by Allan Kozinn
Toward the end of last summer, it dawned on the executives at most of this country's major record labels that their third-quarter earnings reports were going to be even more dismal than the first two and that the end of the proverbial tunnel was not getting any closer.
Everything was going wrong: The poly vinyl chloride used to make discs was growing more expensive, artists were demanding higher and higher fees, foreign recording projects were becoming un conscionably costly as the dollar sank in value abroad, and with retail prices climbing steadily, it seemed that nobody was buying records anymore.
One particularly bleak day in Au gust, a public relations spokesman for one of the large classical labels stared blankly out his office window and told me, "You know, we haven't had a year this bad since the Depression. I'm not sure we can afford to keep making records." This was several weeks before the press, tipped off by rounds of firings, began to report that all was not well with the record world, and at that point, the official word was that all was well-or at least no worse than could be expected, given the prevailing economic situation.
Certainly, when public relations hyper bole was flung, it was of a more positive kind, especially in classical precincts, where sales are so embarrassingly low in comparison with pop sales that spokes men routinely duck quoting actual figures.
Within a month, most labels had done some obvious belt-tightening. It seemed at first that the lion's share of firings took place at the pop labels. At Columbia, for instance, it was claimed early on that only a few secretaries had lost their jobs on the classical floors. But as the CBS firings continued sporadically throughout the fall, even Marvin Saines, vice president of U.S. Masterworks, was shown the door. About this step Columbia's new chief of staff, Simon Schmidt, would say only that "he was a good, knowledgeable man. There was nothing wrong with him. It was just a question of building what I felt the organization required." Everyone else at Masterworks sat tight, unable to discuss plans for any thing ranging from Mengelberg reissues on Odyssey to the release dates of the first CBS digital discs, originally set for January.
Probably most distressing for veteran industry-watchers was the dismissal at year's end of Teresa Sterne, for a decade and a half the driving force be hind the adventuresome Nonesuch la bel. Even as executives of Elektra /Asylum, the parent company and itself part of the Warner Communications conglomerate, handed "Lady Nonesuch" her walking papers and abruptly canceled all her recording plans, they assured the press that they envisioned a bright future for the label.
Those in the business who man aged to keep their jobs found that every thing from the ordering of promotional LPs to the budgeting of major projects was being more closely scrutinized. At RCA Red Seal, the severest blow was the cancellation of the scheduled recording of Ponchielli's La Gioconda on the eve of the sessions, sacrificing an opportunity to take promotional advantage of the San Francisco Opera's worldwide telecast of the work last September-just the sort of free potential sales boost record companies look for in planning such ventures.
Originally, RCA estimated that recording Gioconda in London would cost $195,000, and the producers knew they could come up with another $25,000 to cover emergencies. Well, the emergencies were more than RCA had banked on. In the weeks before the sessions were to begin, the British musicians' union voted itself a 25% rate hike.
Chorus prices went up, too. Negotiations with principal singers moved slowly be cause RCA was intent on casting every leading role with a major name (Scotto, Domingo, Troyanos, Milnes), and these performers wanted healthy fees. Some of them were involved in European festival performances, which meant that RCA would be obliged to pay multiple transportation expenses (including, of course, limousines to and from the airports) to shuttle them between their stage dates and the fourteen scheduled recording sessions. And with all these expenses to be paid in British pounds but billed to the American company in dollars, every time the dollar dropped a point on the international exchange market, the production became several thou sand dollars more expensive. By the time RCA balked, the cost of recording alone-that is, without pressing, artwork, librettos, packaging, and marketing was estimated at $300,000, more than 50% above the first estimate. And, as the prospective producer put it, "If I were going to spend that much of RCA's money, it would have to be for a hell of a lot better work than La Gioconda." Meanwhile, Columbia had issued a list of 1979-80 releases [see HF, September 1979] that made it look as if the halls at Masterworks were paved with gold. But cynics pointed out that much of the material on the list was already in the can, some of it several years old. And others wondered if the cancellation of what could have been the prestige project of the year, the Boulez/Paris Opera Lulu, the first truly complete performance of Berg's opera, was related directly to financial setbacks. After all, Columbia's explanation that Lulu had to be dropped because Universal, the publisher of the score, would not guarantee the label could release the recording looked pretty silly when Deutsche Grammophon stepped in and saved the project. [DG's recording was reviewed in the March issue.] Oddly enough, Columbia's story survives close examination. The label had been planning the project for two years, hoping to record the opera be tween two Paris performances last February and have it in the stores by April.
