Record labels have been on my mind of late. Nowadays the identity and status of the company actually producing a recording has diminished considerably; we buy for the music and the performers, and in many cases the record label itself may not be all that apparent. The big orchestras are increasingly turning to their own in-house labels—think LSO Live, SFS Media, RCO Live, the NY Phil’s live performances. Even smaller groups are adopting a do-it-yourself attitude, such as has been the case with John Eliot Gardiner’s in-house releases of his 2000 Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, initially distributed by Deutsche Grammophon but orphaned a short way into the project.
When I was growing up, record companies loomed larger. That had to do with a number of factors, but two carried the most weight. First, only a few companies achieved broad distribution. For classical music in the US you had two choices: Columbia and RCA. Both companies were part of larger broadcast empires (CBS and NBC, respectively) and both were run by visionairies with a strong sense of purpose and commitment to cultural values.
The second factor was less appealing: lock-down exclusive contracts were the order of the day, and if you didn’t record with one of the two giants, in all likelihood you didn’t record at all. That created some artificial distinctions, such as the notion of the “Big Five” American orchestras. Actually, America was filled with superb orchestras in the 1950s and 1960s. But the “Big Five” were the ones with the lush recording contracts: Chicago and Boston with RCA, Cleveland with Columbia, and both New York and Philadelphia shuttling between the two as the decades passed. Although lesser-known orchestras were thrown the occasional bone by one of the majors (think Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony during the 1940s and early 1950s), for the most part the Big Five were the orchestras—and conductors—you heard.
Soloists were in a similar situation. The biggies were the RCA or Columbia stars: Artur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz were RCA boys; Glenn Gould was Columbia all the way; Vladimir Horowitz was with both RCA and Columbia, depending on the decade; the Juilliard Quartet was with Columbia, and so forth.
The two major labels also carried some subsidiary brands—Columbia had Epic (Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were on that) and Odyssey for low-priced reprints; RCA offered Camden (spoken voice) and Victrola (reprints).
A few independent American labels marked out a scrappy, if skinny, existence. Westminster, for example, or specialist labels like Lyricord (early music) and CRI (modern stuff.)
American record buyers had some further choices from European labels, but there weren’t very many. Really it came down to three: Deutsche Grammophon from Germany, and both EMI and Decca from England. EMI releases appeared in the United States in disguise as “Angel” records, typically blending lovely jacket art with atrociously bad pressings. Decca suffered from an identity crisis, apparently, peddling its wares as both “London” and under its own name. Typically Decca records were identical to their European counterpoints in both jacket styling and (superb) pressing quality. Deutsche Grammophon was fully international, with multi-language labels and liner notes. EMI and Decca both offered budget-reprint labels, “Seraphim” from EMI/Angel and the glorious “London Stereo Treasury” series from Decca.
The big European labels had their lock-down stars as well. Think Deutsche Grammophon and think Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the Amadeus Quartet, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. Think EMI/Angel and think Thomas Beecham, Adrian Boult, John Barbirolli, Maria Callas, and Herbert von Karajan (earlier in his career). Think Decca and think Clifford Curzon, Kathleen Ferrier, Benjamin Britten, Ernest Ansermet, Renata Tebaldi, Myra Hess, and Georg Solti (both in England and Chicago).
We had less choice then, far fewer releases and access to a relatively constricted repertory. Recording quality itself was all over the map, and sometimes you bought specific labels and orchestras because you knew they were engineered to sound well on relatively modest hi-fi equipment. I always looked forward to the luscious swoosh of a Philadelphia Orchestra recording on Columbia Masterworks, or the big-iron solidity of Reiner’s Chicago Symphony on RCA, regardless of the actual works being performed. Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic recordings, on the other hand, tended towards shrillness, while the whipcrack clarity and precision of Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra typically emerged stridently on my cheap-jack record player.
It wasn’t a golden age, not a golden age at all. American record buyers were in a similar pickle to American car buyers: we usually had to settle for crap that the big makers were shoveling us and weren’t usually aware that alternatives existed.
But there were also advantages. Those visionaries who ran RCA and Columbia put their money where their mouths were. At Columbia, both the Broadway albums and the classical recordings were in the same “Masterworks” division and shared profit and loss alike. As a result, the blockbuster profits of Broadway albums such as South Pacific, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Gypsy, and The Sound of Music went into subsidizing prestigious and potentially unprofitable recording projects. Thus it was that My Fair Lady paid for Igor Stravinsky’s landmark stereo recordings of his own works, a series made over a ten-year period and involving just about every major artist in Columbia’s roster. While Stravinsky’s own renditions aren’t always critical top choices, they provide posterity with priceless first-person documentation of one of the great composers, almost as though EMI had captured Beethoven playing his piano sonatas, chamber works, and concertos. Columbia extended that same largesse to Aaron Copland, who turned in a fine series mostly with the London Symphony Orchestra, and also put its financial weight behind recording the complete works of both Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern.
RCA also employed its financial clout to preserve and promote fine music. RCA’s specialty was the commission: we owe to them such fine works as Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. But RCA also helped to bring symphonic music into every American home, courtesy of those weekly broadcasts by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony.
The European labels, with their state-supported culture, had less to worry about, but they did their part nonetheless. Deutsche Grammophon, in particular, showed real class with the “Archiv” series—all those meticulously researched, documented, and gorgeously well-made recordings of early music. Would the early music movement of the 1960s have been possible without them? Decca provided a home-away-from-home to Benjamin Britten, who blessed us with a legacy of his own recordings that rivals Stravinsky’s—and Britten was a considerably better conductor and pianist than his Russian colleague.
But nowadays? The big American labels don’t really exist any more; they were subsumed by “Sony BMG”. Most of the stuff you find nowadays with a Columbia or RCA label is a reprint; the company is trading in on nostalgia, putting out retrospective sets and “original jacket” recordings which, while very interesting to guys in my age group, reflect a certain decrepitude. EMI is soldiering on, still the quietly efficient dynamo.
Deutsche Grammophon is in a strange position. They’re part of a larger conglomerate that includes Decca, and certainly the grand old days of Elsa Schindler and those classy albums with the bright yellow label are gone. DGG is signing a lot of hot young folks, a change from the days when only established masters were considered good enough for DGG’s world-class tonmeisters. But I haven’t given up on DGG, not at all. Any label that could produce that stunning recent release of Golijov’s La Pasíon segun San Marcos still links strongly to its past, and with their fine website and deep ties with download sites, they’re keeping up with changing times as well.
But the real heat today lies in the plethora of relatively younger labels: Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, Chandos, BIS, CPO, and above all, Naxos. They’re putting out stuff at a speed, and at a quality, unthinkable in an earlier time. They’re all making the transition from physical media to downloads with reasonable dispatch and with a minimum of screaming. The modern labels, like their automotive counterpoints (Honda, Toyota, etc.,) are mopping the floor with those old American dinosaurs, or what’s left of them.
Perhaps if there is a golden age, we’re living in it right now—or will be soon, once the whole downloading thing gets past its teething pains and really starts to chomp.