Starplayer: The Marketing of Barry Douglas

It was a scene perhaps more suited to a rock concert than a piano recital.

It wasn’t enough for housewife Lorraine Jolly to drag her friend, her husband, her daughter and her friend’s daughter to Barry Douglas’ concert at the Jorgensen Auditorium here a few weeks ago. The minute the music stopped, Jolly raced backstage with her entourage for autographs.

“He’s one of my fantasy people,” Jolly confided a few minutes later, flushed with pleasure as she looked over her 7-year-old daughter Dana’s autograph. “I saw him on TV and fell in love with him right then. I couldn’t wait to see him in person.”

With his brooding sensitivity, the prize-winning, 28-year-old Irish pianist is clearly more than a talented musician to many in his audience. “I don’t think we blatantly try to play up his sex appeal,” said RCA Victor Red Seal marketing executive Peter Elliott. “But it certainly doesn’t hurt that he has this very appealing manner about him.”

Consider the photo that Douglas’ publicist Michael Mace calls “the picture of a lifetime.” New York photographer Ken Howard’s glamorous head shot has long appeared on theater marquees, in performance programs and with newspaper articles. “I asked for something casual,” Howard said about the photo’s origins. “Barry said, ‘How about this?,’ shook his head, put his hand through his hair, looked at me and smiled.”

None of this would matter, of course, if Douglas had not won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1986, the first Westerner to do so since Van Cliburn in 1958. London’s Daily Telegraph called him “one of the most exciting, most absorbing, most thrilling-communicative pianists of his generation.”

The pianist has already recorded four albums since the Moscow win--the last released in April to coincide with his Carnegie Hall debut--and has performed with major orchestras in the United States, Europe and Asia. After a recent 12-city tour of the United States and Canada, Douglas toured Israel with the Israel Philarmonic and is playing several European cities this month before heading off on holiday until his Sept. 2 Los Angeles orchestral debut at the Hollywood Bowl.

Moving through performance halls, post-concert receptions and media interviews, Douglas deftly combines music and marketing. He will talk about his Moscow win, his childhood, his music, whatever you want. When, for example, Natalie Atlas of New York’s WQXR classical music station asked him off-air if it wasn’t a terrible drag to sell himself as well as his music, he smiled warmly and said in his soft Irish brogue: “It is a drag, but I love coming here. “

The continuing self-promotion may be a small price to pay for designer clothes, fine hotels, a flat in an upscale section of London and a squadron of managers, publicists and other advisers usually reserved for pop stars and baseball players.

As music schools and universities turn out thousands of new pianists each year, musicians like Douglas are vying for relatively few spots at the top. The Ft. Worth-based Van Cliburn Foundation has already received more than 700 application requests for its spring 1989 competition--a competition in which Douglas took third place in 1985--and even competition winners have found it a crowded marketplace. This is the story of one man’s odyssey through that musical marketplace.

The Beginning

Long before the 1986 Tchaikovsky awards were announced, rumor had awarded the gold prize to Douglas. “He was so clearly the favorite, it was impossible to get a ticket to his final performance,” said Susan Tilley, chairman of the Cliburn Foundation and someone who did manage to get a ticket. “They had double police lines to hold the crowds back. It was like going to a place where the President was going to speak. The crowd was throwing flowers on the stage, and gave him a long ovation when he played in the finals. . . . He just got mobbed after they announced his name.”

If his win in the Soviet Union was rewarding emotionally, it was a bonanza professionally. Although Douglas had management while still a student at London’s Royal College of Music, and had already worked with the New York-based manager and publicist who represent him today, the Tchaikovsky prize clearly lifted Douglas into the music world’s major leagues.

Even before he won, three rival Japanese promoters and one manager stalked the corridors outside Douglas’ hotel room in Moscow. Douglas didn’t sign with any of them, instead forwarding their cards on to his manager. (And when he did later tour Japan, the promoter and manager he chose weren’t among his Moscow suitors.) But the experience certainly gave him a preview.