At the last minute, it was ascertained that Universal did not actually own the rights Columbia was hoping to buy from it and could not guarantee that the Berg estate, which had unsuccessfully tried to enjoin the Paris Opera from performing the work, would not sue to prevent distribution. Columbia backed out. DG learned of this and agreed to Universal's terms, recording the work without a firm guarantee that it would be free for release.
Being better versed in the intricacies of Viennese musical politics than Columbia, DG was able to obtain the permission of the Berg estate after all. Nobody will talk about the details-but don't be surprised if a few new LPs of music by a certain older living Austrian composer who was instrumental in the arrangements turn up in the DG catalog soon.
While all this operatic juggling was going on, EMI, which owns Angel/ Seraphim here and does a huge volume of classical business worldwide, began negotiating the sale of its music division, first with Gulf & Western/Paramount and finally with Thorn Electrical Indus tries, Ltd. And though it was widely suspected that British Decca, which markets London, Stereo Treasury, Argo, and L'Oiseau-Lyre among other labels here, was having financial difficulties, no one there would admit that the company was for sale until it was announced on October 30 that Decca / London would be acquired by Polygram. Such a fattening of the Dutch-German giant was symbolic: DG and Philips, both of them Polygram labels, seemed to be the only classical record operations voicing no complaints during the fall. So, while most of the public lamentations about recession in the record business came from producers of rock and disco LPs who were understandably depressed that nothing comparable to Saturday Night Fever and Grease had hit the bins in 1979, it was apparent that classical labels too were in a state of flux.
Yet positive notes were also sounded. Spokesmen for several classical labels argued compellingly that sales were steady and that their business was simply not as vulnerable as pop music to The mix of increasing expenses, changing sales patterns, mergers, and new technologies suggests several possible scenarios for the Eighties, the vagaries of trends or to the pinch of inflation. First, they pointed out, pop and classical buyers were entirely different animals: The classical buyer was, statistically, older and more affluent, with more mature (meaning less radically changeable) musical tastes and with the cash (or credit) available to cater to those tastes. He was also depicted as less impulsive, one who planned purchases to fill gaps in his permanent library--an assertion borne out by the steady sales of fifteen- and twenty-year-old catalog items, particularly in opera.
Furthermore, company spokes men insisted, the growth of digital recording was pumping new life into the business by piquing the curiosity of regular customers and bringing into stores audiophiles contemplating their first classical purchases because of the promise of state-of-the-art sonics. As an example, companies point to the Robert Shaw/Atlanta Symphony Firebird on Telarc, reported to have sold 75,000 copies in only a few months, without benefit of a superstar conductor, a top-five orchestra, or a major-label marketing push.
A trump card is what the companies call crossover albums. Crossovers are recordings of varying seriousness that appeal not only to a reasonably large segment of the established classical market, but to people marginally interested in classics. These projects are regarded as attractive because they are usually produced at little cost and sell quickly and in large quantities, generating income that can be used to cover the deficits left by opera and symphony recordings, which often take several years to pay for themselves.
An example is the Claude Bolling/ Jean-Pierre Rampal Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. A Columbia Records computer printout of early October 1979 lists thirty-five current Masterworks LPs that had sold, altogether, 820,563 units since their release. Of that total, the Rampal/ Bolling disc accounted for more than 50%, with 419,957 copies since 1975.
(Not listed on this printout is Wendy [Walter] Carlos' "Switched-on-Bach," which sold 400,000 copies in its first year [1968-69] and has since gone over a mil lion.) Over the last ten years, crossover albums have included such shows as A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd; such unashamedly popsy discs as James Gal way's "Annie's Song," the Yehudi Menuhin/Stephane Grappelli "Tea for Two," and the Beverly Sills/Sherrill Milnes "Up in Central Park"; operatic superstars singing spirituals; Koto ensembles playing Mozart, Handel, and Vivaldi; and synthesists tackling every thing from Bach to Stravinsky (with varying degrees of sophistication). At any rate, the percentage of crossovers to "straight" classical releases is higher now than it has ever been.
