The Life and Death of Classical Music (14 page)

Andry, still hungry, sussed out small labels. At Hyperion, Ted Perry had a complete edition of Schubert songs and a loyal customer base. One well-known literary agent swore he never bought a classical CD unless it was Hyperion. Andry took Perry to lunch. Over dessert, he pushed an open chequebook across the table.

‘You fill in the price,’ smiled Andry. The former cab driver pushed the cheque back untouched. ‘What would I do with my life if I sold up?’ demanded Ted Perry, independent to the death.

More contenders joined the classical merry-go-round. Rupert Murdoch contemplated a classical label and Virgin’s Richard Branson hired an EMI man, Simon Foster, to start Virgin Classics. RCA, long in hibernation, bounced back under German owners, the Bertelsmann media group, and the leadership of Guenter Hensler, poached from Polygram. Hensler, like Andry, eschewed dawn raids. A man of fine intelligence who obtained degrees in conducting and economics before majoring in entertainment, Hensler reconstructed BMG classics niche by niche. He bought the German wing of Harmonia Mundi, specializing in earlier-than-early music, and commissioned Russian music on price-cutting Arte Nova. For contemporary classics with a sassy edge he hired the Pulitzer-winning music critic Tim Page, whose new label would, he assured Hensler, combine ‘attributes of Nonesuch, the old Victrola label and the Modern Library’.
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Page had a flush of hard, newsy ideas for BMG’s Catalyst, ranging from a CD of Aids-stricken composers to a string quartet composed by Glenn Gould (Page was editor of Gould’s writings), to a musical companion to Thomas Pynchon’s cult novels.

‘I wanted to make recordings that would be both of immediate interest
and
capable of standing the test of time,’ said Page, when it was all over. ‘Catalyst would be not only a new music label but a
smart
music label, something that would attract the same audience that attends a new Sondheim play or highly praised film, something that would reflect the diversity of sound that surrounds us and present some of the more engaging vantage points.’
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Catalyst brought out the white-night symphonies of Rautavaara, the chilipepper Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, the electronic explorer Alvin Curran-along with much else that was eclectic, unusual, ear-catching and nicely niche.

‘Hensler ramped it up,’ recalled James Glicker, who came in as marketing manager from packaged goods at Procter & Gamble but had studied music at college and shared the chairman’s vocation.

‘Guenter was an elder statesman, very good on artist relationships. He was prescient about conductors. He signed Yuri Temirkanov, Michael Tilson Thomas, Leonard Slatkin, Colin Davis. When everyone else tried to repeat the Three Tenors, he laid hands on some unreleased live Pavarottis that did very well for us.’
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Glicker analysed classical records by the criteria of yoghurt, his previous expertise. ‘It was a well-liked product, but there was too much of it. The strength was also the weakness. Why did we keep repeating what we’d done better in the ’60s with Reiner and Chicago? The mass market had no idea what to buy.’ He proposed charging more for famous old recordings by Rubinstein and Horowitz than for hyped-up new ones by the flying-fingered Russian pianist, Evgeny Kissin – ‘Kissin at eleven dollars, Rubinstein at sixteen-I didn’t have much success persuading anyone.’

He wrestled with an industry hamstrung by habit and high on expenses where a classical executive could spend twenty-five grand on a world trip to find a location for the next sales conference but would veto a $5,000 sonata on grounds of cost. ‘They spent ridiculous amounts buying an advertisement for my label in
Rolling Stone,’
said Tim Page, ‘when I couldn’t even afford an assistant.’ Page was flown to Salzburg ‘to meet with four BMG executives, three of whom were based in New York, a couple miles from my home’. He had spent the summer putting together ‘a beautiful and hypnotic programme with the superb and acclaimed pianist Bruce Brubaker-music by Philip Glass, John Adams, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Part, Alvin Curran and Mark-Anthony Turnage’. His meeting was a macabre classic of its kind:

The tape is never played. The glowing reviews are never read. Instead, Brubaker’s press photo-a standard tux-and-piano number with a by-no-means-unattractive man at the centre-is passed around, to the marked furrowing of brows.

‘It’s so …
conservative,’
says the man in the gray suit.

‘I don’t like his haircut,’ whines the whippet-thin trendoid with the coif, between sips of Diet-Pepsi. ‘He should be wearing contacts instead
of glasses,’ says another executive, after a ruminative pause long enough to prove he’d given the matter thought.

