'Purely classical' chart begins chez Gramophone

BBC news has a story that a new top record chart for 'purely' classical music (as opposed to Katherine Jenkins singing Leonard Cohen and calling it a 'sacred aria') is being launched in Gramophone's March edition and will be updated weekly on their website. (More from Tommy Pearson on the subject here.)

So how useful is this? Should they have done it years ago? Is this an industry that takes 40 years to cotton on to a good idea, in a magazine named after a machine that all but vanished 20 years ago? But now that it is on its way - with the late Richard Hickox doing well - is it actually of any positive value whatsoever? I am put in mind of the book trade, which is desperately skewed by several big, depressing factors that are usually nothing to do with quality but more about who is willing to spend money on what. (If I start telling you what these factors are, though - and how pernicious, how poisonous and how ought-to-be-illegal - someone will tell me to stop being a whingeing author. So you'll just have to take my word for it.)

In short: the discs that become 'bestsellers' are almost certainly going to be those on which the most money is spent in terms of promotion. Promotion means that the public will know something exists (nobody will buy anything if they don't know it's there). The CDs will then bowl on up the chart, and will sell more. Or are we classical aficionados more independent-minded than crossover and pop flock-followers? What do you think, folks?

Alfred takes the cake

Caught the very beginning last night of Brendel in Recital on BBC2 - Haydn, played with magic, detail and profound empathy - but it was getting on for midnight, way past my bedtime. The recital from Snape Maltings, according to the introduction filmed at the concert, showed Brendel at 70, about to embark on a world concert tour. Problem: today Brendel is 77 and retiring; the historical nature of the film should really have been pointed out beforehand. There must be a fair number of people googling Brendel's forthcoming world concert tour this morning...

You can't get any of this on BBC iPlayer, but the documentary, Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask, is snug on Youtube, so here is some of it.

Decca: the obituary?

As I feared...the imminent death of Decca, as reported by Norman Lebrecht. He says:

Still, no point waxing nostalgic. Lots of firms are going to the wall, taking their traditions to oblivion. Decca joins a long queue at the morgue. The regret is that what dies with Decca is more than just a label – it is the very concept of label as a mark of character, a name that united artists and listeners in the search for a particular quality. The idea of label defined the record industry. It is the strategic antithesis of sterile agglomerates like Universal.

Without labels, artists spin off to Starbucks, listeners lose interest and the remnants of the record business go rummaging in dumpbins. Even a number-one classical hit barely shifts 500 copies a week, not enough to support an executive’s pension fund. It’s the end of the line for Decca, the last waltz in a bare-walled studio of dreams."

Far be it from me to 'wax nostalgic' - but this was the label of the glory days, the home of Georg Solti, the label that - largely thanks to the magic ears and brilliant intuition of Christopher Raeburn - helped to build the recorded careers of Cecilia Bartoli and Andras Schiff, among others. This was the label of Benjamin Britten, Kathleen Ferrier, Pavarotti, not to mention his two friends. This was also the label that brought us the Entartete Musik series, spearheaded by producer Michael Haas, encompassing Schreker, Krenek, Braunfels, K/g and many more - a library of great historical value since most of those works are not available to hear elsewhere. This was the label of vision, of class, of...

So, where are the Raeburns and Haases of today? Christopher has retired; Michael divides his time between curating exhibitions in Vienna and producing Opera Rara's discs. If there are any brilliant people left in the recording industry, they are having trouble making their presence felt because the core values are vanishing from the big companies. For instance, in his article Norman complains about the "all-purpose" engineering of Julia Fischer's latest disc on Decca, which he feels does her no favours. Sound quality does matter to the record-downloading public, but what if a company boss does not know that, can't hear the difference and doesn't see the point of spending money on it?

Here in the hackworld, we knew something was going wrong about 20 years ago when a major label (not Decca) held a press conference that included a speech by their new marketing chap, who'd just joined them from a food company and started declaring to a roomful of the most knowledgeable critics in the British capital how amazed he was to learn that Tchaikovsky was gay, so now they were going to develop a 'Tchaikovsky concept' in which... well, if the 'concept' ever took wing, it was quickly buried; but generally speaking the vision began to leave the industry when it chose people whose presumably considerable expertise in accountacy, sales and marketing nevertheless did not extend to a profound empathy with classical music and its market. I am no marketing guru, but it looks like a no-brainer to me: how can you sell anything successfully if you haven't a clue what it's about?

Smaller labels such as Bis, harmonia mundi, Hyperion and some of the artist-led labels like LSO Live, Onyx and Avie, are still more than afloat today largely because they know what they're doing. As Sir Alan Sugar might say, they understand their product. If you don't understand your product, you end up like that Apprentice candidate who was trying to sell expensive day-rents of his red Ferrari in Portobello Road Market - fired. Decca, you're...

STOP PRESS for Brendel fans

There is an actual documentary about Alfred Brendel on BBC2 tonight, at 11.20pm (not exactly prime-time but we can always set the video if we can work out how to use it). 'Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask' follows the great pianist through two years, during which he works with such artists as Simon Rattle and Matthias Goerne, and explores the influences that shaped his life and musicianship. He's also featured in The Culture Show at 10pm - which has extra culture on it today, including our beloved Felix and his birthday. Here, apparently Brendel reveals a fondness for the films of Bunuel.

I don't know yet whether the documentary will be available on the BBC iPlayer after tonight, but if it is then I will link to it here.

Mendelssohn is 200!

It's Mendelssohn day! Over at BBCR3 Felixcitations I have borrowed the JDCMB Cyberposhplace and the Virtualvintagechampers and Felix is holding a party, which the virtualcybercontrollers are providing free of charge on condition that we are allowed to see his trans-spiritual-dimensional guest-list in advance. UPDATE: The post is now up, and open for suggestions of who else he could ask. Drop in for some cyberbubble!

Meanwhile, here are three musicians who should definitely be there: Arthur Rubinstein, Gregor Piatigorsky and Jascha Heifetz. Turn up the sound now and wallow in their glorious playing of the first movement of the D minor piano trio.

(Apropos de Heifetz, yesterday was his birthday. It was also Fritz Kreisler's. I am vaguely pondering what possible astrological connection there could be between the two greatest geniuses of 20th-century violin playing and, um, Groundhog Day.)