Clearly, this complex mix of in creasing expenses, changing sales patterns, corporate mergers, and new technologies suggests several possible scenarios for the classical record business in the Eighties. As with any series of predictions, some distinct possibilities may contradict others. Perhaps the best approach is to isolate and extend recent trends one by one, letting the contradictions fall where they may.
Let's begin with symphonic recording. It has for some time been significantly less expensive to record an orchestral work in Britain than in North America. Even taking the recent British rate hike into account, such a recording can cost as little as $15,000 to $20,000 in London; higher session base rates, the American Federation of Musicians' rule that each three-hour session may yield no more than forty-five recorded minutes in the final product, that each session hour may yield no more than fifteen recorded minutes, and a list of required extras (fees for stagehands and for players not needed for the work at hand, for instance) have pushed the cost of a com parable project in the States to between $45,000 and $60,000. Yet, while American labels are increasingly shifting their gaze to London, those in Europe have approached the American big five and a handful of other orchestras. We see RCA relinquishing its hold on the Philadelphia Orchestra, with its Philadelphia releases cut from eight to four LPs a year, and EMI moving in. Boston has gone from RCA to DG and thence to DG's sister label Philips. Chicago, on the RCA roster until Solti took over, now records for just about everyone, though mainly
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for DG and London. Cleveland, exclusively in the CBS camp during the Szell years, has been doing most of its work for London since Maazel became music director in 1972. And London will be doing some recording with the New York Philharmonic now that Mehta is on the podium.
To the consumer, all of this label shuffling may seem to mean only that the best tradition of American orchestral playing will continue to be available on disc, and in superior, if slightly more ex pensive, European pressings. But what will become of our domestic companies' catalogs? Instead of giving us recordings of our best orchestras led by their principal conductors, the American labels are giving us documents of their pet artists' guest-conducting stints with British orchestras. Have the a&r men here forgot ten that to survive it is necessary to keep the catalogs fresh with performances that have a distinctive quality that will make people want to buy them five or ten years hence? Have they forgotten that the source of this quality is a special communicative bond between a conductor and the orchestra with which he works regularly? No, they haven't forgotten. But in reconciling their artistic philosophies with the financial strictures placed on them by the unions and by their own corporate accounting departments, they have arrived-through conviction or convenience-at the position that buyers are no longer interested in orchestras, only in conductors and works. In other words, forget all that stuff about the Chicago and Philadelphia sound-this is the age of jet-set personalities. After all, some company spokesmen have been heard to argue, the world median level of performance is pretty high these days, so if you take a great conductor and stick him in front of an orchestra that he conducts two, three, maybe half a dozen times a year, you can make a very good, possibly even an exciting, recording. Where the will of the conductor is strong and the orchestra flexible and perceptive, the results of such collaborations can be of lasting value. Everyone's list of favorite recordings includes examples. Think of Bernstein, Giulini, Colin Davis, and Abbado. Then will the tight finances of the early Eighties finally put an end to the domestic recording of conductors with their own orchestras? No. The orchestras themselves have come up with a way around the cost problem-by paying for their own recordings.
Many of the conductors American labels are most interested in stand on relatively minor podiums. Take Eduardo Mata, for example. RCA is interested enough to send him to London to record and to pair him there with its prime seller, Galway. But RCA will record Mata's own orchestra, the Dallas Sym phony, only on a subsidy basis-and with some justification. Another of the union-enforced hindrances to recording here is the Federation's insistence that all orchestra personnel, whether it be a major or a minor ensemble, be paid the same rates. If it is almost prohibitively expensive to record the Philadelphia Orchestra, why would RCA be willing to spend as much to record Dallas unsubsidized? Lesser-known orchestras, though, are more than happy to pay the major la bels to come and record them, and they can look forward to being recorded, how ever infrequently, so long as they retain the services of a major conductor (or, in some cases, persuade major soloists to insist on recording with them). They hope, of course, that, through exposure on major labels, they can build a wider following and eventually become major orchestras: the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields syndrome. And who's to say it's not possible? Perhaps some of these orchestras--Toronto, National Arts Centre ( Ottawa), Dallas-will blossom into important symphonic entities and the Eighties will see the emergence of a "middle five." The possibility brings to mind a passage in Anthony Burgess' futuristic novel, A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist, a London rough neck, unwinds after an evening of ultra-violence by playing his favorite recording of the Macon ( Georgia) Philharmonic.
