The Life and Death of Classical Music (15 page)

The enormity of his classical blunder could no longer be concealed. Breest had let Polygram reconquer the US charts and Sony Classical sorely needed an American sensibility. Peter Gelb’s name came into contention. Gelb was making promo videos for Ronald Wilford’s CAMI, the biggest artists agency, and running television sales for the Met. The son of an executive editor of the
New York Times
, he started out as a publicist at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and amazed
Times
critics by getting out-of-town Ozawa
into their pages week after week. Wilford called him ‘one of the most brilliant men I know’. Colleagues found him inarticulate and impossibly vain. ‘I want you to be Peter’s friend,’ said Ozawa to one of his Boston interns. ‘Why?’ said the young man. ‘Because he doesn’t have one.’

On 14 July 1993 Wilford sold CAMI Video to Sony for $6 million, with Gelb thrown in. The new US vice-president of Sony Classical picked up a million-dollar salary and was welcomed as his deputy by the guileless Breest, who was having problems with Erwin Veg, his artist relations manager. Breest promoted Michael Haas, formerly of Decca, to head of A&R. Veg went into a huff and Tokyo sent in its head of human resources to sort out the fuss. During the kerfuffle, Gelb told Ohga of Breest’s inadequacies. ‘Gunther adored Peter Gelb, right up to the moment of his own execution,’ said Haas.
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With Breest gone, Gelb moved the label back to New York, putting the Nonnenstieg folly up for sale. ‘If Sony want to become more populist and American oriented, I can understand that,’ Breest told a Hamburg newspaper, ‘but I can’t go along with it. I stand for something which cannot be achieved in an instant.’
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Gelb scrapped Vivarte and put classics on ice. His revivalist plan was founded on the movies, for which he had a boyish fascination. ‘One of the reasons I came to work for Sony,’ he said, ‘was that it gave me an opportunity to expand into feature film … [Sony] is interested in my continuing on film projects in future.’
³³
Not very interested, it transpired. Gelb was allowed to make one feature film called
Voices
, a romantic life of the suicidal English composer Peter Warlock. It was never shown in cinemas and scuttled out ignominiously on video. Gelb continued to describe himself as a ‘visionary, award-winning documentary filmmaker’, though he never got to make another film.

Hollywood, however, did provide him with lift-off. Sony, practically on Gelb’s first day, bought James Horner’s soundtrack to James Cameron’s
Titanic
with a theme song performed by Celine Dion. Mottola refused to have such mush on any of his pop labels and every other Sony boss turned it down. ‘Gelb was the newest
executive, the weakest,’ said an insider. ‘He couldn’t refuse.’
³⁴
Titanic
, a three-hankie weepie, became the best-selling soundtrack of all time, racking up 25 million CDs and giving Gelb the aura of magician and the right to lecture his industry. ‘It is neither commercially rewarding nor artistically relevant for us to make [classical] recordings that sell only a few thousand copies,’ he would tell a 1997 Klassik Komm Conference in Hamburg. ‘Rather than drift toward commercial oblivion with new recordings of old music that don’t sell, we have started doing something about it.’
³⁵

The something was commissioning music for the middle of the road, music that suited both movies and concert play. The prototype was a score being written by John Corigliano, composer of a powerful Aids symphony (CD 82, p. 254), for a Canadian movie,
The Red Violin
, telling the tale of a valuable fiddle over three centuries. The fullness of Corigliano’s score would be kitted out as a concerto for Sony star Joshua Bell to play on the symphony circuit, and ultimately in the BBC Proms. By marrying movies to the concert hall, Gelb aimed to revitalize classical recording. ‘I am not afraid to admit that we are seeking success,’ said Gelb. ‘We are seeking artistic and commercial success. And we’re doing it by commissioning new music and taking new musical initiatives.
We are attempting to redefine the meaning of classical music.
’

The rest of the industry looked on in awe and irritation as Gelb, with all the luck that Breest lacked, bulldozed his way to success. ‘I’m not interested in crap like this,’ he told an independent producer who brought in a $30,000 project. ‘I’d rather lose a million on a movie than make peanuts on some pathetic symphony.’
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‘I believe in great music,’ he told a conference, ‘I just don’t want to record it.’

