Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Recording Industry

Norman Lebrecht

Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, London 2007.

ISBN 0713999578, 324 pages.

Reviewed by Ken Nielsen

In his latest book, Norman Lebrecht reports that the classical record industry is dead. Not threatened, not in trouble, not in crisis but stone dead.

The news has not reached my credit card. In the past twelve months I have bought recorded music:

·          From a specialist shop in Sydney, some of it by order and some on impulse.

·          Through several Australian and overseas-based online shops.

·          At concerts of ensembles I enjoyed in performance.

·          Online in digital form from iTunes and other suppliers.

As well, each month or so I receive a two-CD set of Bach Cantatas recorded by John Eliot Gardiner in 2000 and now sold on subscription and in record shops.

Lebrecht’s argument is that what used to be called the major record labels have substantially cut back the number of releases. He dismisses the practice of organisations like Gardiner’s and the London Symphony Orchestra releasing their own recordings as vanity publishing. Labels such as Hyperion, Chandos and Harmonia Mundi, which make up a fairly large part of my recent purchases, are dismissed as cottage industry. Naxos does not count because it does not pay artists as well as the majors used to. Downloaded music will never match the quality of a CD.

As with all of his books, Lebrecht identifies the villains. They are the greedy conductors who demanded exorbitant fees, the labels who produced too many recordings of standard repertoire and, finally, the shareholders in the record companies who expected profits and a return on their investments.

The first part of the book – really a long essay rather than a book – tells the story of the classical recording industry over the past eighty years. Lebrecht uses secondary sources, so many of his anecdotes will be familiar to those who have read other books and articles on the subject. There is one story – of the group of label owners rioting and shouting “the truth is in the groove, the truth is in the groove” when shown the early CD at a trade meeting in Athens 1981 – that I simply do not believe. It has been told several times in other books and perhaps something like it happened, but I will bet that the story has been exaggerated and improved over the years. With this and some of the other snippets in the book, I suspect that Lebrecht is following the old journalistic rule that some stories are too good to check.

The second part of the book consists of a list of 100 recordings that Lebrecht considers to be milestones in the history of the industry, and another 20 that he thinks should not have been made. In his introduction to the first list, Lebrecht writes that he makes no claim that the list comprises the ‘best’ recordings made, but the cover of the book tells us that this is exactly what they are. Whatever they are, the lists are only of interest to someone who shares Lebrecht’s tastes and are certainly not worth half the price of the book.

Of course, what we are seeing is a radical change – a rebirth, perhaps – of the record industry, not a death. Two main technological developments have brought this about. First, recording technology has become simpler and much less expensive. The first half of a concert of Gardiner’s orchestra in London last year was recorded and CDs burnt for sale at the end. I have one of these and the quality is excellent. Second, marketing and distribution has been made easier by the internet. This applies not only to companies selling in digital form for downloading (e.g. iTunes), but also to those that can keep deep-catalogue centralised stock somewhere in the world and respond quickly to internet orders (Amazon, MDT and Buywell).

Where all this will end up is impossible to predict. It is almost certain, though, that music lovers will get more choice and greater availability of recorded music, which to me is a very exciting thing.

To understand all this, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail is much more insightful and valuable than Lebrecht’s book.

Lebrecht’s thesis on the death of the industry is rather like a person who, seeing fewer horses and carriages in the streets, announced the death of the transport industry.