“The moment we found out he’d won, we sent telegrams to major orchestras all over the country,” said Douglas’ North American manager Patricia Winter. And the same day those telegrams hit, Winter was ordering printed announcement post cards “that went out to hundreds of people--everyone in the music business.”

But even with that push, conceded Winter, it was slow going. For one thing, Douglas’ win on July 3, 1986, was largely eclipsed in the United States by the Statue of Liberty Centennial weekend. Besides that, said Winter, “One of the problems you face with a Tchaikovsky winner (is that) somebody like Barry is not well-known, and a lot of people say they want to wait and see. There was interest but not major.”

Not yet, anyway.

The Team

Meet the Douglas team:

Michael Mace, “37 and holding,” an eternally patient press agent who began representing Douglas after his third-prize win in the 1985 Van Cliburn Competition in Ft. Worth. At that time, the Van Cliburn Foundation had engaged Mace to represent Douglas. A year later, just weeks before he won the Tchaikovsky, Douglas hired Mace himself. Besides setting up media interviews, Mace also seems quite obliging to perform such unglamorous tasks as driving Douglas from Storrs to New York City after an evening recital or arranging--and often re-arranging--rehearsal times and locations.

Patricia Winter, 46, director of instrumentalists and chamber music at New York’s Thea Dispeker, Inc., management firm. She first heard Douglas at the 1981 Cliburn competitions--at which Douglas received the Jury Discretionary Scholarship Award as that year’s most-promising non-prize winner--and signed him in 1985 after he had snared the Cliburn’s bronze medal. “He didn’t go to Moscow until that summer,” Winter said. “He was somebody who really deserved a major career, (but) at that point, there was no big competition win, he hadn’t played with any major conductors, he wasn’t known in this country and wasn’t from here. But I thought it was worth the challenge.”

Michael Emmerson, 46, president of BMG Classics. The record executive was formerly a London-based manager for musicians like James Galway and a longtime Belfast resident whom Douglas had known through mutual friends. Winning over several other record companies, BMG signed Douglas to a long-term contract on its RCA Victor Red Seal label. “I had complete freedom of repertoire,” said Douglas, “and I knew the president.”

Terry Harrison, 50, the man Douglas calls his “manager for the world.” The London-based manager for such artists as Vladimir Ashkenazy and Radu Lupu, Harrison was suggested by Emmerson when Douglas was ready to change European managers. “He won what is probably the world’s major piano competition, so as a businessman, I’d be crazy not to be attracted to that,” Harrison said.

Harrison was in New York on other business a few weeks ago and joined Douglas’ advisers there for a chat over turkey-and-Brie sandwiches. The pianist was in Manhattan to help drum up press interest for his Carnegie Hall debut, and what better time for the management team to work out some future scheduling, repertory and marketing.

The Carnegie engagement capped a monthlong, 12-city tour, a tour that publicist Mace had been working on since November. He first marked off venues Douglas had been to within the prior nine months, such as Montreal and Atlanta, where repeat features and TV coverage seemed unlikely and instead concentrated in those cities on making sure Douglas was reviewed. He also limited himself to chasing down reviews in Gainesville, Fla., Tarrytown, N.Y., and Santa Barbara, where concerts were sold out “and the promoters didn’t want me to go peddling interviews.”

That left seven cities, and in those cities, Mace went all out for features. In New York, for instance, he was nearly delirious that Douglas’ picture got good play in the New York Times on the Sunday before Carnegie Hall and a Douglas interview appeared in the same paper the very day of the concert.

Douglas was still in charge, however. For instance, the pianist was willing to forgo two days on the beach before a Santa Barbara performance to promote his New York concert date. But after three radio interviews in one morning, Douglas simply refused to perform 45 minutes of music now that would be broadcast this fall. “It’s a question of energy,” he told WQXR producer Atlas, who looked just crestfallen.

Publicist Mace kept tossing out possible solutions, trying to change Douglas’ mind: It is for radio, argued Mace, not the concert hall. Douglas could play the Brahms he knows so well. He has done something similar for the BBC.