Which raises another question.
The Macon Philharmonic may have a London following in Burgess' fiction, but will a provincial American orchestra ever sell enough in the real world to leave subsidization behind? The U.S. accounts for only 30 to 35% of the world classical record market, and spokesmen for all the labels agree that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make any money by selling expensively recorded discs to the U.S. market alone. A case in point: Columbia's Complete Works of Webern, Vol. I, conducted by Boulez, was re leased last June and, despite rave re views, had sold only 4,012 copies here by October. In Europe, however, the set sold another 10,000 copies--enough, Columbia says, to cover the cost of its production. But can RCA ever count on selling Dallas to the French and Germans? According to a rule of thumb used around the offices of some large classical companies, a project pays for itself when three discs are sold for every dollar spent on it-from recording sessions and artists' fees to pressing and packaging, pro motion and advertising, distribution and overhead. An American-made sym phonic disc, therefore, may have to sell more than 180,000 to break even. Obviously a world market is needed, and the performance must be something that will capture the imagination of an international audience.
Some international companies are better than others at providing for a classical disc's success. Deutsche Grammophon assumes that 90% of the discs it re leases can be sold anywhere (the other 10% are aimed at specific national markets) and so sees to it that each national "territory" accepts nine out of ten re leases. And DG counts on waiting five or more years for each release to reach its break-even point. Masterworks operates in somewhat the same way (but with a shorter break-even period-the target is one year), producing very few records that all Columbia affiliates are not com mitted to in advance. At EMI, while the major productions are funded by the International Classical Division and accepted by most or all affiliates, each national label (HMV, Electrola, Pathe Marconi, Odeon, Toshiba, Angel, etc.) pursues projects of its own. Of about eighty EMI discs released around the world each month, Angel can absorb only one-tenth, and the projects Angel funds itself are generally of the solo variety (Ransom Wilson, Angel Romero, Igor Kipnis, etc.), requiring a relatively small cash outlay and little help from the foreign markets.
Of all the major labels, RCA seems faced with the toughest set of circumstances. Like Angel, Red Seal is part of a loosely organized international corporate amalgamation. But unlike Angel, it not only is responsible for funding major projects, but has virtually no guarantee that RCA's foreign affiliates will pick them up. So while the label's Levine conducts-Mahler series and the occasional Chicago or Philadelphia disc will have broad international appeal, Red Seal now finds itself able to afford fewer symphonic projects, and those are of lesser worldwide sales potential! No examination of the symphonic field is complete without a word about the dozens of smaller labels that have traditionally helped fill holes in the catalog and that apparently will continue to do so. Many get along by licensing European recordings, reissuing historical discs, and recording-with subsidy smaller American orchestras (with their permanent conductors), all practices that allow them to avoid taking on the full cost burden. Perhaps the greatest service they provide is their continual chipping away at the iceberg of contemporary music; labels like CRI, New World, Opus One, and Finnadar explore musical ground the majors seldom tread.
On the contemporary music scene, though, it should be noted that the closing years of the Seventies have shown a decidedly conservative swing.
Composers such as George Rochberg, David Del Tredici, John Corigliano, and Jacob Druckman have opted out (early or late) of the avant-garde, creating mu sic that, if audience reaction at concerts is any indication, is communicative, ex citing, and attractive to listeners normally outside the new-music fold. Major labels are aware of this: RCA has brought out works by Corigliano (for whom it has further plans) and has some Rochberg and Toru Takemitsu waiting in the wings. Last year Columbia re leased the Penderecki and Rochberg violin concertos (it should be noted that these were Isaac Stern's recording choices, however) and, on the heels of the increasing popularity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, is planning to release a new Terry Riley disc. It would be nice to be able to predict that this populist shift in the composing world-should it gather steam-will bring about an involvement of one or more of the major While American labels are shifting their gaze to London orchestras, the European labels have approached the American big five.
labels in contemporary music, on the or der of that of, say, Columbia in the days of Goddard Lieberson's Stravinsky and Schoenberg recordings. Unfortunately, that would be only wishful thinking.
