of Universal Classics and Jazz, whose writ reduced the famous label from standard-bearer of classical performance to ambulance chaser of crossover trash. Roberts is leaving the job in October and his structure is being demolished daily beneath him.

Many expected Lang to depart with his master and commander, but the quiet former jazz producer has been given one big chance to put right all that has gone wrong over 15 years. It’s a huge task, but the restoration of geographic primacy will be widely cheered – and not just by the surviving Mutters and Thielemanns on the roster.

One of the world’s leading conductors told me the other day of the hostility he faced from Roberts & Co. ‘I felt they hated conductors. Anything I suggested was greeted with a sigh and a frown. I was a time-waster for them. We were never going to achieve anything together.’

That deadly ambience has changed with the return of Costa Pilavachi in a presiding A&R role. Pilavachi was removed as head of Decca when Roberts decided to demolish the London-based label. he went on to become head of EMI Classics, fell out with its hedge-fund owners and has now returned in a peacemaking role to revivify the Roberts wasteland. 

Much will need to be done before Deutsche Grammophon can regain its rightful historic position as pacemaker in the classical music industry, and Pilavachi has a long way to go before he gains the confidence of its devoted German staff. Many of them are avid readers of Slipped Disc, anxious to know what’s will hit them next.

Regime change at the leading classical record label stepped up a gear yesterday when Michael Lang, head of Deutsche Grammophon, was ordered to report to his parent company’s German HQ instead of the Universal New York office. This is a small but significant shift.

Lang, an American, was installed at DG as the executive arm of Chris Roberts, president of Universal Classics and Jazz, whose writ reduced the famous label from standard-bearer of classical performance to ambulance chaser of crossover trash. Roberts is leaving the job in October and his structure is being demolished daily beneath him.

Many expected Lang to depart with his master and commander, but the quiet former jazz producer has been given one big chance to put right all that has gone wrong over 15 years. It’s a huge task, but the restoration of geographic primacy will be widely cheered – and not just by the surviving Mutters and Thielemanns on the roster.

One of the world’s leading conductors told me the other day of the hostility he faced from Roberts & Co. ‘I felt they hated conductors. Anything I suggested was greeted with a sigh and a frown. I was a time-waster for them. We were never going to achieve anything together.’

That deadly ambience has changed with the return of Costa Pilavachi in a presiding A&R role. Pilavachi was removed as head of Decca when Roberts decided to demolish the London-based label. he went on to become head of EMI Classics, fell out with its hedge-fund owners and has now returned in a peacemaking role to revivify the Roberts wasteland. 

Much will need to be done before Deutsche Grammophon can regain its rightful historic position as pacemaker in the classical music industry, and Pilavachi has a long way to go before he gains the confidence of its devoted German staff. Many of them are avid readers of Slipped Disc, anxious to know what’s will hit them next.

No connection to the Paris trial of its former bosses, Universal Music Group has finally moved today to get rid of its weapons of mass classical destruction.

Universal Classics and Jazz, a hybrid construction, is to be shaken down from the top. Its president, Chris Roberts, is expected to leave today ‘to pursue other interests’ (the official line goes) and the dumbing-down policies of the last 15 years are to be reversed.

They didn’t exactly cheer at Deutsche Grammophon HQ when the news of Roberts’ departure was announced at lunchtime, but the wave of satisfaction could be felt three countries away.

Roberts, imposing his lowbrow tastes on a high-class business, demolished Decca and meddled constantly in DG, appointing sucessive label chiefs and obsessively spying on them (as I recounted in The Life and Death of Classical Music). His crossover disasters cost the label a fortune and much of its hard-won credibility.

Market share soared as a result of his dumbing down but core customers deserted and the labels lost their allure. Lang Lang quit in disgust and other prestigious names are said to be on the brink of rupture.

Once Roberts departs – I write these words with trepidation since he’s a corporate animal who has repeatedly dodged the chop – reconstruction can begin. New appointments will follow in the next few days.

For Deutsche Grammophon, this is a Berlin Wall moment – a historic chance to reinvent itself as an entity of acknowledged integrity. It’s drinks all round at the yellow label tonight. 

No connection to the Paris trial of its former bosses, Universal Music Group has finally moved today to get rid of its weapons of mass classical destruction.

