BMG Classics' greatest critical success this year was the reissue of all of its recordings by the pianist William Kapell, who died in 1953. Even the two ensembles generally judged the country's finest - those in Cleveland and Philadelphia - no longer have exclusive arrangements with any company. Why would any record company with an eye on the bottom line want to record another?Īnd so the major labels, endowed with their splendid backlists of great recordings of the past, seem to be moving out of the business of recording classical symphonies. 9 conducted by the same man, Guenter Wand. BMG Classics alone has no fewer than three recordings of the Bruckner Symphony No. Not the Joseph Schwantner Percussion Concerto, which made up much of the NSO's second BMG disc and was a recording premiere.īut there are now hundreds of recordings of the Beethoven symphonies, dozens of recordings of the Mahler symphonies, and even several recordings of the rarest of Haydn's 106 symphonies. Not the Corigliano, of course (although here, too, there was already a performance on disc, albeit a substandard one, by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony). The reason? It's very simple: Virtually everything has already been recorded to death. The Corigliano was considered a hit by classical music standards. And how do you make back your $200,000 from sales of 15,779 copies at an average cost of about $14 per disc? That puts the gross at $220,709. The piece is scored for a colossal orchestra - more than 100 players, all of whom must be paid at a special scale for recordings - and it lasts almost an hour. Neither the NSO nor BMG will divulge the exact cost of the recording, but I would guess that the orchestra's Corigliano disc probably cost $150,000 to $200,000 to make, once all the musicians' fees, studio costs, manufacturing and marketing were factored in. And a folk singer - one person, one guitar - could conceivably come in for only $3,000 or so. And rock, folk, jazz and other musics are much cheaper to record than symphonic music indeed, one of my favorite pop albums of the 1990s, the High Llamas' "Gideon Gaye," was reportedly made for a grand total of about $7,000 in 1993. Any major rock band that sold 15,779 copies of its first album would probably be dropped by its label immediately - particularly if the group happened to be signed to one of the more famous and wealthy companies. 1 and the American composer's related choral work "Of Rage and Remembrance," not only won the most prestigious of classical Grammy Awards - best classical recording - but went on to sell a total of 15,779 in the United States alone, a remarkable number nowadays. The first of these discs, devoted to John Corigliano's Symphony No.
The three recordings that Slatkin and the NSO have made for BMG Classics have all been critically acclaimed. Still, it is important to put this matter in its proper perspective, for it is in no way a reflection on the merits of either the orchestra or its music director. That story aside, one event stands out: the decision last month by BMG Classics (formerly RCA Victor) to terminate a 14-year association with the conductor Leonard Slatkin and, by extension, to cancel all pending recording projects with the National Symphony Orchestra.
The most significant music news for the capital city in 1998? Well, for our purposes, I suggest we discount the Washington Opera's decision to abandon its plans for transforming the old Woodward & Lothrop department store into an opera house - an abandonment that many observers believed was inevitable from the beginning.
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