There may be some flirtation with new music now and then. But ultimately, these companies will continue to live by their timeless maxim, "The only profit able composer is a dead composer." Might the digital and /or video disc brighten up the symphonic recording scene? At the moment, the hybrid digital-recorded/analog-playback discs are causing excitement both in the studios and at the cash register, although as they become more commonplace sales will sink back toward normal levels. Major orchestras and conductors-Mehta, Solti, Bernstein, Ormandy, Maazel-are beginning to get into the act. If companies ever needed a justification for simply remaking all the old warhorses instead of exploring new ground, digital recording is it.
It has been suggested that the digital process may be the right thing at the wrong time-that its capabilities and its promise are exciting in theory, but that the economy may not be able to bear the major catalog-equipment overhaul required. Yet the people at Philips are predicting that its home digital player, to be introduced in 1983, will coexist with conventional analog players for about ten years, superseding them entirely early in the Nineties.
The video capabilities of these new systems are not likely to mean much to the symphony buyer, and I suspect that not much effort will be made in that direction. It is true that there are plenty of symphonic video tapes floating about. But are they interesting enough to attract buyers willing to pay a premium for them and to watch them over and over? Besides, if labels get into making symphonic video discs, there will have to be compromises somewhere. Either the performances will have to be filmed and recorded in concert, where the sonic advantages of the studio will be compromised for the sake of a good show and theatrically minded conductors tempted to put showmanship above musician ship, or they will have to be recorded in the studio, as usual, and the video "faked." The latter technique has been used by Unitel in its many films of Karajan, et al., shown here on PBS. That kind of thing may be passable on television once, but who would want to own a copy? There is a much better chance that the video disc will make its impact on opera, where the video presentation obviously would greatly enhance the listening experience and, if properly done, could bear repeated viewing. It can even be assumed that if labels institute a vigorous opera video disc program, marginal opera listeners will find the action of unfamiliar works easier to grasp when so graphically presented. The success of the ever more frequent "Live from . . ." (the Met, City Opera, San Francisco, Wolf Trap, and Spoleto U.S.A.) series and the already burgeoning under ground market in pirated video tapes of these broadcasts indicate that an audience for video opera exists; and you can bet that where an audience is perceived, someone will sell it what it wants.
We have seen in recent years an increasing number of operas filmed for television (Unitel) or for theatrical showing (The Magic Flute a few years ago, the recent Joseph Losey Don Giovanni), and apparently this is only the beginning. By the time the video disc is ready for the market, our major singers will have had a taste of the film experience that may become a requisite of operatic careers in the Eighties.
But the problems presented are staggering: complex rights and contractual questions, the artistic pressures of producing performances of lasting value, both sonically and visually, and cost. Actually, record companies might find making video opera less expensive than conventional opera recording, de pending on how the film company/ record company cost accounting is done:
Film companies might underwrite some of the recording costs in return for the right to use the "likenesses" of opera singers under contract to the record la bels. In fact, one company spokesman points to such a coproduction as the Columbia /Losey Don Giovanni, reportedly already making money for both, as a
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Even now opera is horrendously expensive to record, and using the three-discs-to-one-dollar-spent formula, lots of sets must be sold to break even. (Of ten, however, operas prove to have a much longer shelf life than orchestral works.) Because opera requires many more sessions than symphonic works, labels don't even consider recording it in the States (except for the odd concert performance). Most say they can record an opera in London for about $150,000 which, assuming we're talking about a three-record set, still means it must sell more than 150,000 albums, when you throw in costs for manufacturing, advertising, and so forth.