“But I knew in advance (about the BBC radio performance),” Douglas said. “I thought it would be talk, not playing, these two days. It takes an awful lot of energy. There’s no audience in the studio. I can’t do it.”

Before leaving WQXR, however, Douglas promised to visit a London recording studio--a visit now scheduled for later this month--and tape a segment, telling Atlas, “Don’t worry. I won’t let you down.” (“I could have done it, of course, but that wasn’t the point,” he said a few days later. “The point was that I had started to wind down and I needed those two or three days to rejuvenate myself.”)

The Campaign

“I know (the marketing) goes on,” Douglas said over lunch one day, “but I don’t get involved. I have to do the odd photo session or interview and I don’t mind that. In moderation. A bit of marketing never did anybody any harm. An artist likes to feel important.”

Pianist Misha Dichter, who took the silver medal in the 1966 Tchaikovsky competition, said during an interview in New York that he has no delusions about being marketed to promoters and the media. Dichter suggested that perhaps people in the classical music business have just become more aggressive about getting attention.

“None of us (used to have) press agents,” said pianist Gary Graffman, who has been performing professionally for 40 years. “It was almost bad taste. Press agents were for Hollywood actors, jazz and pop people and some singers. There were exceptions but very few. Now it’s almost routine.”

Douglas is good at marketing himself as well. The musician probably couldn’t even add up all the times he has told interviewers about playing piano by ear at 4, juggling clarinet, organ, piano and cello well into his teens. As he told Atlas, “There’s a lot of media interest, so if it’s difficult for you to talk about yourself, it’s a big handicap.”

In large measure, said Mace, “a lot of things he needs to do for career-making he knows instinctively. (For) his premiere interviews with major broadcasters and journalists, I made him aware that how he looks is how he will appear on television, and what he says is what we’ll hear on the radio or read in print so that he’s conscious of himself. I’ve met a lot of performers who had to be coached and lead every step of the way on how to dress, what to sing, conversations to stay away from. And he isn’t like that.”

Peddling a classical musician is obviously a lot tougher than peddling his rock counterpart. Only 3% to 5% of the U.S. population is even interested in classical music, Mace said, “so we have a difficult time convincing People magazine or ‘The Tonight Show’ or David Letterman. The competition for slots on those is limited and usually given to those who are seen by the greatest number of people, which means that we in classical music always have the hard-fought battle to get our artists seen, heard or read about. So I have to be sure, when representing an artist like Barry, that his persona be as effective in those places as Ted Danson, Tom Selleck or Paul Scofield.”

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Douglas is handsome. The cover photo on his second recording, which features Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” is what RCA executives call in-house his “Don Johnson look.” There’s something very casual about it, executive Elliott says of the photo in which Douglas faces the camera, his tie askew, his hands in his jacket pockets. And his most recent album, on which he plays the same Beethoven “Hammerklavier” he played on tour, shows him “again, relaxed, casual. There’s a classics-is-not-a-stuffed-shirt feeling to the photograph.”

Elliott readily confirmed that the first Ken Howard photo of Douglas was an incredible hit, saying “When we pitched this photo in the U.S., they went wild. It was a real cute, glamour-boy kind of picture.” Then, asked if RCA was trying to sell Douglas as a sex symbol, Elliott paused: “Subliminally, perhaps we are. Because he’s a good-looking guy, and the women in the audience just go crazy for him.”

They sure do.

Carol Navratil, administrative assistant to the producers of “Cheers,” scooped up daughter Caroline Bordinaro and flew from Los Angeles to New York for the weekend just to attend Douglas’ Carnegie Hall performance. “We’re both terrified to fly, but we just did it,” said Navratil, whose 19-year-old daughter was the first person back stage after the concert. “We were going to bring him some 12-year-old Irish whiskey but were afraid we’d look like groupies.”

