Making Music, Not Money : U.S. orchestras make recordings for many reasons--prestige, promotion and tie-ins--it’s rarely for profit

When an orchestra goes into the recording studio, it isn’t just to make music.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic makes recordings for artistic quality. The Milwaukee Symphony records because it needs visibility in the face of stiff competition from other regional orchestras. The San Francisco Symphony records to enhance its reputation and build prestige. The Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic records for the repertory--works by obscure women composers that would remain unheard otherwise. Others use recordings as a marketing tool, still others as a way to improve their players.

With few exceptions, orchestras do not record to make money. For the largest orchestras with the $20-million-plus budgets, the recording fees and royalties are mere drops in the bucket. Most fees go to jet-set star conductors and soloists who have contracts with the half-dozen big international labels.

Interviews with orchestra executives and conductors around the nation indicate that each organization has specific objectives in mind with the release of each recording. Recordings are used as promotional items, for fund raising, for commemorative issues and sometimes just to remind the community that the orchestra is still there.

Needless to say, the Los Angeles Philharmonic isn’t driven to record, unlike some other orchestras. In 1987-88 the Philharmonic’s recording fees and royalties were a paltry $213,000, compared to a budget of $26 million. The last time the Los Angeles Philharmonic made a recording was in Royce Hall with Andre Previn conducting a program of French works for the Philips label last April, the same day Previn abruptly resigned as music director. Ironically, the next Philharmonic recording sessions will be a year later--Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony and Mahler’s Fourth for Telarc--and with none other than Previn on the podium.

Managing director Ernest Fleischmann said that the Philharmonic “makes three to four recordings every year, which is about as many as time permits.” He added that this “is also about as much as we can afford because we lose money on recordings.”

He emphasized that artistic quality is the primary reason that the Philharmonic records. “Basically one shouldn’t make recordings for the sake of recordings,” he said. “I think a recording needs to be the result of a long, considered and loving collaboration on specific repertoire between a conductor and an orchestra. That’s when recording becomes a really valuable experience.”

Fleischmann gave a number of additional reasons to record: “There is a kind of prestige from being on a distinguished label such as Deutsche Grammophon or Telarc. Also, recordings are important to the morale of the musicians, a sort of keeping up with the Joneses. The recordings we have made with Mehta, Giulini, Bernstein and Previn give our musicians important stature which, although perhaps not of direct financial benefit, increases our national and international standing.”

Fleischmann stressed the importance of recordings to touring successfully abroad: “In Japan, for example, not only are the fees you can command higher if you have made recordings, but it is also very difficult to tour at all without having any recordings in the catalogue.”

And in the crucial area of fund raising, Fleischmann acknowledged that recordings “confer a kind of legitimacy, a stamp of approval which a substantial contributor is not uninterested in.”

A recording session is expensive for an orchestra. The Philharmonic paid $268,000 for its last three recordings conducted by Previn. Telarc and Philips paid a total of $144,000 to the Philharmonic, leaving a deficit of nearly 50%. But Fleischmann said that “in virtually every case in the United States (recording) companies don’t pay the total costs.”

American orchestras rarely receive up-front payments of any kind. Instead, most receive payment in the form of royalties, negotiated in most cases according to strict scale determined by the American Federation of Musicians. Although most monies come from royalties, they represent only a small fraction of those orchestras’ annual income: The Boston Symphony reported royalties of $274,000 during the 1988-89 season, the Chicago Symphony more than $280,000, the Philadelphia Orchestra $595,000 and the New York Philharmonic $665,000.

Many managements pay a token advance flat fee to their musicians, against future royalties, under a clause known as the Electronic Media Guarantee. This binds the musicians to any recording contract the orchestra can negotiate. In the case of the San Francisco Symphony, for example, now in the midst of a 12-recording program for London, each musician receives $50 a week.

For recording companies, the dollar drives the deal. According to Telarc spokeswoman Valerie Thorson, recording with the top American orchestras “needs to be done because it continually establishes and reaffirms the credibility of the label. And basically,” Thorson said, ‘orchestral releases are very profitable, at least for us.”

Meanwhile, orchestras across the nation cite various reasons for recording.

In the Midwest, two orchestras have launched aggressive programs for improving their regional visibility and prestige.

In Minneapolis, Edo de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra wanted to establish their credentials and recently embarked on a three-year project with London-based Virgin Classics.

“One of the criteria for orchestras aspiring to the elite is recording,” said Minnesota’s general manager Mark Volpe. “The conductor is a factor too. Most come with certain strengths and want to leave their mark, do something special. Edo also wants to be known as an orchestra builder and, if you’re trying to improve an orchestra, recording is one of the best means of doing so.”

Minnesota’s program, which will have a minimum of six recordings, will be devoted to Mahler and Richard Strauss, not usually big sellers, however. Virgin has sweetened the pot with a crossover release with big sales potential, “Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days.”

As an additional benefit, Volpe said the recording sessions are expected to result in higher quality playing: “Recording is an activity which is very intense, involving a lot of self-scrutiny and evaluation; if you’re trying to improve an orchestra, recording is one of the best means of doing so because knowing that it’s for posterity creates a different type of tension from live performances.”

The Milwaukee Symphony, wanting to assert themselves in a competitive market locally, has fashioned a unique relationship with Koss Classics, which also gives them international exposure. General manager Gary Good explained:

“We are in a competitive market with the orchestras in Minneapolis and Chicago and there are few ways we can directly impact that competition. The question was whether we could we find the money to do it. That’s where it got creative.”

The Milwaukee Symphony got together with Koss Stereophones, which agreed to form a new Classics division to make recordings. These would be distributed through its international network of headphone dealers. Koss also put up production monies while the musicians, working within the framework of their American Federation of Musicians agreement, converted part of their salary into offsetting some of the recording costs. The Women’s League gave the orchestra a $90,000 grant to get the two-year, eight recording program under way.

“Given sales of 5,000 per unit,” Good says, “and setting aside the royalty income, at the end of four years, we should have enough money to fund an ongoing recording program. We’ve already sold 1,000 copies of our Beethoven’s Ninth--to Gov. Tommy Thompson, who wants to give them out as mementos at the Midwest Governors Conference in October.”

Other organizations also have recognized the value of commemorative recordings. The Dallas Symphony’s new recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony for Pro Arte, taken from live performances at the historic opening of $84-million Meyerson Hall in September, is being sold as a souvenir. But commemorative issues are not a new tactic. In 1964, the Los Angeles Philharmonic issued works by Respighi and Richard Strauss on RCA after the opening of the Music Center.

In Birmingham, Ala., where the Alabama Symphony is preparing to record William Kraft’s Piano Concerto early this month for New York-based New World Recordings, general manager Edward Wolff said that the recording would help ticket sales by reinforcing the orchestra’s image. “The fact is, a recording gives us an identification with (high) quality,” he said.

The noble motive of recording for posterity something not otherwise available occasionally motivates an orchestra to assemble in the recording studio.

Three years ago, the Billings, Mont., Symphony, which gives 10 concerts a year on a budget of $213,000, recorded Walter Piston’s Clarinet Concerto (still the only recording in the catalogue) for Philadelphia-based Contemporary Recording Studios. Explained music director Uri Barnea: “Clarinetist John Russo, the president of CRS, knew that I was very interested in contemporary music. So, we engaged him for a concert, put extra time into the rehearsals and, the day after the concert, recorded it along with some other music.”

Barnea said the orchestra paid for the rental of the hall and the music, and the production costs were paid by CRS. “Our orchestra is not a union orchestra,” Barnea said, “but even so, with royalties to the publisher, the cost to us was more than $10,000.”

In San Francisco, the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic and conductor JoAnn Falletta are record specialized works by female composers. Fueled by an $85,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (to eventually total $340,000), the Bay Area orchestra embarked on a two-volume recording project last year, the first released last week and the second session due in 1992. The program of previously unrecorded works by 17th- and 18th-Century female composers such as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Madelena Lombardini-Sirmen, Marianne Martinez and Camilla di Rossi was recorded at Lucasfilms’ Skywalker Ranch in May and will be released on the Providence, R.I.-based Newport Classic label.

“This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time,” executive director Miriam Abrams said. “The only way to get these works into the repertory, since we cannot afford to tour beyond the Bay Area, is through recordings. That way the music will be available over the airwaves and in the classrooms.”

The NEA grant money covered the costs of researching and reconstructing the music, producing the recording, and choosing the record company. “Since we’re not the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Abrams said, “we didn’t have the major labels beating down our doors. We selected Newport because they do both unusual and standard works, the latter in non-standard ways.”

At the San Francisco Symphony, executive director Peter Pastreich cited the importance of recordings the orchestra and conductor Herbert Blomstedt have made on the London label: “Recordings are a source of reputation,” he said. “If a distinguished soloist with limited American touring time were trying to choose between two orchestras, neither of which he had personal experience, the one he’s heard about is the one he’s likely to choose--and he’s more likely to have heard about the one which has made the most recordings!

“We find that on tour, many more people come backstage than used to. It’s a small thing but it says they’re beginning to look at us in a different way.” This summer, the orchestra’s European tour will include the Salzburg Festival for the first time, plus festivals in Edinburgh, Berlin and Besancon. “I feel reasonably confident,” Pastreich said, “that if we hadn’t had the recording contract, we’d have been much less of a contender.”

For the nation’s orchestras, recordings represent an expensive and rarely profitable method of achieving important goals. But the struggle to make recordings goes on, even though a discouraging number end up ignored in the bargain bins or melted down by the manufacturer. As Fleischmann says, making recordings is “part of the function of a major orchestra.”