Although other companies are sanguine about the future of opera recording, the Gioconda experience was bitter for RCA, one that left its staff wondering if it had a future in that end of the business. Red Seal has for some time been interested in recording the Metropolitan Opera but has not been able to work out the details of cost and logistics-the Met being a repertory company, scheduling studio sessions has proved impossible. The prospective solution? Live Met LPs. According to a new ruling by the Federation designed to en courage at least some opera recording in North America, record companies will be allowed to tape as many live performances of an opera as they want, paying the performers a one-hour studio fee for every ten minutes of the finished product. It's still pretty expensive; it can mean more than $100,000 in orchestral fees alone. Compared with the old rates, though, it's a bargain, and RCA is seriously considering taping several performances from a Met run of a work and splicing the best parts together to make quasi-documentary recordings.
But this approach is rife with commercial and artistic problems. To begin with, whom does RCA expect to buy these sets? Anyone interested in live Met performances can tape them off the air Saturday afternoons. RCA must also be wondering whether the Met chorus and orchestra, generally agreed to be below recording-studio standards set by ensembles from Vienna, Berlin, and Lon don, can be made to sound good enough for these sets to be competitive. And there are casting problems. Fortunately, the era of exclusive contracts for singers is coming to an end, but some major names still maintain strong ties to labels other than RCA, and the Met is not about to cast its operas with an eye to RCA's needs. Furthermore, though it can be argued that recording technology, especially with digital looming on the horizon, is capable of capturing the sound and some of the excitement of opera "on location" and that there is value in the documentation of actual performances, a stronger argument can be made for the near-perfection that can be achieved in the studio.
Columbia has put out several live opera discs in the last few years (the Eve Queler concert performance series), and the recent Federation rule change may lead other companies to set up their equipment right in the opera house, too.
But it's not likely that this will be the predominant mode of opera recording of the Eighties. While there may be some short-term economic benefit to the documentary approach, it's likely that producers will continue to insist that studio opera recording is an art that should not be slighted, and record buyers (not to mention critics) will make the labels aware that they consider any large-scale move from studio to stage a leap in the wrong direction. The best solution would appear to be a compromise, with the labels still devoting most of their operatic energies to studio projects, recording the occasional live performance when the cast is right, and offering the live sets to the public on mid-priced lines.
A word about prices. Since 1977, retail list prices have risen from $6.98/$7.98 to $8.98/$9.98. Considering the dramatic rise in the cost of raw materials--talent, petroleum, paper--this increase is not surprising, and we can probably count on prices jumping at least a dollar every twelve to eighteen months. Theoretically, the introduction of the digital playback disc can arrest this trend, for Philips says that the manufacturing process for the 41/2-inch disc will not be any more expensive than that for today's standard disc. As one record company executive put it, "By 1983 I'm going to have to charge $20 for an analog record. Digital playback is the only hope for the business. You can put the digital signal on anything." On the surface, it seems that most of the problems facing the classical record business are short-term financial ones. But they go deeper than that. In spite of widely publicized recent financial disappointments, pop labels will surely continue to wield infinitely more clout among company finance men than classical labels do. So, in the course of my research, I decided to stop at the offices of one of the larger pop labels for a chat with an old college friend who has been working in the rock recording business for the last few years. After he con firmed that even unknown pop groups are selling in the hundreds of thousands and that, by comparison, the classical affiliates are a drag on the corporation, I asked him why the companies bother maintaining them.
"Well, prestige is a nice way of putting it," he said. "Everybody knows that the big companies are whores; but with a classical line we look a bit less like whores than we might otherwise. After all, this is big business, and we're in it for the bucks, not for art. Right now the people sitting on the board of directors happen to think it's important to keep the classical lines going. They like classical music, and they like to be able to take advantage of some of the benefits that accrue from running classical record companies-good seats at the opera, good seats at symphony concerts, a certain social aura.
"But times are changing. When people our age are sitting on the board of directors, we're not going to care much about good seats at the opera. We're going to be more interested in good seats at the ballgame or in seeing whatever the big rock group is in 2000. Don't get me wrong-I don't want to see classical mu sic disappear. But when the generation that grew up on rock and roll grows into those positions of power, things are really going to change." By that time, of course, Polygram will have bought up the rest of the world's classical labels, and classical recording will continue happily ever after.
HF
(High Fidelity, Apr 1980)
Also see:
Classical Records---P.D.Q. Bach and Peter Schickele; Karajan's Don Carlos; Shostakovich song cycles
Audio Research SP-6 preamplifier