RCA has capitalized on Douglas’ personal charm, getting him to the people wherever possible. At a Chicago record store signing, for instance, about 150 people waited in line, some as long as two hours. Besides sending Douglas out to meet and thank the staff at key record stores in New York, RCA has also held lunches for retailers and media to meet the pianist, plus made sure--”even to the point of absurdity,” said Elliott”--of getting key people to his concerts. An example: When Douglas performed in Stockton, RCA’s San Francisco sales manager drove an important San Francisco-based retailer to the concert.

“The public wants two things,” said Emmerson. “They want real big personalities--charisma--and they want musical integrity. Things like technique are taken for granted. You can’t build a career on technique alone. The great thing about Barry is that he has this immense technical facility but at same time has real depth to him and I have to say on stage he has this real charisma.”

Douglas’ first recording, made less than two months after the Moscow win, was of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, a work which Van Cliburn earlier turned into one of the best-selling classical records in history. The record was in stores by November, and despite there being three other releases of the piece at about that time, it sold well, won Douglas a Debut Recording Artist of the Year Award in Ovation magazine and was on the charts for several months. While RCA generally does not release sales figures, Elliott said the record has already sold more than 30,000 copies worldwide--far exceeding the 10,000 sales customary for a first album--and is still selling.

One might expect so, given all the promotion. In October, 1986, promotional materials went to 400 RCA staffers, said RCA marketing executive Elliott, “to let them know the excitement we felt about Barry. If we sell our own people--from me to my sales manager to the RCA sales force, to the promotional people and merchandisers--it all translates to the public who buys the record, attends the concerts and casts its vote for your man.”

A month later came a screening of a coming PBS special of the Moscow competition. An elegant, wine-colored invitation went out to key RCA personnel, record retailers and press. About 250 people watched the show at the nearby McGraw-Hill auditorium, then moved into an adjacent room whose walls were decorated with huge posters of Douglas and whose tables were laden with such things as Russian caviar and vodka.

“The minute you sat down in that screening room and saw the video, you saw why he won the competition,” said Denise Pineau, manager of the Classical Music Center at Barnes & Noble Discount Bookstores, Inc. “Any retailer who walked out of there not excited about the product does not belong in retail.”

Retailers also walked out carrying press kits loaded with photos, bios, press releases, post cards about the telecast and compact discs. (People who didn’t attend still got press kits and CDs.) And at evening’s end, Douglas autographed every picture in the room to give to retailers as a special display piece.

One of those photos still hangs over the stairwell at Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue. “(His was) a wonderful interpretation of the piece, and the sound quality was very good,” said Pineau, who for days on end played Douglas’ recording in the store during the lunch hour and the heavily trafficked 5-to-6 p.m. period. “It made a great Christmas gift and there was enough press about him at the time that it took off. It was one of the top five (selling albums) for the Christmas season, maybe the top one for a solid month.”

Douglas and his record company were also blessed with good timing. The PBS special on the 1986 Tchaikovsky competition, which drew an audience of more than 4 million people nationally, aired the first week of December and was augmented by heavy print and radio ads. Douglas was “the priority” for RCA Red Seal from Thanksgiving to Christmas, said Elliott, and every company ad during that period featured Douglas--prominently.

Caught up in memory, Elliott was leafing through a 2-inch-thick file folder on that first ad campaign. “Basically, when you launch an artist like this, you are launching a career so you tend to spend more and advertise heavier than you would for subsequent recordings,” he said. “The launch paid off.”

The Tour

Douglas, who performed about 65 concerts during the 1987-88 season and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles doing so, said being on the road “doesn’t bother me at all. I’m very careful and experienced about my limitations and capabilities as regards scheduling and traveling. I know what I can and can’t do and I don’t overstep the mark.” Or as manager Winter put it: “ A lot of competition winners want to make hay while the sun shines and go out and play 120 (concerts) a year worldwide, booking themselves to death, and Barry will not do that.”

When WQXR’s Bob Sherman asked Douglas about how he avoided the trap of too much too soon, Douglas quickly responded, “If you have some will power and some sort of artistic goal, and you stick to that, then there really cannot be too many problems. The problem is if you get tempted by either earning a lot of money or you want the prestige, or some sort of huge career, that the danger is, of course, you do too much.”

