Why Media?

The two most important questions that face the new self-made recording industry are these: Have the new generation of artist/producers learned from the mistakes of their major-label elders? And if not, how much does it matter?

During the CD boom of the 1980s and early-90s, you had to see the downfall coming. Even while in a state of denial, you couldn’t ignore the plethora of standard-repertoire recordings that were all but interchangeable, so un-distinctive were the performances. They were “me-too” recordings, produced not by sense or with an eye for the needs of the marketplace but by contracts and agents. When Sony began snapping up much-valued artists such as Vladimir Horowitz and Herbert von Karajan, the recording world became extremely nervous and put many of its major artists on long lucrative contracts. That’s why you had, for example, the complete symphonies of Mozart expensively recorded by the Vienna Philharmonic with James Levine. He, like many others including Riccardo Muti, would’ve done well to hold off; the calibre of the work they do now is infinitely higher than in the heyday of their recording careers 20 years ago. Probably, they thought they’d get another crack at recording their repertoire; didn’t Artur Rubinstein have three? Didn’t Daniel Barenboim have two before the age of 40? But even if the recording industry suddenly sprang back to life, the market is not likely to be so great as to accommodate new recordings by older conductors when there’s such a steady stream of fresh young faces on the scene.

Cut to the dawn of self made recordings, one of the first being the St. Louis Symphony in the early years of the Hans Vonk tenure. Those recordings – at least to the very few that heard them, and perhaps the even fewer who remember them – wanted to beat the major labels at their own game. However, the reason that the orchestra wasn’t recording for one of the majors (which were still a force then) had to do with that model’s decreasing relevance. The last thing the world needed was St. Louis’ middle of the road performances of Beethoven symphonies. I suppose the orchestra was counting on the old home-team spirit to make the recordings viable, from a sales and circulation standpoint. But these carefully edited concoctions taken from live performances had less chance of being relevant to people’s lives than the instant downloads some orchestras are now beginning to offer at the end of their concerts.

With instant downloads, people are buying an experience as opposed to a honed and massaged compact disc – and doing so for less money without (thanks to iPods) adding to the storage problem at home. So one way to look at the decline of major-label recordings is that they failed to deliver an experience. They sold artistic perfection but of an unnatural artificial sort – a rendering of a piece that could only exist inside a digital audio tape machine. And with that, so say the editors and engineers who have come into my sphere, is what makes so many recordings dull. It’s sort of an anti-alchemy: There’s no reason why replacing slightly fluffed chords with unfluffed ones from a different performance should make a recording dull. Somehow, though, this is exactly what happens. Many artists believe or at least pay lip service to the idea that long, unedited “takes” are more likely to make the performance leap off the disc. But over editing is an addiction that many just can’t break. Though I’m not privy to the amount of editing that goes on in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s current series of recordings, the fact that their temperature is lower than the live performances that they’re taken from suggests that the editing addiction is still with us.

Now that the novelty of super super high fidelity has worn off a bit, the experience element may be crucial. Of course, there are many ways to deliver an experience. My feelings about the performances aside on the recent Philadelphia Orchestra performances, the programming is a delight: Christoph Eschenbach’s debut disc with the orchestra was built around Bartok’s oft-recorded Concerto for Orchestra, but with lesser-known works by Martinu and Haas that reflected or looked back on the disaster of World War II. The soon-to-be-released recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 is a longtime Eschenbach speciality, and emerges on disc hotter than the live performance, but it also features the conductor doubling as a pianist on Mahler’s early but well-worth-hearing Piano Quartet. The Tchaikovsky symphonies come with Eschenbach playing the same composer’s piano suite, “The Seasons.”

There’s also the experience, albeit non-musical, that comes with the mere presence and packaging of the disc. And it’s here where lessons learned from the major labels matters less, if at all. The illusion-inducing abilities of the media have never been stronger. We’re in an age when it doesn’t matter that we know the Thanksgiving turkey served by President Bush to the troops in Iraq is, in fact, a contrived photo opportunity or if the turkey was made of rubber. The image is planted in the mind of the beholder, and it does its work. A certain amount of that is true for self-made recordings. I mean to be realistic and not cynical: Though this theory can only be speculative, I believe the mere presence of handsomely packaged Philadelphia Orchestra discs, plus the advertisements for them in the program books and websites, gives the orchestra an element of prestige that’s extremely useful for fundraising and overall image building that aids in ticket sales.

No matter how much or how little the recordings sell, the fact that the Philadelphia Orchestra can say it is in the recording again (aided by the promotion and distribution of the Finland-based Ondine label) saves face, at the very least, for an organization that’s traditionally been in the vanguard of the electronic industry. The fact that the discs come in shiny, posh, silver-foil packages, as opposed to the generic white covers of Naxos, again make a statement about the state of the orchestra that, alone, may justify the time trouble and expense of the recording. The book is judged by its cover. Recordings can only improve the morale of the musicians, and that’s important. As Zubin Mehta once said, “When the birds aren’t happy, the birds don’t sing.” So, to resurrect the famous Milton Babbitt quip, “Who cares if you listen?”