Do-It-Yourself, Classical Style

Maestro Colin Davis, or Sir Colin as he’s known in these parts, had every reason to welcome the new year in January.

His 2001 recording of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens,” with his band, the London Symphony Orchestra, had already made many of the best-of year-end lists.

Then came the Grammy nominations: The CD, recorded on a fledgling label called LSO Live, garnered three nominations--for best classical album, best opera recording and best engineered recording.

And that wasn’t even the beauty part.

Davis and company had created this “Les Troyens” entirely on their own.

LSO Live is the London Symphony Orchestra’s private label. Other orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, have gotten into the record business, issuing special sets of recordings from their archives, with limited distribution, but LSO Live is a different kind of enterprise: an orchestra going head to head with the commercial record business--and winning.

What makes it especially delicious--what “makes them feel rotten,” says the maestro, “and us really good”--is the nyah-nyah-nyah factor: The major record labels have deserted classical music in droves in the last decade.

Davis, music director at the LSO since 1995, is now 74, and he has seen plenty of ups and downs in his trade over the years. But with LSO Live in his back pocket, he can afford to see the current situation as a bigger problem for “them” than for “us.”

“Since big business has removed its money from classical music, the actual standard of the orchestras has gone up,” he says, with evident satisfaction.

“The big companies have missed the peak of the profession in some way. They were interested in making money and they exploited the repertory and the orchestras and the artists, [and then] they chucked it in. But, you know, we’re still there. Big business isn’t going to destroy classical music. It didn’t invent it in the first place.”

The Barbican Centre is an imposing citadel of reinforced concrete in central London, a city within the city, with countless flats surrounding a huge arts center, within which sits the LSO’s wood-lined concert hall.

The orchestra almost matches the center as a monumental force. There are five major orchestras in London, but the LSO is literally at the center of things, giving more concerts than any of the others and maintaining its claim to being the most recorded orchestra in the world. That’s LSO on Diana Krall’s latest hit record, “The Look of Love,” and that will be the LSO, under John Williams’ direction on his score for the fifth installment of “Star Wars.”

It is just that recording strength that turned the LSO into a do-it-yourself operation. Since its first recording in 1911, it had been a major player in classical recording as well as film music and other genres. Over coffee in the Barbican Centre recently, Chaz Jenkins, general manager of LSO Live, laid out the saga. The push toward self-recording came two years ago, when the orchestra’s diminishing classical recording schedule couldn’t be ignored.

“If you look at the LSO’s schedules in the ‘80s and right back through its history, it has had constant recording sessions. A typical day would be morning and afternoon at Abbey Road [studios], and an evening doing a concert. Quite often, the concerts would be done here, and they’d do the same concert at Abbey Road. Come the ‘90s, the number of recordings went down and down as companies came to re-evaluate classical recordings in the current market.”

The real impetus for LSO Live, he says, “all stems from the line that we think, generally, what we’re doing in concert is the very best the LSO has ever performed--the best conductors, the best soloists--and since the standard of playing is better than ever, we thought it was a shame that what we’re doing doesn’t get regularly recorded.”

It doesn’t hurt that the LSO is used to going its own way. The 98-year-old ensemble was London’s first self-governing orchestra; there is no outside board. As Jenkins says, “In the LSO, technically, I’m an employee of the musicians.”

The label was actually the brainchild of LSO general manager Clive Gillinson, once a cellist in the ranks before he was drafted for the “temporary” task of aiding an ailing administration (“I switched loyalties,” he explains). Starting in the late ‘90s, Gillinson looked at the same history that Jenkins cites, and decided that the orchestra should take matters into its own hands.

He faced a few obstacles. First was the musician’s union contract. It called for the orchestra, conductors and soloists to be paid a fee upfront for recording sessions, which made costs of experimenting prohibitive. In 1999, however, the contract was eased. In the case of live recordings, the musicians could be paid on a royalty basis. If the CDs made money, the players and guest artists would too.

Gillinson wasn’t unhappy about having to record live; he knew it would cut down on expenses all around. He figured the orchestra could reasonably afford to hire freelance engineers, producers and equipment to record in Barbican Hall, and, as Davis says, live recordings produce “a tension which you don’t always get in the studio. You can get the thing right in the studio, but you can’t get that tightrope feeling, that which creates the excitement. I think that we’ve captured some of that in these recordings.”

Distribution--getting albums shipped into retail stores--was a different sort of obstacle, one that, at first, Gillinson decided to avoid altogether.

“We thought it would [be years] before we’d have enough [product] to get distribution,” Jenkins say. “We decided early on that we’d just sell our recordings via our Web site [and at concerts]. It seemed a sensible idea. We had a lot of traffic on our Web site, with people booking tickets.”

LSO Live got underway in 1999, recording concert performances during its regular season. From the beginning, the idea was to cherry-pick the most interesting repertory and artist lineups. There was some early serendipity, from Gillinson’s standpoint, because the orchestra had scheduled a series of Berlioz programs, conducted by Davis. “He is, I suppose, the premiere Berlioz conductor in the world,” Gillinson says.

Starting in January 2000, the label released Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Issues of Brahms, and the beginning of the Berlioz series began followed quickly. To Jenkins, one sign of success came quickly. “Within a couple of months, we started getting approached by distributors,” he says. “We only had three titles out by then.” At present, the albums are available in retail stores in 10 countries. Next stop: the U.S.--Harmonia Mundi has just picked up the label for distribution here.

The five-part Berlioz series culminated with “Les Troyens,” which was recorded in late 2000 and released by spring 2001. It’s a good example of what LSO Live can achieve. Fast turnaround from live concert to living-room listening; minimal cost (it was recorded over a few performances, with minimal editing to clear up audience noise), creating a four-disc set that sold for $30 (comparable studio sets cost close to $65).

Neither Gillinson nor Jenkins will reveal specifics on sales, profit or expenses on any of their titles. Jenkins says that LSO Live’s goals are to sell 10,000 to 20,000 copies in the first nine months of a release. According to a British music industry trade paper, “Les Troyens” sold “well above the 30,000 mark” in that period. Are the musicians getting royalties? Not yet, says Jenkins, but by July, when the orchestra’s fiscal year ends, he expects that to change.

Gillinson says that while the orchestra isn’t getting rich off the recordings, it isn’t going broke either. And he points out several ways in which the do-it-yourself impulse is good for business: “There is the preservation and dissemination of the most important work you do as an orchestra, where you can decide and not simply be responding to what a record company might want to do in terms of its overall catalog.” Also, “it means you can build your brand internationally, a key thing for the future. Major arts organizations as well as artists are going to move toward the area where they own their own copyright and are actually the licensor of their own product.”

The shifting and fragile nature of the recording industry has shaken up musicians in every category in the past decade, but perhaps nowhere as radically as in classical music.

Sedgwick Clark, producer of several of the New York Philharmonic archival releases, points out that the relationship between labels and orchestras has never been more unstable.

“None of the big orchestras in the United States now have [major] contracts. The last was the Chicago Symphony, and they recently made their final recording for Teldec, and that’s that. [Music director Daniel] Barenboim and Chicago do not have a contract anymore. Philadelphia lost its EMI contract. Cleveland lost its Decca London contract. The [New York] Philharmonic lost its Teldec contract. Boston has had non-exclusive contracts with Deutsche Grammophon and Phillips, and has made recordings for Sony, as well.”

Closer to home, the San Francisco Symphony is “currently in negotiations to extend their relationship” with BMG, according to the orchestra’s executive director, Brent Assink. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has an ongoing agreement with Sony Classical, although it isn’t the kind of deal that guarantees a set number of CDs will be recorded.

Once upon a time, labels had an almost philanthropic attitude toward classical music. “It used to be that the classical market was supported by the pop business and by original cast albums and things like that,” Clark said. “Those days are gone. The problem is that the companies no longer have the stability to go out and record all sorts of things. Plus, when there are a couple hundred Beethoven Fifths available, what do you choose? I must say, I’ve gone into big stores, like the Virgin Megastore, and my knees just buckle. It’s too much, even for me.”

On top of that, the big labels got greedy, Clark said. An album can make it onto the Billboard mainstream classical chart with sales of just 500 albums; 4,000 in a week might mean a No. 1 rating. The 1992 Nonesuch recording of Gorecki’s Third Symphony, over time, has sold more than a million copies, making it a megahit in classical terms. But then there’s the Three Tenors. The first of their CDs, from 1990, sold like a pop record. In 1996, the last time its sales were audited, the figure was 3 million.

“Basically,” Clark says, “the classical market is a mom-and-pop market, and the problem happened when Three Tenors [CDs] came out and heads of companies who should have known better said, ‘Hey, if we can make this much money on the Three Tenors, why can’t we make that much on the L.A. Philharmonic’s latest recording?’ Of course, this just doesn’t happen. No matter how much the people at the companies explain to their bosses that this will never work, they still wanted it.”

LSO Live’s Jenkins agrees: “It’s just that the economics of running record companies are changing.” The labels are so concentrated on the short-term bottom line, he says, that they can’t appreciate the slow-brewing nature of the classical music market.

“At the end of the day,” Jenkins says, “a classical recording can still be valid 30 years later. So it’s a good long-term investment. But the major companies these days can’t afford to think like that. It’s not surprising that the major record companies are re-evaluating what their classical arms are doing.”

So what’s an orchestra to do? Stateside, the Philadelphia Orchestra is paying keen attention to the LSO Live. It has already gingerly dipped into the do-it-yourself realm, experimenting with an independently released album two years ago. Initially, it put out an album called “Nature’s Prelude” with music by Dvorak and Liszt.

“It was really just an experiment to see whether there was a market for this,” Philadelphia Orchestra President Joseph Kluger says. “With relatively modest marketing efforts, we sold 8,000 or 9,000 copies.”

Kluger explained that “necessity being the mother of invention, we have formed what we call the Philadelphia Media Institute, a joint venture similar in structure to the LSO Live entity, where it is jointly run by musicians and management.” Again, the idea is to make the musicians partners in the recording effort, rather than paying them upfront fees.

Though the orchestra is working out long-term union contractual issues in trying to set up a revenue-sharing program to make the label possible, it hopes to be issuing more CDs in a year or two.

At least one U.S. orchestra is further along the LSO path. This month, the San Francisco Symphony launched its SFS Media label, with a recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. A complete cycle, funded by Gordon Getty, of Mahler symphonies will eventually be released on the label in the next five years.

San Francisco’s Assink said that “what intrigued us was the possibility of making our own recordings with less overhead. What had stopped us before was the lack of an effective distribution model. Now, with the Internet and online e-commerce opportunities, it seemed to us that that last barrier had fallen.”

Assink says it is too early to know how it will sell. “Based on the early buzz, we’re cautiously optimistic that what we thought would happen will, in fact, happen--that this will turn out to be a best-seller, in terms of how that applies to classical CDs. We’d be extraordinarily proud, of course, if that happens.”

The next LSO Live releases are scheduled to be, appropriately enough, Davis leading the orchestra in the music of Britain’s own Edward Elgar (“Pomp and Circumstance”). Elgar once had Davis’ job, and the recording project follows on the heels of concerts late in 2001. Other upcoming releases, yet to be performed and recorded this season, are Holst’s “The Planets” and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4.

In the meantime, Gillinson and the orchestra are reveling in their Grammy nominations. They plan to send the CD’s producer, James Mallinson, to L.A. for the ceremonies. “These are early days for the label,” Gillinson says, “so we’re absolutely thrilled that it should receive this kind of recognition.”

Win or lose, however, Gillinson sees his organization as creating a future model for classical recording. “There are a lot of terrific orchestras around the world, no question about it,” he says. “But I think one of the things that’s always been a characteristic of this orchestra is that it’s not a follower. It does tend to lead and it does tend to feel that if we believe in something, we’re going to go out and make it happen.”

Sir Colin edges on positively gleeful when he considers what LSO Live has achieved so far:

“Anything that makes us independent of big business is to be applauded,” he says, with a laugh. “These guys think that because they’ve got money, they can do what they bloody well like. But they can’t. We can do just as well without them.”

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Josef Woodard is a frequent contributor to Calendar.