Sherman wasn’t about to let that one go by, asking, “And you’re not tempted by the big career or the prestige and the money and everything?”

“I’m not actually,” replied Douglas. “I love playing music. I love to be involved in music. And if I decide one week I’m going to do five concerts, it’s because each has a different reason. For instance, this is a piece I really want to play with orchestra, or I’ve got to play with that conductor because I admire him so much. Or I always wanted to go to that place, and I really would like to combine playing and visiting this place.”

Essentially it works like this: An artist like Douglas gives his management a block of time, and first they put in the big dates. Some dates are obvious, like Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, where he will play with conductor Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony next year, or Hollywood Bowl, where he will play in September. After that, add in the concerts that pay well, have good audiences or simply help in getting him from one end of the country to the other.

Douglas’ Los Angeles orchestral debut will be an appearance with the Pittsburgh Symphony and Eduardo Mata on Sept. 2 and 3 for the Bowl’s Tchaikovsky evenings--playing, of course, the first piano concerto--just before he goes on to New Zealand and Australia. His Los Angeles recital debut is scheduled for March 8, 1989, at El Camino College in Torrance.

A potential Los Angeles date fell through last season because of scheduling problems, Winter said, adding that she was unable to work out a Douglas recital in Los Angeles this season. She instead booked him at Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre--where he was billed on a marquee as “the world renowned pianist Barry Douglas”--a few days before he was scheduled to perform in Phoenix.

Thousands of performers like Douglas traverse the nation’s hundreds of auditoriums and concert halls, picking up fees that range from $500 to $35,000. That fee is usually set per season and is unlikely to change with the size or location of the hall, except when a musician’s management is willing to bend for a major orchestra or particularly attractive geographic routing.

The more recognition, the higher the fee. While Douglas’ fee is reportedly between $5,000 and $7,000, his income didn’t jump until the Tchaikovsky win. “Believe me,” said Winter, “when we were first booking Barry, we were thrilled if we could get a couple thousand dollars.”

Although nobody wanted to turn down concerts just after the Moscow win, Douglas’ managers now seem sanguine about Douglas taking nearly three months off this summer, even though it meant passing up a date with the Chicago Symphony. But they did not pass up an invitation from the Israel Philharmonic during a previously scheduled rest time in April. “We decided to accept that because the atmosphere for concerts in Israel is terrific,” said Harrison. “And (music director) Zubin Mehta had asked for him, and if Zubin asks for him, we should say yes. It’s a good sign.”

The Debut

On April 8, Douglas made his Carnegie Hall debut--a concert that came about not from winning the 1986 Tchaikovsky competition but rather from placing third in the 1985 Cliburn competition. The Van Cliburn Foundation was a co-sponsor of the recital and post-concert reception, and Cliburn himself was among a contingent from Ft. Worth who flew in for the occasion. So did Douglas’ Belfast-based mother-the-midwife and sister-the-doctor.

The musician arrived at the hall alone that evening, heading straight through the back-stage door to his dressing room about an hour before the performance. Greeting press and other guests backstage instead was a jubilant Mace, pacing the floor and looking like he couldn’t make the clock move fast enough to 8 p.m.

On the program were Liszt’s Apres une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata, Brahms’ Fantasies, Opus 16, and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. The latter piece runs nearly 50 minutes and is rarely performed, even by far more experienced musicians for, as critic Donal Henahan wrote in the New York Times, “the fact that it can eat a good pianist alive lends a certain shiver of anticipation to any performance.”

Douglas had played the same program several times before arriving at Carnegie, and he strode to the piano with the same confidence he had shown in such cities as Santa Barbara and Storrs. And when he finished, the sold-out audience, dotted with friends as well as critics and other musicians, gave him three curtain calls. “I knew we had a hit,” Mace said later, “when the I heard the gallery stomp its feet.”

