A classical purist

To locate the oldest independent classical music label doing business in the New World, head to the Bed, Bath & Beyond on Olympic in West Los Angeles and go north.

In an unassuming brick building on a side street, Harmonia Mundi occupies a maze of rooms and a sprawling warehouse. The home office is in France, but a third of the 44-year-old label’s output is funneled through this U.S. branch, an outpost of chant, concertos and chamber music in Entertainment Land.

Amid the maze, Robina G. Young sits behind a massive desk, surrounded by CD jewel boxes and album cover art, and knocks on wood. She is Harmonia Mundi USA’s artistic director and its primary producer. This year, she has been nominated for a Grammy as classical producer of the year. It’s a position she’s been in five times since 1994 -- but she’s never won. Could 2003 be the charm?

Young shakes her head, her short blond hair unmussable, her manner practical. Four British Gramophone producing awards have come her way, and she’s been included in BBC Music Magazine’s list of the “60 Most Powerful People in Classical Music.” Still, she is circumspect about her fate in pop-oriented Grammy territory. “It’s amazing that I get nominated at all,” she says in no-nonsense British cadences, “doing what we do.”

Exactly what she means by “what we do” comes into focus when you look at the 2002 CDs grouped behind her name on the Grammy nominations list.

There is “La Bele Marie,” 13th century music from early music’s star girl group, Anonymous 4; Baroque greatest hits from Richard Egarr (Bach harpsichord concertos) and from Egarr and violinist Andrew Manze (Handel violin sonatas); and material from the 19th century: Brahms sonatas from violinist Pierre Amoyal and pianist Frederic Chiu, and a Mendelssohn disc with another stellar girl group, the Eroica Trio.

A more recent release, “Baltic Voices,” with Estonian singers and players led by Paul Hillier, takes Young and the label into the 20th century and beyond. One of its reviewers made clear why Young is a perennial Grammy producer-of-the-year nominee:

“Credit Robina Young ... with not resting on her considerable laurels when it comes to exploring new territories toward expanding the recorded repertoire .... The excellent sound is typical of a ... Young production; a well-nigh ideal compromise between closeness and atmosphere.”

Young’s career is nicely summed up by her portfolio-sized scheduling book. It’s liberally marked with varicolored highlighters, tracking multiple projects and a travel schedule that rivals an airline pilot’s.

She co-founded Harmonia Mundi USA with Rene Goiffon, who is the company’s president, and she has a hand in all of its output. Pointing at the book, she says, “You have the things that we’re actually bringing out, the things being recorded at the same time, and then negotiating for whatever is upcoming. It’s a bit mind-splitting, but it’s fun.”

This year, Harmonia Mundi USA plans to release about 60 titles -- most of which Young will produce -- a number that, as she points out, “is more than most of the majors, in terms of new classical recordings.”

Originally from Yorkshire, England, Young started out as a keyboardist with a keen love for early music. After getting degrees in music education and performance in England, she landed in France in the 1970s running harpsichord master classes. Along the way, she was introduced to Bernard Coutaz, who founded Harmonia Mundi in 1958.

“One day, out of the blue, they called me up,” she recalls. They needed a producer for a harpsichord record. She laughs. “And here we are.”

After working as a staff producer in France for three years, Young, along with Goiffon, was tapped to launch the label’s U.S. subsidiary in 1982.

They chose the West Coast as a base mostly because the label already had a strong distribution connection here. And Young brought with her an essentially purist take on her job as producer.

“Technically, you put together the sessions and edit the tape and deliver it to the company,” she says. “In the pop world, the producer is king. He mixes, he fiddles around. Our philosophy is to put as simple a pair of mikes as we can get away with in front of the musicians. What you hear, in terms of dynamics and shading and color and so on, is what the musicians do. It’s as realistic as possible.”

The psychological aspect of the job can’t be over-emphasized, Young says. “Making records is hard. It’s tough for a musician. If he or she thinks too much -- ‘Oh, God, this is going to be on this piece of plastic forever and ever’ -- it can be terrifying. So I try to make it as relaxed and as fun as possible, and encourage them to take risks.... You push the envelope just to the edge. That’s how you get some exciting music-making.”

Reciprocal commitment

Young has produced all but one of Anonymous 4’s CDs since the singers signed with Harmonia Mundi in 1991. “She makes a big investment in terms of time, publicity and confidence,” says Susan Hellauer, an alto and the group’s self-described medieval music geek. “In return, she expects a commitment and a loyalty which are not unreasonable.”

That investment, Hellauer says, includes eliciting the best performance “with the temperature being 111 degrees or 40 degrees, both of which have happened” in the chapels Anonymous 4 prefers to record in. “And then a bat gets in, flying around. The exalted producer has to come out waving a towel.”

More important, she says, Young, a “very fine musician,” has to hear the CD “as music for non-medieval music geeks. We can’t sound like we’re singing footnotes.”

“It’s really hard to imagine making a record with anyone else,” Hellauer says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship with all the best qualities.”

It’s exciting music-making that Young thinks has put her at the forefront of classical producers and has kept her -- and Harmonia Mundi -- in business, despite the classical music recording industry’s increasingly fragile state.

She ticks off a short list of projects she’s looking forward to in 2003. “Baltic Voices III,” which will take her back to Estonia, is one thing on the list. So is an album of 16th century music by English composer Thomas Tomkins coming from Fretwork, an ensemble of British viol players.

She also points to a mock-up of a new CD of piano music by one Joseph Wolfl. He “had quite a nice little twinkle in his eye,” she says, checking out his likeness on the cover. “Apparently he was very good at improvisation and had a contest with Beethoven. Some people thought he won.”

Discovery, she says, is one way to assure excitement. Harmonia Mundi “has always gone for the niche repertoire” -- like early music. She calls it “a conscious decision not to go for the mainstream romantic repertoire, which was already covered to death by the majors.”

Now, she says, “H.M. has a following of people who know that the label doesn’t just keep on throwing out Beethoven Nine. Fortunately, they keep buying.”

More than 50 Harmonia Mundi titles have sold between 40,000 and 60,000 units (a classical album can hit the Billboard charts with sales of only 500 units) and two of Young’s CDs, Anonymous 4’s “An English Ladymass” (1993) and a version of Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” (2000) featuring conductor Rene Jacobs and singer Sebastian Henning, sold more than 200,000 units.

“The majors’ attitude to classical music was totally skewed by the success of things like the Three Tenors,” Young says. “It suddenly put them into numbers which look like pop.... The expectations just can’t be that high.

“They’ve pulled back and pulled back. The shops have gotten panicky, and started reducing the shelf space for classical music.”

In response, Harmonia Mundi has opened its own stores in France. In the States, the label has nooks in chain stores such as Virgin and Tower, but it has also increasingly looked to selling its CDs at its artists’ concerts.

The subject of sales brings up Young’s frustration about the wave of concern over CD retail costs.

“I get very upset with the press in the States telling people that that silly piece of plastic costs a dollar, and therefore, we’re all ripping them off. What do they think we pay the musicians, the musicologists, the people who write the notes, and the people who do the translations?

“Nobody says, about a bottle of wine, that the bottle costs 50 cents, and therefore.... Nobody says, of a book, that the paper is worth nothing, therefore .... Why do they do this about records?”

Still, Young is satisfied that her artists and her public know what her discs are worth. The numbers may never rival those that usually fuel Grammy wins -- but numbers, as she says, are not only what keeps Harmonia Mundi going.

“It sounds very altruistic,” she says, “but we’re in the business of making as good a record as we can make.

“I love what I do,” Young continues. “In a way, it’s cowardice, I suppose. You don’t have to put yourself on the stage, gird up your loins and walk out in front of a thousand people. I’m shy, basically. And I love being around such gifted people.... These people just pour out such wonderful noise.”