Universal Classics and Jazz, a hybrid construction, is to be shaken down from the top. Its president, Chris Roberts, is expected to leave today ‘to pursue other interests’ (the official line goes) and the dumbing-down policies of the last 15 years are to be reversed.

They didn’t exactly cheer at Deutsche Grammophon HQ when the news of Roberts’ departure was announced at lunchtime, but the wave of satisfaction could be felt three countries away.

Roberts, imposing his lowbrow tastes on a high-class business, demolished Decca and meddled constantly in DG, appointing sucessive label chiefs and obsessively spying on them (as I recounted in The Life and Death of Classical Music). His crossover disasters cost the label a fortune and much of its hard-won credibility.

Market share soared as a result of his dumbing down but core customers deserted and the labels lost their allure. Lang Lang quit in disgust and other prestigious names are said to be on the brink of rupture.

Once Roberts departs – I write these words with trepidation since he’s a corporate animal who has repeatedly dodged the chop – reconstruction can begin. New appointments will follow in the next few days.

For Deutsche Grammophon, this is a Berlin Wall moment – a historic chance to reinvent itself as an entity of acknowledged integrity. It’s drinks all round at the yellow label tonight. 

My first university lecture in Sociology, long ago, dealt with the official abuse of data and quoted Mark Twain’s famous aphorism (which he attributed dubiously to Benjamin Disraeli): ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics’.

The account of UK classical record sales in 2009 from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) calls that admonition gloomily to mind. If you believe the BPI, two Universal labels now command more than half the UK market. Deutsche Grammophon and Decca have a combined 58 percent share, way ahead of plummeting rival EMI, which is down to 9.2%.

But that depends what you call ‘classical’. The BPI counts as classical pretty much anything that comes its way from major classical labels – including Katherine Jenkins’ pop smooch, TV talent show winners, Bryn Terfel singing Andrew Lloyd Webber, Il Divo, Sarah Brightman and the Band of the Coldstream Guards. All a label has to do is label a title Now That’s What I Call Classical, and into the stats it goes.

The real market is rather different. While DG and tacked-on Decca have gone on an all-out grab for overnight sensations, EMI Classics has reclaimed the classical high ground with a list that is free of gimmicks and, at times, ear-prickingly original. It has a raft of new stars in Natalie Dessay, Kate Royal and Philippe Jaroussky and it is signing them young and longterm. It is, in other words, behaving like a classical label.

So why has it lost market share? Fact: it hasn’t. On the classical side, EMI’s figures are looking so good that (I gather) parent hedge fund Terra Firma has given the go-ahead for further signings. There is a discernable bounce feeling at EMI, and that doesn’t come from trailing in the charts.

Overall, consumer habits are changing and the BPI-rated classical share of a shrinking UK market is down to just over 3 percent, little more a quarter of where it stood in the 1990s CD boom. But making a living in classical music is about building audience loyalty. You don’t get that from TV constests, from Andre Rieu or even from Kathleen Jenkins sings for our boys in Afghanistan. There are many reasons why Lang Lang quit Deutsche Grammophon, but one of them is that its former prestige as a classical label no longer counts for much.

The Sony label, which paid $3 million to snatch Lang Lang from Deutsche Grammophon a few weeks ago, has swooped again to sign the violinist Ray Chen, winner of the latest Queen Elisabeth competition in Belgium.

Chen, 21, was born in Taiwan, raised in Australia and schooled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He is represented by the same CAMI management as Lang Lang and will play a limelight concert at the opening of the World expo in Shanghai, mainland China, this summer – much as Lang Lang did at the Olympics.

Ray Chen is, by all accounts, a highly promising young artist. But his signing confirms the general direction of Sony’s classical strategy. A label that shed all of its conductors and all but handful of instrumentalists is now headlined by Lang Lang, Yo Yo Ma and Ray Chen, three artists from the same country – which is the market the Japanese label is pitching for.

In a signing-day statement Ray Chen said: “I am very excited to become a Sony Classical artist and I am looking forward to this wonderful collaboration. Our joint mission is to capture the excitement, passion, and life in a performance of the finest quality and to bring them to the audiences worldwide”.