After the recital, at least 100 people wedged into a stairwell leading back stage. There were young women in strapless gowns, older women in furs, girls carrying roses in tubes and a young woman with a tape of one of his Canadian concerts. At the door to the Maestros’ Suite, a piano behind him laden with at least a half-dozen floral arrangements, Douglas signed programs for admirers like Pam Worcester, a 19-year-old pianist from Los Angeles who first got an autograph for herself, then for a 13-year-old fan back home.

Festivities next moved a few blocks uptown to the swank Metropolitan Club where Douglas was still greeting well-wishers well past 1 a.m. It was, in fact, nearly 2 when Harrison walked the pianist out through the deserted lobby, giving him a few pointers about the Israel Philharmonic before Douglas went off to play there in two days.

How did the evening go, Douglas was asked as he headed out to dinner with a few friends. ‘I think it went very well,” he said with a smile.

The Future

Currently touring Europe, Douglas will break for the summer after an appearance next month at London’s Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. His fifth album, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, recorded last winter with the London Symphony, is expected to be released this fall. And he plays a pianist in John Schlesinger’s “Madame Sousatzka,” which stars Shirley MacLaine and is due out from Cineplex Odeon Films later this year.

Winter said Douglas is almost completely booked for the 1989-90 season in North America for orchestral performances and recitals. Ninety percent of those engagements “are with major orchestras and important conductors and that really is unusual for a young artist,” she said. The musician “has to make sure he’s returning to prestigious places in N.Y. and London on a regular basis,” said Emmerson. “It keeps the air in the tire.”

Harrison, who meets with Douglas once a month to discuss dates and future plans, intends “to try to get Barry to reach his mid-30s without being jaded and with him having had time to develop and reach his full potential, which I think is enormous. I think instrumentalists can never get to their full potential in the first 10 or 15 years of their careers. Conductors take 30.”

Publicist Mace has his own long-range plans for the pianist. “Now I have to build on the successes he made around the country on this tour, which were substantial, and I have to build his visibility with the general public who I think will find him a most interesting personality and make sure we don’t overexpose him, which is always a danger. And build on his musical personality. I think to talk about what may be in the cards--for me to talk about specifics--is defeatist and bad luck, but I do have a long-range plan.”

Douglas, in turn, cites repertory plans. He wants to perform the complete concertos of such composers as Beethoven or Liszt in concert, “and if they work, as recordings. But this is the very distant future. I’m at the beginning of my recording career and finding out what I’m most close to. It’s very difficult to recreate in the studio what you do in the concert hall.”

Meanwhile, reviews land on Mace’s desk daily. Douglas “stunned a rapt audience” in Cleveland, turned the Chattanooga Symphony season closer into a “spectacular event,” and led a Washington Post critic to remark that “his workmanship was finely tailored and his emotional command penetrating throughout.” An Atlanta Constitution critic found him “fully up to the terrifying demands of the ‘Hammerklavier.’ ”

In New York, however, the critics were less enthusiastic. While referring at one point to Douglas’ “heroic intentions,” critic Henahan concluded that “too much of the recital could be faulted for its lack of the distinctive personality that one has a right to expect of an internationally successful young pianist.” New York magazine’s Peter G. Davis remarked that “At the moment, much of Douglas’ letter-perfect playing has that impersonal, glazed-over quality one hears in the work of so many competition winners.” And despite a summary statement that Douglas “ultimately made a favorable impression,” the New York Post’s Harris Goldsmith also wrote a mixed review.

How did Douglas respond to all that?

“Historically,” said Mace, “Barry doesn’t read reviews, and it doesn’t bother me much what critics say. He, of course, wants to be liked, and he questioned me from Israel after his first concert--which went very well, I heard--and he asked me what reviews were out. (I told him) that three had been in the paper and they were basically mixed.

“And his question to me was could I get any quotes from the three that could be used positively for him and I said, yes. And he said, fine. And that was the end of the discussion.”

Times librarian Tom Lutgen contributed to the research in this article.