September 14, 2004

A Merger of Labels Puts Trove in Limbo

n the weeks since American and European authorities approved the merger of the recorded-music businesses of Sony and Bertelsmann , two of the world's five biggest record companies, virtually all the discussion has been about what the deal means in the vast popular-music market, with barely a mention of the labels' classical catalogs.

From a corporate perspective that is probably as it should be: a hit pop disc, after all, will sell in the millions, but a classical release can sail to the top of the Billboard chart with sales of 10,000.

Yet along with the high-profile catalogs of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Franz Ferdinand (on the Sony side) and Elvis Presley, Avril Lavigne and Outkast (on the BMG side), the vaults of each company hold a priceless trove of master tapes that document the work of many of the greatest musicians of the last century. More broadly, these recordings offer an overview of American musical life through the late 1970's, when both companies began to lose interest in recording the top American orchestras, and European labels like Decca and Deutsche Grammophon moved in to take up the cause.

No one at either Sony or BMG, either in their classical divisions or among corporate spokesmen (to whom journalists are immediately referred by workers terrified to talk, lest they earn an instant spot on the list of 2,000 employees expected to be sacked), has been able to say what will become of the labels' classical operations. So faintly do the classics register on the corporate radar that BMG's spokesman, when told that his company had recorded the likes of Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein, said he was pleasantly surprised to hear it.

The future of the labels' backlists, alone, makes the decisions significant. Sony Classical, formerly known as Columbia and CBS Masterworks, owns the hundreds of recordings Leonard Bernstein made with the New York Philharmonic from the 1950's into the 70's. Prominent, too, are aging but revered recordings by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra; the violinists Isaac Stern, David Oistrakh and Zino Francescatti; the Juilliard String Quartet; and the pianists Rudolf Serkin and Vladimir Horowitz. And the extensive series of composer-directed recordings by Stravinsky, Copland and others, undertaken in the 1960's, shows how visionary the label once was.

In its heyday, RCA Red Seal, BMG's classical arm, also recorded a healthy chunk of the Horowitz catalog, as well as many Ormandy-Philadelphia recordings. For decades RCA recorded the Chicago Symphony, with Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon and Georg Solti on the podium, and the Boston Symphony, with Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch and Erich Leinsdorf. Its archives also include much of the recorded legacy of Arturo Toscanini, leading both the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony.

Those lists, of course, barely skim the surface. Both labels once ran important opera programs. The combined label's current stars would include the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; the pianists Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Murray Perahia and Evgeny Kissin; the violinists Joshua Bell and Midori, and the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and the early music ensemble Sequentia.

The merger of Sony and BMG puts two of the record world's oldest rivals under one roof. RCA, through various permutations, can trace its artists and repertory program back to Fred Gaisberg, an 1890's defector from the Columbia Phonograph Company. But by the time both passed from American ownership in the 1980's, these venerable companies had been through tough times. Both had virtually abandoned operatic recording, and the rising cost of recording American orchestras led both to drop their contracts with the major American ensembles in favor of British, German and French orchestras that work less expensively. And both had devoted themselves increasingly to crossover projects - pop-tinged hybrids that sold briskly and briefly as novelties, but contributed little to the discourse of classical composition or performance and were regarded by most collectors as embarrassments.

So as sad as it was to watch what could only be seen as the abandonment of classical music by American corporations that had once prized it, there was also the hope that Sony, based in Japan, and Bertelsmann, based in Germany, might value these labels' classical lines in ways that their American owners did not.

For a time, that seemed to be the case, thanks in part to a spike in classical sales occasioned by the introduction of compact discs in the 1980's, and the subsequent rush by classical music fans to replace their favorite LP's with CD reissues.

As it turned out, the CD boom leveled off, and expansive new programs proved too costly for Bertelsmann and Sony. The Sony managers were laid off in 1995, and Peter Gelb moved from Columbia Artists Management (where his principal projects were Horowitz and a video line) to Sony. Mr. Gelb has essentially dismantled the line, now called Sony Classical, as a classical label. Although soloists like Mr. Ma and Mr. Ax occasionally release purely classical recordings, the push has been toward crossover projects. Bizarre releases, including an opera aria program ventured by Michael Bolton, the pop singer, have been vigorously promoted. So have soundtracks, an increasingly large share of the label's output ever since it had a freak hit with James Horner's score for "Titanic."

At BMG, things have been even more dire. Over the last five years, the label has dropped most of its stars, including the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the conductors Leonard Slatkin and Sir Colin Davis, and the flutist Sir James Galway.

The company's current roster lists fewer than 10 performers, including Mr. Kissin, the soprano Vesselina Kasarova and the tenor Ramón Vargas. There is also, at the moment, no one really in charge. Gilbert Hetherwick, who moved to BMG from EMI Classics less than two years ago, has been administering the company's American arm and has undertaken an ambitious plan to remaster some of the company's great recordings in Super Audio, a new high-definition multichannel format.

But Mr. Hetherwick has not had full control of the company's recording program. That authority has rested with Nicholas Firth, who is also the head of Bertelsmann's music publishing arm. Because publishing is not part of the Sony-BMG merger, neither is Mr. Firth. It seems likely therefore that Mr. Gelb will end up at the helm of the combined company. He has proved, after all, that he can rake in heaps of money with soundtracks and crossovers, and although he has whittled the straightforward classical recording program to a trickle, he has kept a significant chunk of the back catalog in circulation, generally at reduced prices.

But unless the company's new recording program grows momentously - which is unlikely, given current corporate priorities - the most interesting and important material here is in the back catalog. Most of it was recorded decades ago for a fraction of what it costs to make a recording today, and because the greatest recordings have been steady if modest sellers, their costs were amortized long ago.

It would be sensible to put the back catalogs in the care of someone with a good grasp of what they hold, someone who understands them and is prepared to treat them as the cultural legacy that they are. And although the temptation will be to merge the catalogs, there is something to be said for letting the CBS and RCA backlists stand as separate pillars of the new company. They should remain as tributes to the producers who built CBS and RCA into the great labels they were, and as a reminder to the current crop of executives of what was once possible.