It has been a busy winter, with artists rushing from one team to another searching for stability. The headline moves were Lang Lang and Dudamel. Here are some more:

Artist                      From                              To

Lang Lang               DG                                 Sony

The Dude                A/Holt                             VW Mgement

Edward Gardner      IMG Artists                      A/Holt

Andreas Scholl       H/Mundi                           Decca

Alexandre Tharaud  H/Mundi                           Virgin Classics

Elizabeth Watts     Sony                                H/Mundi

Kazushi Ono          IMG Artists                       VW Mgement

Simone Dinnerstein Telarc                              Sony

Yundi Li                  DG                                  EMI

Aled Jones                                                     Novello

Jean-Guihen Queyras                                     Opus-3 Artists

Gerald Barry           OUP                                Schott

Ingrid Fliter              H/Parrott                         Intermusica

Jan Vogler                                                     IMG Artists

Feel free to send in any more you may know about.

One of the busiest events on London’s South Bank Centre next year will be a 10-day residency by the Chinese pianist in May 2011 in which children from all over the country are summoned to play.

‘We’ve inspired 40 million kids to play the piano in China,’ Lang Lang is quoted as saying, ‘now let’s get started here’. The plan is to wheel in an army of keyboard instruments for any young person to tinkle, climaxing in a massed finale when Lang Lang’s chosen talents get to make their Royal Festival Hall debut.

This is a nicely timed extension of last year’s placement of old pianos on London street corners, a return of the old joanna to the alleys of Bermondsey. But it is also a shrewd advancement of the Lang Lang brand, not just as big-buck international superstar but as an educator and role model to a rising generation that is running low on heroes.

Unlike sportsmen and rock stars, Lang Lang is untouched by sleaze and drugs. What you see is what you get – a vibrant young player who makes the piano sound the way he wants. There may be some backstage chicanery – like the pre-recorded track that he mimed to at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony – but there is no mistaking the urgency of his music making, or his desire to share it with as many people as possible.

Whether by chance or divine irony, the climax of the Lang Lang extravaganza will coincide on the South Bank with the culmination of another residency – by Maurizio Pollini, a pianist who is Lang Lang’s opposite in almost every respect. Introspective where Lang Lang is extravert, awkward and inhibited on stage, the Italian projects an altogether antipodal form of intensity, an inward contemplation that reminds one more of prayer than player. 

The contrast promises to be one of the most extreme dichotomies of piano playing since Mozart took on Clementi and had to settle for a split result.

No sooner had I broken the Chinese pianist’s label switch on Bloomberg than Google flashed up his new deal with Bombardier, makers of Lear jets as its brand ambassador for 2010. ‘Flying on Bombardier business jets allows me to reach audiences worldwide faster, well-rested and focussed,’ explained Lang Lang. So I guess we won’t be bumping into him again in the Easyjet departure lounge.

Before these coups, Lang Lang was in Davos last week, lecturing world and business leaders on ‘enrichment through music’. The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thought he had ‘nothing very much to say’. More likely there was nothing much he wanted to say as brand Lang Lang builds its global reach. The pity of it was the his presence at Davos rather eclipsed that of Gabriela Montero, the Venezuelan wonder whose improvisatory pianism presented a real lesson for world leaders on how to play their way out of recession.

So what’s driving Lang Lang? Setting aside 21st century greed-is-good theology, people who know him well tell me he wants to be taken seriously. At DG, he did not feel that top brass gave him the respect they showed to Argerich, Pollini and Zimmerman – unsurprising, given the length and depth of their achievements, but Lang Lang at 27 is a man in a hurry to be top pianist. At Sony he will find little competition, except from the semi-retired Murray Perahia. 

The refreshing aspect of Lang Lang is that he has no hidden agenda. Next time I see him, if I ask him what went down at DG, he’ll be open, frank and engagingly undiplomatic. Buttoned-up Sony, who are refusing to comment on the deal, should be aware that their new catch is dynamite in more ways than they perhaps anticipated.  

The BBC Proms have ended with another set of record attendances, five percent up overall and 87 percent averages at the Royal Albert Hall, night after night over eight weeks.

More encouraging still, 37,000 attenders were first-timers and there was a sharp rise in the number of under-16s in the hall. Several of the new-music nights were sell-outs

Following on good returns from Salzburg and Glyndebourne, the classical audience appears to be holding steady and even increasing during the recession – at least in those festivals where innovation weights just as heavily as tradition.

The full BBC press release follows: