Not the neo stuff: Is new classical music still being recorded?
There’s a daunting task that faces any layman wishing to dip their toe in the vast and bewildering world of classical music.
Choices, or rather, the confusing bludgeon of countless recordings and performances, render gleaning an authoritative entry to a composer’s work a hopelessly daunting task. Take Beethoven’s ‘Ninth Symphony’. Do we plumb for Felix Weingartner’s 1935 vintage capture with the Vienna Philharmonic? Perhaps Leopold Stokowski’s 1967 conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra is best suited due to the pioneering Decca Phase 4 sound technology for a truly immersive, audiophile experience?
Then there’s Roger Norrington’s Beethoven cycle, a more traditional affair cut in the late 1980s that armed the London Classical Players with period-accurate instruments for a historically authentic transport to the Holy Roman Empire’s capital at the cusp of the 19th century.
It’s hard to approach classical music as a novice. With such an ocean of takes and iterations out there on streaming services or YouTube for the rarer cut, the classics pose a greater degree of cumbersome research than music’s recent evolutions into pop, the latter presenting a steady stream of direct, singular records produced and dropped with definitive eternality. With such a vast array of classical music at our disposal, with certain high-profile pieces in the possible hundreds, have we reached an oversaturation of the market and witnessing a kind of classical recording crash?
Classical music and commercial releases have had a hell of a run. Ever since Handel’s Israel in Egypt oratorio was etched onto a wax cylinder in 1888 during August Manns’ Crystal Palace event, the natural eagerness to hear the lofty spectacles previously exclusively enjoyed by the upper classes would find a perfect home with the developments in recording and audio playback. It would be America’s Columbia Records 60 years later that would spark classical’s retail golden age. Pioneering the dominant 33⅓ RPM vinyl discs, entire long-form suites of classical works as well as official cast recordings of the day’s popular Broadway shows, would see mass-market light.
Soon enough, Stereophonic sound brought the likes of Wilhelm Kempff back to the ‘studio’ to rerecord Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and come CDs’ digital revolution, Alfred Brendel cut his third stab at the sonatas for the 1990s. As David Denby laid out in this month’s The New Yorker, there was a concurrent boom in classical CDs with various labels issuing their back catalogues on the format with acceleration and quantity such that the classical world imploded and collapsed in on itself due to the sheer wealth of recordings and versions out there. With such an expansive existing sea, why continue to pour more cuts?
So, is new classical music still being recorded?
Yes, but perhaps not in the mainstream. Smaller, micro-labels such as Naxos or Supraphon are quietly putting out classical records, and, with today’s advances in easy yet high-quality recording, the Chicago and London Symphonies are issuing records and broadcasts entirely in-house. The Berlin Philharmonic went one step further, offering a ‘Digital Concert Hall’ with live-streaming features and access to their exhaustive archive.
The conundrum classical’s always had is that it’s an art form begging to be heard live. From the architectural awe of Europe’s key venues, the spatial ambience, the orchestra’s many instruments aurally dancing, or the characteristic animated manner with which the conductor captains the symphony before them, audio documents may forever be a mere substitute for classical’s live power, no matter how sophisticated the fidelity.
