Terry Grimley: Classical music is dead - and, at the same time, alive and well

Aug 6 2008 By Terry Grimley

There is a general perception that the classical music recording industry is not so much in crisis as lying in ruins. But that’s just one side of the coin.

Certainly if you’re a serious music enthusiast you can’t easily cast an eye over the so-called classical music charts nowadays without a feeling of depression. Take this week’s W H Smith chart for instance, where the top-seller is Classic FM Anthems, with Russell Watson – The Ultimate Collection in second place, just ahead of Andrea Boccelli’s Greatest Hits.

Obviously there is actually some classical music on these “albums”, but in tenth place is the Icelandic singer Cortes’s When You Say You Love Me, which I thought had been ejected from the classical charts because someone noticed it had less than the required 60 per cent classical content.

In what I can only assume was an unfortunate slip of the tongue, an industry spokeswoman explained that some of the material on Cortes’s album was “too modern”. Well, if he had included some pieces by, say, Thomas Ades, Magnus Lindberg or Harrison Birtwistle that would have been pretty modern too, but it would still have been “classical” in the everyday sense in which this slippery term is normally understood.

Continuing down the W H Smith chart, past something called “Symphony” by Sara Brightman, it is not until I reached No 22 that I recognised something I would call a proper classical record, combining concertos by Beethoven and Mozart. But, of course, the soloist was Nigel Kennedy. If it hadn’t been him it would have had to be Nicola Benedetti.

So it’s plain that the mass sales end of the classical spectrum has been swamped by hyped-up, pre-packaged celebrity culture.

But wait a minute. I’ve just been looking at a list of the latest releases from budget label Naxos – a high-volume label with a high profile in record shops. It may have launched itself with cheap and cheerful recordings of standard repertoire from Eastern European orchestras, but what is it releasing now? Keyboard concertos by Johann Christian Bach, performed by some leading musicians in the British early music field.

There’s music by double bass virtuoso Bottesini, and by Beriot, Breton and Pilati – the last three literally composers I’ve never heard of.

So there are the two sides of the coin. On the one hand a bland, stagnant market associated with what used to be called the major labels and on the other an ever-widening land of musical opportunity for inquisitive listeners, served by Naxos and many other small independent labels.

It means that the classical CD boom that began in the mid-1980s is both dead and continuing. The explosion in the classical market was partly driven by people replacing their vinyl collections. Once everyone has their definitive set of Beethoven symphonies it’s difficult for a new one to find space in the market.

This was obviously bad news for major labels like EMI and Deutsche Grammophon, whose tradition was to nurture successive generations of artists through the same relatively limited repertoire of acknowledged masterpieces.

A more sustainable model was opened up by a new generation of small independent labels – Hyperion is my personal favourite – which were interested in exploring the less familiar byways of musical history. The result is that the range of music available today is incomparably greater than it was say, in the 1960s.

One of my favourite examples is a short opera by the late 17th century composer Charpentier, which was performed once in a private house and then remained untouched until the late 1990s. Now anyone can hear it in their own private houses.

In fact Charpentier’s substantial modern reputation can be largely attributed to the CD. And the same can be said of much more music.

The strength in depth of British music since 1900, as represented by composers like Bax, Bridge, Howells and Finzi, is something which has become far more apparent in the age of the CD. Even composers like Birmingham’s Granville Bantock, once assumed to have gone for ever beyond the recall of fashion, have been brought back for reassessment via small shiny discs.

On the downside, the opportunity to hunt down these treasures in record shops is much less than it was 20 years ago. Increasingly, hardcore enthusiasts are having to go online, but this is what the internet does best, pulling together minority tastes to give them critical economic mass. Another technological change has been the plummeting cost of making recordings. This has helped stimulate the creation of in-house labels by orchestras in Britain and abroad.

This isn’t necessarily big international business, but there are things that are more important than money and celebrity, and music is one of them. It’s far too sweeping to say the classical recording industry is dead. For the discerning listener it’s never been so alive with choice and possibilities.