Gelb in hubris was a sight to behold. He lectured staff on his ‘philosophy’, accusing critics of ‘negativism’. In the wake of the
Titanic
soundtrack he formed a cadre of easy-listening composers to furnish his output. They included Horner, Corigliano, John Williams, Elliot Goldenthal (partner of the Disney director Julie Taymor), Michael Kamen
(Band of Brothers)
, Richard Danielpour and the Chinese immigrant, Tan Dun. Joshua Bell played Horner’s
soundtrack to Richard Eyre’s biopic
Iris.
Yo Yo Ma, the finest cellist of his generation, soloed in Tan Dun’s
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
and in Williams’ score for
Seven Years in Tibet.

Beyond movies, Gelb preached crossover. Ma led an orgy of genre bending with a hillbilly album, Appalachia Waltz, performed with country fiddler Mark O’Connor and double-bassist Edgar Meyer and promoted on bus stands around America. Ma followed with a set of Bach suites, paced to accompany a gardening video. Rising violinist Hilary Hahn played an Edgar Meyer concerto. Dreadlocked Bobby McFerrin caterwauled on classical tracks. An egregious pair of Operababes gave way to the still ghastlier Il Divo, a quartet of beefcake tenors.

Gelb discontinued all Sony conductors except the LA Philharmonic’s Esa-Pekka Salonen, whom he persistently sought to offload on other labels. A Swiss-funded scheme to record the life’s work of the avant-garde Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti was stopped in mid-flow and shunted on to Warner. This was music that required mental effort and it did not fit Gelb’s fast-food methodology.

For a couple of years the formula worked like a dream and most of Gelb’s chickens came to roost in the charts. But there is no success in music without imitators. Others got into the bidding for movie scores and the price went through the roof. Decca beat Gelb to Horner’s
Braveheart
, selling one and a half million CDs. Decca also won Michael Nyman’s
The Piano
and Gabriel Yared’s
Mr Holland’s Opus.
Gelb got lumbered with losers from Sony Pictures. Unable to repeat his
Titanic
fluke and without a flow of bread-and-butter classics, Gelb needed to find one big hit a year to stay solvent. With some ingenuity he reinvented Billy Joel, the middling pop singer, as a ‘classical’ composer of piano suites. Radiohead, a British rock group, appeared in ‘classical’ transcriptions. A little Welsh girl with a lovely warble was launched as an old-fashioned wunderkind, paraded before popes and presidents with pretty opera arias. But while Sony Classical claimed the credit for Charlotte Church, the profits went to another division, Sony Europe, since Gelb had refused to share the investment. That bad
decision cost his label $3 million. As Charlotte Church went from winsome arias to teenage pop and sex scandal, Gelb’s label lost its veneer of quality and became known as Sony Anything-but-Classical.

By the end of the century Gelb was glum and his business sinking. With Ohga in retirement, Gelb’s ‘brilliance’ failed to convince hard-hat techno-Japs. Appalachia Waltz which became a Sony Classical number one, sold just four thousand a week, one-fiftieth of a pop hit. In the real world, Sony Classical amounted to a row of very few beans. ‘How’s business?’ I asked Gelb in a lobby encounter at London’s Savoy Hotel. ‘Never been tougher,’ grunted the failed messiah of classical recording.
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Ray Minshull was counting the days to retirement: ‘Only fourteen hundred and thirty-seven to go.’ By way of valediction he signed off a million-dollar Frau ohne Schatten for Solti, Berlioz’s five-hour Les Troyens for Charles Dutoit in Montreal and, most lavishly of all, a Ring cycle for Dohnanyi in Cleveland. The logic was inscrutable. Frau was a slow seller, Solti’s Ring was unsurpassable and while The Trojans had only Davis on Philips as competition, union rates in Montreal ruled out any possibility of profit. Minshull was playing himself out on a chord of luxury, flying first class between his favourite conductors in the company of a close personal friend. He gave Dutoit, a Swiss martinet who dressed like a business executive, a contract for twenty-five CDs over five years.