I venture the obvious-that we can introduce Brubaker to a hairstylist, replace his tuxedo with Day-Glo peacock feathers or whatever is deemed the hip thing that week (after all, BMG had wrapped the violinist Maria Bachmann in mosquito netting for her first cover), and buy him some contact lenses. What about the music, the mood, the artistry? No go.

‘You don’t understand, Tim,’ it is explained patiently, as if to an idiot child. ‘We want somebody with
attitude.
You can’t fake attitude.’

Heads bob around the table.

And so, on the whim of the moment, one more long-planned, made-to-order, inexpensive to produce and presumably easy-to-sell project is shot down, for want of some mythical attitude. However, so the trip shouldn’t be a total loss, as I prepare to leave (walking past the fancy posters, the giveaway knick-knacks on which BMG had spent a fortune) I am told the company has finally decided to ‘look’ for the funds to hire a $200-a-week assistant, so that I will no longer have to sort through hundreds of unsolicited tapes alone on my living room floor.
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It was small consolation. Hensler suffered a heart attack, retired early and died at sixty-three; Glicker got sent to Australia and Page resigned. Catalyst died. Virgin Classics was sold to EMI, and Erato, Teldec and other Warner subsidiaries were brought under. Homogeneity was the menace in waiting.

A dark cloud loomed from the east. A German trader in Hong Kong, active in record distribution, was asked for a package of popular classics to be sold door to door in South Korea. Spotting a drop in CD manufacturing costs, Klaus Heymann bought thirty orchestral tapes from a Slovak in Paris and pressed them for his client, who went bust. ‘So there I was, stuck with thirty classical masters. I couldn’t sell them at full price because these were unknown East European orchestras, although the performances were not too bad. I had to put them out on a budget label. That’s how Naxos Records was born.’
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Priced at $6, Naxos were the cheapest classics by far, a third of the price of a premium DG. They sold across Asia in 1987, then in Woolworth’s in Britain and in gas stations up and down Scandinavia, a slow-moving landmass where classical CDs had only ever been found before in smart city shops. Soon, Heymann was selling more classics in the north than all the majors put together. In three years he counted 4 million sales. By 1994, adding the US and Japan, he had 10 million with annual growth of 50 per cent. One in six classical records sold anywhere in the world was a Naxos.

‘Basically a record collector who loves music,’
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Heymann laid no claims to artistic vision. ‘I sat down with a catalogue and marked everything that had more than ten recordings. That was our initial policy: record the hundred most recorded things in reasonably good quality, reasonably good sound, and make them available’.
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In Slovakia and Slovenia, he paid orchestral players $100 a disc, for which they were duly thankful. Conductors and soloists got $500 or $1,000, no royalties, no frills. Every contract was for a single disc, no long-term exclusivities. The biggest name on the box was the composer’s, followed by the work. Performers got small print at the back. Bucking the rules, Heymann reduced the artist to a cipher and sold entirely on piece and price. If one of his artists won an award, he refused to spend on publicity, arguing that the big labels had been ruined by the star system. Promoting an artist would only swell heads and increase fees. The Scrooge-like side of Heymann was balanced by a puritan work ethic and a complete lack of flam. Any money he made on records, Heymann would say, went back into repertoire-though there was enough left over to buy him a $10 million estate overlooking New Zealand’s Mellon Bay, where he moved his family ahead of Hong Kong’s return to China in July 1997. Artists, unaware of his prosperity, churned out Naxos CDs for $1,000 a go, reckoning that the volume of work would keep them occupied and in the public eye. A disc of Beethoven sonatas by the Hungarian pianist Jeno Jando sold a quarter of a million. On any other label the royalties would have built Jando a house in Budapest. On Naxos, publication was its own reward.

Heymann never argued with artists; he preferred not to meet them at all. Musicians, he said, ‘have a certain charisma that lets them push you into doing things that don’t make artistic or business sense’.
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Performers who tried to obtain better conditions-the Franco-American conductor Antonio de Almeida, and the British cellist Raphael Wallfisch – were bluntly dismissed.

At Naxos’ price, most things sold-abstruse Hindemith, in a performance by Franz-Paul Decker and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cleared 18,000 in a year where, on DG or EMI with Abbado, it barely managed three figures. Naxos classical clips crept into such US television series as
ER, Sex in the City
and
The Sopranos
, paying Heymann hundreds of times with each episode’s repetition around the world and nothing to the artists. Heymann, in one territory after another, bought out his distributors and acquired an overlordship of cottage labels that came to him for warehousing. If he saw an esoteric item selling well on Swedish BIS or German CPO, he would swiftly have it recorded for Naxos.

Pigtailed and sport-shirted in a wrinkle-proof business suit, Heymann was refreshingly transparent about the record business, quick to mock the vanity of artists and competitors whose designer items he replicated on the cheap. Musical likes and dislikes were luxuries that he kept out of the office. Scratch him hard and you would find a conventional German
Bildung
founded on the three Bs, but if the bottom ever dropped out of Beethoven Heymann would not scruple to scrap his output. Driven by opus numbers rather than any brilliance of interpretation, his catalogue bulged out into remote corners of repertoire, gaining Naxos anorak appeal. Each national office was given a licence to record local composers. There was a series of British music from Bournemouth and Glasgow, an American line from Nashville and Seattle, with conductors Marin Alsop, Paul Daniel and Dennis Russell Davies. ‘The cost of recording an orchestra today is cheaper than it was in the beginning in Slovakia and Hungary,’ exulted Heymann.
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Early eastern Europe CDs were replaced with western versions and binned at two or three dollars under hypermarket labels of convenience.

Klaus Heymann was on a high, hitting the industry where it hurt most, in the slow-burning backlist. BMG tried to buy a stake in his company for $10 million. Tim Harrold, a Polygram executive, got on a plane to Hong Kong and presented himself to Heymann with two suitcases filled with high-denomination dollar bills. Richard Lyttelton, head of EMI Classics, offered $30 million. Heymann has a letter on file offering $100 million. In every case, the answer was No. ‘I was having too much fun,’ he laughed.
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Jazz, nostalgia, talking books and educational CDs joined the Naxos roster. When the internet kicked in, he offered website access to the entire canon of Western classical music, threatening to corner the market in classical downloads.

The only thing that could have stopped him, he confessed, would have been a swift move by the majors to swamp the market with cheap reissues. Klemperer, Szell and Kubelik for six bucks would have killed stone dead the likes of Gunzenhauser, Wit and Halasz.
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But the labels were in a war with Sony and could not afford to reduce revenues from their grateful dead. Alain Levy issued a prohibition on price-cutting. By the time he relented, the century was over and Heymann had a $50-million turnover and 2,500 masters in his vaults.

With merciless effrontery he proceeded to raid the recorded past for epics that had lapsed from circulation. Success with Kreisler, Casals and Rachmaninov emboldened him to nibble at the margins of mechanical copyright. Richard Lyttelton, on a New York trip, found a Naxos Callas recording on sale, copied from an EMI LP. After issuing a ‘cease and desist’ letter that Heymann ignored, EMI sued. Naxos won the first round but lost in the Court of Appeals at Albany, which vested all rights in the original producer. EMI demanded exemplary damages. Heymann took the case back to the lower court fighting, he said, on a matter of principle.
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Months later he withdrew 150 historic titles from sale in the US ‘as part of an amicable settlement’.
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EMI claimed victory and other majors cheered a debacle for Heymann, who turned seventy in October 2006. ‘I wouldn’t give five million for his catalogue now,’ said Lyttelton scornfully,
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but Heymann
continued to prove that it was possible to succeed in classical recording without a dazzle of stars or a tower full of salary-guzzling executives.

The madness had to end; it was just a matter of who blinked first. Ohga was clearly not having as much fun as he had hoped. Classics was haemorrhaging cash and the rampaging Walter Yetnikoff was proving a painful embarrassment. On 29 June 1991 Ohga wrote to Yetnikoff: ‘you are my old friend and we will stay as friends forever’.
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Ten weeks later Yetnikoff was called to Ohga’s New York office. ‘I’m sorry,’ said his old friend, ‘but this hurts me more than it hurts you.’ ‘Please exit through the side door,’ said the security guard.
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Yetnikoff’s sacking was the signal for slim down. His successor was sharp-suited Tommy Mottola, an A&R hustler who had romanced Morita’s goddaughter and left his wife for pop diva Mariah Carey. Ohga told Mottola he had to get approval on all new signings. Yetnikoff signed a no-attack confidentiality clause, which was supposed to ensure that he was never heard from again. He wound up serving soup at a homeless men’s shelter on the Bowery. Schulhof followed him onto the scrapheap. Morita suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and Ohga, fearing that his time was short (he turned sixty in 1990), sought classical relief. He took up conducting-first in Japan, then with Maazel’s Pittsburgh orchestra and Levine’s at the Met, after giving each of them million-dollar gifts. ‘I cannot find a successor,’ he fretted in February 1992. ‘If I find a good successor, I’ll hand over to him and become a conductor, full time.’
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