With thanks to Gary T. and apologies for any accidental duplicate postings:
>Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 19:15:36 -0600
>
>Another record crash
>
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> The Lebrecht Weekly
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> Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. [Index]
>
>
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>
> Another record crash
>
> By Norman Lebrecht / June 12, 2006
>
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> A large chunk of masonry fell off the music industry last week when
>Warner shut down its classical operation, throwing 40 artists onto the
>street.
>
> The execution was conducted in the usual way, without the slightest
>consideration for cultural consequences. An empty suit in Hollywood rang a
>tight-run office in London and told them to stop everything and sack the
>team - all except those who will be needed for recycling the backlist as
>supermarket labels and download fodder. No argument was permitted, for such
>elevated decisions are always irrevocable.
>
> The fact that Warner Classics has been profitable in each of the
>past five years and more progressive than its competitors cut no cake with
>a parent corporation that is yoked to floundering AOL and contemplating
>merger with EMI. Grappling with these big deals, chairman Edgar Bronfman
>Jr. had no patience for the prestos and adagios of an offshore accessory
>that contributes barely two percent of pop-music revenues.
>
> The tragic fact of the matter is that giant media players are
>pulling out of minority art, a myopic strategy that gives them no chance of
>tapping the next quirk in public taste or contributing to cultural
>evolution. Warner bought its way into classics just ahead of the Three
>Tenors 1990 boom and scored an eight-million follow-up CD at the Los
>Angeles World Cup. It gobbled up one independent after another - Erato in
>France, Teldec in Germany, Finlandia, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi - and went
>into overproduction along with all the others in the 1990s until the roof
>fell in and the outlet was slimmed down to a single stream of mainstream
>classics. That, too, ha now been deemed surplus to requirements.
>
> Warner's exit leaves just three major labels in the classical racks
>- EMI, Sony-BMG and Deutsche Grammophon/Decca - and much of what they
>produce nowadays cannot be remotely classified as classical.
>
> The brunt of the Warner switch-off is being borne by artists. Senior
>figures like Daniel Barenboim and William Christie took the news with a
>fatalistic shrug, having made enough records over the years to live off
>rolling royalties. But there was no softening the blow for soloists in
>their 20s and 30s who were just starting to make a name - the quicksilver
>Canadian violinist Leila Josefowitz, the formidable Russian pianist Nikolai
>Lugansky, the thoughtful British fiddler Daniel Hope.
>
> The BBC Symphony Orchestra's new era with its Czech chief Jiri
>Belohlavek has been taken off the record with just one Dvorak disc in the
>can; the eclectic Sakari Oramo in Birmingham will not be given another
>chance to exhume obscure British composers such as the intriguing John
>Foulds. Karita Mattila, Susan Graham and Monica Groop are among the singing
>casualties. Anu Tali, an enterprising, stunningly attractive young Estonian
>with her own Nordic Symphony Orchestra, has been thrown on the scrapheap.
>Even by present-day corporate standards, the shutdown was as brutal as it
>gets.
>
> The irony is that Warner Classics, under the thoughtful Matthew
>Cosgrove, was doing almost everything right. Avoiding vapid film tracks,
>tacky crossover projects and sex-bombs who could pout but not play,
>Cosgrove, 45, combined aesthetic sensibility with an eye for market
>opportunity. He had a higher count of living composers than any other
>label, including a million-selling CD of Henryk Gorecki's third symphony
>and the projected complete works of Gyorgy Ligeti (now discontinued).
>
> When Tony Blair visited the Pope this month, the gift he presented
>him was a Warner set of Mozart concertos. When the BBC broadcast
>Barenboim's set of Wagner's Ring in a day over Easter, Cosgrove offered
>free downloads, taking a bigger stride into I-pod delivery than any of his
>plodding rivals. Whatever Bronfman's reasons for axing Warner Classics,
>failure was not one of them.
>
> But then performance, financial or artistic, plays little part in
>the running of the music industry, where the big egos belong to the suits
>upstairs and the artists get by as best they can in a never-ending round of
>executive musical chairs. EMI has just announced a successor to its
>deceptively subtle President of Classics, Richard Lyttelton, who is being
>shoved into early retirement in his mid-50s despite sustaining high profits
>and prestige for almost two decades. Lyttleton, fourth son of a British
>Earl a former Sixties disco owner, got along famously with everyone from
>Simon Rattle to Angela Georghiu to Vanessa-Mae. His one social failure was
>Alain Levy, the humourless chairman of EMI Music and his direct boss, who
>wanted him out.
>
> So Lyttelton has been expensively ousted in favour of Costa
>Pilavachi, a Greek-Canadian of equal conviviality who was best mates with
>Valery Gergiev, Andrea Bocelli and Cecilia Bartoli so long as he was
>President of Decca - that is, until a couple of months ago when he was
>removed in an ego spat by his New York boss, Chris Roberts. Roberts sent a
>Serb from Deutsche Grammophon to run Decca, leaving a highly-paid A&R gap
>at DG which, I understand, is going to be filled by none other than Matthew
>Cosgrove, newly released by Warner. So, when the music stops, all the
>executives have good seats (or payoffs) and it's only the artists that
>suffer.
>
> Meanwhile, the actual production of classics by major labels has
>dwindled to about three-dozen a year and the only way most artists can get
>on record is by paying for it themselves or authorising free downloads.
>That, whatever the soft talk of corporate press releases, is the state of
>play in the music industry of 2006, an industry that is looking more and
>more like the kitchen cabinet of Admiral Doenitz, waiting for a junior
>Allied officer to come along and arrest the fantasists around the table. It
>would be a farce if it wasn't so sad, for the loss is wholly ours.
>
> Classical music used to be the industry's core resource. The Beatles
>could never have developed their sophisticated sound world without the
>symphonic expertise on hand at Abbey Road and most subsequent groups are
>indebted, wittingly or not, to the stern disciplines and mathematical logic
>of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. 'People in the record business understood
>that classics was where we all came from - the basis of what we do,' a
>former head of Sony Europe told me recently. 'We were happy to carry on
>making records in that area, even losing a bit of money. But Wall Street
>didn't like that. If investors see sentiment, they make heads roll.' This
>month's Sony-BMG release sheet consists of movie puffs and crossover - not
>one classical CD. The abolition of Warner Classics is another small step
>towards cultural oblivion.
>
>
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> To be notified of the next Lebrecht article, please email
>mikevincent at scena dot org
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> Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. [Index]
>
>
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> (c) La Scena Musicale 2001-2006
>
>
Teri Noel Towe
Of Counsel
Ganz & Hollinger, P. C.
1394 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10021-0404 USA
212-517-5500 (voice)
212-772-2216 (telefax)
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