Still, it was assumed that Minshull knew what he was doing and the office ran like clockwork. ‘Ray was very particular,’ said a finance clerk. ‘You could never send him a memo beginning “I’ll be going tomorrow …” It would come back corrected to: “I will be going tomorrow.” Everything had to be done properly.’
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When he reached sixty-five, Minshull slipped away into bucolic oblivion, never to be seen again. Holschneider retired that same year, handing over to Gianfranco Rebulla from DG’s Italian office. ‘It wasn’t a bad choice,’ he insisted, but his Italian redesign had been subsumed by the globality of the Sony war and DG was no longer to be defined in national colours. The marketing chief was Aman Pedersen, a Norwegian, and the head of A&R, Englishman Roger Wright. ‘Apart from head of legal affairs,’ said Wright, ‘there wasn’t a single German head of any department.’
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Pedersen was a man of flair and impetuosity. When he fell for an artist, he fell big. The contract he gave Sinopoli was for eighty-eight CDs, John Eliot Gardiner was down for fifty-nine Bach cantata CDs, Cheryl Studer was his all-purpose soprano and Trevor Pinnock
could do no wrong. Promoted to head of marketing, Pedersen faced a rude awakening. ‘He’d predict 100,000 on the next Studer, and then he’d come back completely deflated with orders for a few hundred,’ said colleagues. But Pedersen had a sharp eye for branding. He dressed up The Originals in Fifties livery and shiny black surfaces, selling 10 million units and putting a roar back into DG’s stalled backlist.

Wright, nurturing talent, fell in love with the Hamburg atmosphere:

I was fascinated by recording, by capturing a particular moment, and at DG you are so conscious of the legacy. André as reinforced that on all of us. DG was the conductor’s label par excellence, but it was also the label of pianists-Argerich, Pollini, Krystian Zimerman. We would ask ourselves: what are we looking for in a record? First, it should be artistically right, something we’d be proud of. Second, that it sustained the brand. And third, that it would sell. The sadness is that I arrived just at the point where we had to consider where the business was going, how to make fewer records. After a while we’d be saying to each other: why the hell are we doing this?

The day of reckoning had dawned.

Polygram’s company report for 1996 proclaims a splendid record of expansion and achievement. Held up one way, the report is titled ‘Creativity’, held the other it is called ‘Control’. Creativity features Brad Pitt, star
of Sleepers
, a film ‘which took over a hundred million at the box-office’. Next page is Shania Twain with ‘the best-selling female country album of all time’. Jackie Cheung is the ‘Asian superstar’, Richard Dreyfuss stars in
Mr Holland’s Opus
, there is a scene from the British cult film
Trainspotting
, a still of the evergreen Elton John and an introductory shot of Italian popster André a Bocelli, ‘a major success throughout the Benelux and Germany’. The only classical artists on show are the soprano Jessye Norman, who opened the year’s Olympics, and Pavarotti, who parades with pop stars at a charity concert. Hanover, in the year
reported, pressed its billionth CD. All was well in a never-ending Polyworld. ‘The breadth of our repertoire, internationally and within each region, provides the strong base from which we believe future growth will come,’ wrote president Alain Levy. ‘Music as a whole remains an
important and growing
part of the total entertainment budget and has seen a decade of unprecedented growth, up 12 per cent per annum on a compound basis since 1986.’

‘Important’ and ‘growing’ were confident words. They applied to every aspect of the business except classical, where the adjective changed admonitorially to ‘challenging’. Levy wrote of a need ‘to expand the horizons of classical music’.
³
He had ordered ‘a careful and comprehensive review’ that would lead to ‘a reduction in the overall number of recordings and releases, and the reorganisation of the recording studios’.

That kind of policy called for a hatchet man. Levy’s eye fell on Chris Roberts, a sometime record-store assistant from Portland, Oregon, who had gone to Munich to write a doctoral thesis on cabaret and wound up writing jingles for German TV. Landing a Polygram job in 1989, Roberts proved the perfect corporation man, sensitive to his boss’s wishes, ruthless to those below. In his mid-thirties, he dressed like a Roosevelt-era drugstore owner in sleeveless grey cardigan. He was head of Polygram Classics USA when Levy sent him to London to wield the axe.

‘I looked at the situation,’ said Roberts, ‘and thought: people can’t absorb all these records. A potential or occasional record buyer cannot differentiate one conductor from another, one interpretation or brand image from the next.’
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He recast the three labels. DG would be core-classical, Decca vocal and crossover and Philips neutral, all to be ethically cleansed by willing executioners.

Roger Lewis was the Decca chopper. A fast riser, the ex head of music on BBC’s Radio 1 pop station had moved to EMI UK, where his key classical signing was a half-Asian, half-British babe of fifteen whom he displayed on her debut album cover in a wet white swimsuit. Vanessa-Mae Nicolson sold 1.38 million CDs, earning Lewis widespread revulsion. ‘The record was never aimed at the classical market anyway,’ he shrugged.
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To avert mutiny at
Decca, Roberts hired a traditional head of A&R – Evans Mirageas, artistic administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a close adviser of the soprano Renée Fleming. To strip down Philips, Roberts appointed Costa Pilavachi, a Greek-Canadian who had run the music programme at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and was well connected to Ozawa and Gardiner. The new chiefs were given their cutting orders.

Roberts told them to start from the top-sack conductors. Paul Moseley, a Decca man, remembers coming into the office and seeing Lewis on one phone, Mirageas on another, simultaneously ending the record careers of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Christoph von Dohnanyi. ‘Roger said I’ll call Jasper (Parrott, Ashkenazy’s agent), and you call Tom Morris (president of the Cleveland Orchestra). That was how they broke the news.’
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Ashkenazy had four contract years to run, Dohnanyi five.
⁷
Ashkenazy was only down to make one record a year, and once the Ring was cancelled, not much was saved by sacking Dohnanyi. The deed was done for exemplary reasons, to send a chill across the art. Despondency fell like a winter’s fog, sowing mistrust between artists and producers, who were next for the scrapheap.

‘The Decca Recording Centre was a money loser,’ explained Mirageas. ‘We had become obsolete in Research and Design … To carry an in-house staff of nearly forty engineers, editors, producers and technicians was simply no longer possible.’ Skilled employees were flung onto the street. Many went straight to Naxos, where the sound improved exponentially. The last engineer left Decca on the final day of the century-Philip Siney, his name was-and that was the end of the celebrated Decca Sound.

‘The toughest decisions,’ said Mirageas, ‘were how to prune the too-large artist roster and to close down the Decca Recording Centre … The market was shrinking and our very large investment in recordings was not recouping anything near the bare minimum to stay in business. I was charged with making those decisions and it was painful because every single artist was worthy of a contract in the best of times.

‘If there is any pride involved in doing a hard job, I look back
on this agonizing process with some pride. Polygram was prepared to be very generous with the departing employees. In the case of departing artists, most of it was accomplished by simply playing out existing contracts.’
⁸
That may have been the case with the seniorities, but many young artists were tossed, still twitching, onto a compost pile from which few rose again. The roll of Decca artists was slashed in 1997–8 from forty to sixteen. The number of recordings dropped from 120 in 1990 to 40 in 1998 and half as many in 2006.

At Philips, Pilavachi tried to let conductors down gently, dragging out contract talks until it became clear there would be no renewal. Muti, Previn, Marriner, Colin Davis and Bruüggen were phased out. The only frontal confrontation was with Bernard Haitink, the label’s prowhead for four decades. Haitink had persuaded Hans Kinzl, Pilavachi’s predecessor, to let him record a second Mahler cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic, arguing that his interpretation had matured since his 1970s Amsterdam set. Three symphonies achieved negligible sales, five more were in the can. Pilavachi had to stop Haitink doing the eighth and ninth symphonies. A tetchy, graceless man, Haitink was living in London with his third wife, a popular member of the Royal Opera House orchestra. He was not the kind of artist to face adversity without retaliation. Dutch governments still flinched at the hoo-ha Haitink made when they tried to trim his Concertgebouw orchestra in the 1980s.

Pilavachi arranged to call on Haitink at his home, near Harrods, accompanied by the retired Kinzl and a producer, Clive Bennett. Haitink heard him out in total silence. ‘Oh, so that’s it,’ he said, after a terrible pause. ‘It’s over.’

And so it was. Ten days before Harnoncourt was to record Bruckner’s ninth symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic at Salzburg, a performance that included a keenly awaited restoration of the finale, Warner shut down Teldec and stopped all classical recording. The orchestra, eager to play Bruckner’s last notes, agreed to be taped without fee and the Teldec crew recorded them unpaid. Harnoncourt had a card up his sleeve. He was due to conduct the Vienna New Year’s Day concert, always a hit in Japan.

Labels, vying for that prize, were told that they had to buy the Bruckner if they wanted to waltz with Strauss. BMG placed a bid. Awed by the conductor’s Habsburg aura, they took up his Teldec contract together with his technical crew.

This, however, was a rare act of mercy in the summer of wholesale slaughter. Sacking conductors was a symbolic parricide. The gods of the gramophone were shown to be made of tinfoil and tossed aside, like crumpled tissues. There was no discernible consumer reaction. The few who noticed the stoppage slackened their record buying habit, or gave up altogether.

Judgement day was delayed at DG, where Rebulla had fallen out with John Eliot Gardiner, whose girlfriend, Isabella de Sabata, was DG’s head of press. The abrasive Englishman had a direct line to Chris Roberts, whom he had once conducted in an Oregon choir. Rebulla came under pressure to quit. ‘He left in the disastrous summer when we were supposed to be telling all the artists we were going to drop,’ grouched a colleague.

The DG baton passed to Karsten Witt of the Vienna Konzerthaus, a man without free-market experience. Jaws dropped when producers read his rose-tinted version of reality. ‘Interest in classical music is growing,’ Witt told
Billboard.
‘There are more festivals, promoters, venues, sponsorship-more people learning instruments. We are actually selling twice the number of recordings we sold during the time of the LP … There has been no decline.’
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Witt, it seemed, was keen to please all of the people all of the time. When Abbado, contracted to the Berlin Philharmonic, proposed to do Haydn symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Witt clapped his hands in delight. ‘He couldn’t say no to an artist, it was not in his nature,’ said an associate. Finding that Witt was the wrong man to slash and burn, Roberts stepped in and did it himself. The massacre at DG was bloodier and costlier than any other. Giuseppe Sinopoli, one of the most civilized men ever to mount a podium, a philosopher of limitless curiosity, had his eighty-eight disc deal terminated with just thirty-five completed. Sinopoli, music director at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, sought
satisfaction. It took four years and several million euros to settle his lawsuit. Weeks after the agreement, on 20 April 2001, Sinopoli dropped dead in mid-Aida. He was fifty-four years old and widely mourned, not least at D G where his dismissal was so expensively mishandled.

James Levine went, as did Ozawa. Trevor Pinnock’s English Concert, financed by his DG deal, almost went bust and John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir was plunged into crisis when plans for a 250th Bach anniversary cantata tour were undermined by DG’s retraction. Gardiner’s deal for fifty-nine Bach cantata CDs was cut to twelve. ‘We were left stranded,’ he raged,
¹⁰
reaching for lawyers. Matters were complicated by personal attachments. De Sabata was still on the DG payroll and Decca’s Pilavachi was president of Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir. Prince Charles threw a fundraising dinner and Polygram pumped in £350,000 ($600,000) to save the Bach tour. ‘It was a very generous settlement,’ whispered an insider, but Gardiner was not appeased. With money raised from hundreds of fans, he set up his own label and recorded the cantatas with de Sabata as executive producer. They called the label Soli Dei Gloria (Purely for God’s Glory), its spinal initials SDG. That, said friends, stood for ‘Sod DG’. The first release won a
Gramophone
award as record of the year. ‘Those records couldn’t have been made at DG prices,’ said an ally, ‘not at the low level of sales that Jeggy [Gardiner] predicted.’ Where SDG could break even on 5,000 CDs, DG would have had to sell ten times as many in order to sustain its corporate superstructure. Major labels stood exposed as bloated parasites, adding heavy overheads to artistic enterprise.