The Life and Death of Classical Music Read Online Free

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.’ 16
    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 insteadof 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. 17
    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