I don't think classical recording is dying. It is changing. The time of big contracts for classical "stars" is over. In fact, it vanished more than ten years ago already. The last great "stars" of classical music were people like Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. They couldn't walk in the street without being recognized. I don't think "the man in the street" would recognize Simon Rattle or Lorin Maazel in real life. Rattle is famous in Britain perhaps, but I don't think people in the streets of Rotterdam would recognize him. Still he performed a lot in Rotterdam in the past.

I don't think it's a problem that the days of Von Karajan and Bernstein are over. Recording the same pieces over and over again with new "stars" that never will reache the highest level is a waste of time and energy. Roberto Szidon, Justus Franz, Okko Kamu, Miriam Fried, Thomas Demenga: were have they all gone? Trying to create new "stars" by connecting classical music to pop music hasn't turned out very profitable for the classical record companies either: remember Vanessa Mae? Or even worse: Todd Levin?

I find buying classical records nowadays far more interesting than years ago. All major labels have their own budget-series: very interesting when you want to renew your old LP collection. There are interesting budget labels (Naxos, Arte Nova) and there's a huge amount of recordings of lesser known repertoire on smaller labels that has been totally ignored by the major labels for years. I have to say that it's a bit disappointing to see that this lesser known repertoire still isn't making it to the concert hall. I would love to hear a Petterson or Hartmann symphony in the concert hall more regularly, for instance.

I don't know what the exact opinion of Mr Norman Lebrecht is, but I sincerely hope that the title of his new book is ironical. I read his columns with a certain pleasure, but his opinions are often difficult to take seriously. I also remember now that he once said (in the documentary issued by DECCA when the Entartete Musik series was started) that Boulez and Stockhausen were responsible for the fact that composers like Goldschmidt and Braunfels were ignored after the war. This statement is ridiculous. Boulez and Stockhausen weren't that influential and the music of a composer like Goldschmidt is beautiful and charming but it is not as good as the music of Hindemith or Hartmann, a composer who had a tremendous stature in post-war Germany. Great music can't be destroyed by dictatorship. There's only one enemy of music: neglect. Arthur Lourié wrote first-class music and it never became famous only because it was neglected by musicians and academics. This had nothing to do with the cultural politics of the Bolsheviks or the Nazis.

As for Elvis Presley: the real music of the "common people" was folk music. A culture that has been totally destroyed by the commercial musical industry (I hate that word). Has anyone here seen the lovely documentary Song Hunter about Alan Lomax? It was a bit tragic to see people who used to know and sing the songs of their village sitting in front of the television all day. The folk or "common people's" culture has been destroyed by commercialism. When I see what's happening with education and public media I begin to think that the next step will be the destruction of the "classical" culture.

I'm sure some have; the problem is huge contracts and giant marketing budgets are a very expensive way to sell CDs - CDs that the wider public is becoming increasingly reluctant to buy at current prices (hence every label attempting to follow the Naxos model, the explosion in downloading (legitimate and otherwise), and so on). The pop recording industry has had its fingers badly burned in recent years over the artificial creation of megastars like Mariah Carey and Robbie Williams and are only very, very slowly coming round the view that channelling all your investment behind a very small stable of acts is not the way forward. I suspect the classical crossover thing will continue - some people seem to like it, and it does sell records - but I don't seriously see classical recording coming to an end because if it: I doubt Kairos, NMC, New Albion, BIS and the like (pulling names off the top of my head) are looking for an Il Divo of their own at the moment; I doubt Naxos are either. If EMI, Sony and the rest to continue flailing around like dinosaurs in tar, that's fine by me, it won't affect my record buying habits one bit.

In that case I must do my bit and send them some more of my trade 

But aren't niche (for want of a better word) labels like Kairos always going to struggle? And would the death or non-death of the majors make any difference to their situation?

It may be: instinct would suggest so, but although there has been a lot of research on this recently (not all of it un-biased, I should add), the results have been far from conclusive, and I think there's enough evidence to say that file-sharing is not solely to blaim (there's some evidence to suggest the contrary in fact, with one reporting suggesting that regular file-sharers tend to spend more money on music). There are strong indications, for example, that the big drop in DVD prices in recent years (not matched by a similar drop in CD prices) has encouraged people to spend more of their monthly entertainment budget on films rather than music.

Thanks for the info on Kairos, btw.

Very good, thanks for that. Also interesting would be a comparison of the number of actual CD reviews published in a typical 2007 Gramophone as opposed to 1988. I suspect that the number will have gone down considerably. And surely not because the major labels will have used their advertising-revenue clout to lean on the publisher not to swamp their threadbare output with that of the burgeoning independents? Or would thinking such a thing be paranoia?

Another question: we know that Lebrecht's agenda is primarily connected with the sound of his own voice and how the sound and fury (signifying...) thereof might be transmuted into hard currency, but what is he actually up to here with what seems to be at best deliberate obfuscation and at worst deliberate falsification?

Surely Presley, Beatles and Dylan are derived from American jazz and blues which were not influenced by Schoenberg and Stockhausen. If anyone, the jazz tunes from Tin Pan Alley composed by Berlin, Kern, Donaldson etc owe a lot to Gilbert & Sullivan?


John W

I wondered if I hadn't made myself clear......

JW - I doubt very much that Presley and co were influenced by the direction of classical music.  That's not my point. The point is that if an audience is turned off from somewhere they will go find somewhere else.  If serialism did that to classical music, behaps light and popular music were the benefactors.  And would Presley and co have been so famous if they had had a smaller audience......? etc.

Richard - I haven't explained myself clearly enough.  All of what you say makes sense from a conceptual point of view, but that's where it misses my point - it's all conceptual, and conscious.

I wonder what the process for composition was for Schoenberg in his early years.  How did he choose what notes to put where, what harmonies to move to?  He wasn't following written rules like no parallel fifths, but there must have been something internalised and subconscious that drove his choice.  The thing that was internalised is the 'language' I was talking about - probably informed by the music Schoenberg had listened to throughout his life, including folk.

That for me is a very different process from a conscious decision to place a note because of a principled set of rules.

The point I wonder about is whether the internalised language for most Europeans was a shared language.  If it was, then doing something different like serialism is like speaking in an alien language.  There must be elements of our musical 'language' that we share, otherwise we would not relate to each other's music.

I get your example that Wagner is a different language to east European folk music, but just how different?  I suspect there are a lot of shared fundamental elements.  But stretching your example, say, to what would a sitar player of the day from India think of Wagner?  There, the shared musical language is little.

Tommo