Middlemen – who really needs them? This seems to be a question many orchestras have been asking themselves recently. The internet has so totally reshaped the way music is distributed that even the oldest, most traditional of cultural institutions have been exploring new horizons, wondering what profit they could make from these newfangled downloading and streaming things that the young people seem to have become so fond of.
First there was the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Met Live cinema programme, beaming opera around the world from Manhattan’s Lincoln Center and proving a runaway success. Then came the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall, which live-streams concerts to your computer for a fee. Mahler beamed to your laptop’s tiny screen and speakers might sound underwhelming, but these concerts have also proved a hit, demonstrating a sense of occasion – of music actually happening – that can’t be replicated any other way in your own home. Now the Berlin Philharmonic has taken another bold step: it has founded its own label.
Admittedly, the Berlin Phil isn’t the first to do this: the London Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago and San Francisco symphonies have all trodden this path before in a small-scale way. Berlin’s move is in a different class, however. This is arguably the world’s greatest orchestra, lead by arguably the world’s greatest conductor, the Briton Simon Rattle. When an ensemble like this makes a move, it means a shift for the whole classical world, a future where orchestras might not just be groups of musicians performing together but successful, influential media companies that choose and market exactly what they want to sell themselves.
So why are they doing it? Well, I imagine that you’ve already noticed that the music industry across the board has gone topsy-turvy in recent decades.
With its older audience, classical music has been less destabilised by illegal downloading than pop music, but this ageing audience brings other problems with it. There’s a pervasive sense that dwindling audiences are not being topped up by younger generations. While there are enough new recordings to stave off worries about actual drought, the ground of the classical music world is still looking a little parched and dusty. As things stand today, companies that record classical music are coming close to failing orchestras and performers.
It’s easy to see why. The number of new recordings has shrunk drastically since the industry’s late-20th century heyday – because recordings cost money and they aren’t necessarily needed by companies. With remastering technology at their disposal, they’re increasingly happy to sharpen the sound on their existing, exceedingly rich back catalogues rather than create new albums. After all, if you have recordings from such great conductors as Karajan and Haitink ripe for re-release from your archive, why would you spend money recording a new version?
New – and great – recordings of classical music still come out, of course, but orchestras fare worse than most. Recording chamber music – say, a lieder cycle with just soloist and piano – is relatively cheap. Getting a whole ensemble into a studio is another matter entirely, which is why so many new orchestral albums are recorded live in concert.
If you want classical music to stay alive and healthy, this stuff matters. This is a genre that thrives on reinterpretation, not on fixing a definitive version of a piece and playing it until you just can’t hear it anymore. The process of re-examining and reshaping a piece is what keeps classical music vital – and the relative absence of new albums might seem to the pessimistic like a massive doom gong for the music’s future obsolescence.
In this climate, the Berlin Philharmonic's new label makes perfect sense. No one knows what the future of classical music recording might be, but if it involves fewer gatekeepers, then so much the better for the ensembles. They've also chosen to kick off with exactly the sort of grand project that it's hard to get the green light for: a symphony cycle [Berlin Phil website].
The fact is that Schumann’s symphonies aren’t the best-known or best-loved corner of the Romantic repertoire, and they have been well recorded before. They’re delightful and bold in their way but they had a difficult genesis and, in the decades afterwards, a complicated reception. Composed between 1841 and 1850, they show Schumann, an acknowledged piano master already, was itching to try something on a broader canvas. Working with phenomenal speed, Schumann produced some striking music, but some felt that the composer’s growing pains were still on show in orchestrations that didn’t truly fly. These works thus had a mixed reception from the beginning.
Schumann's First Symphony was much admired, but the composer got cold feet about his next major effort. After a very shaky premier in 1841 – Schumann conducted the work himself, something for which he apparently had little skill – the composer canned his next symphony for more than a decade. It was only revived after much rewriting in 1853, which is why the work now has the confusing name the Fourth Symphony.
Meanwhile the Leipzig premiere of his next work, the officially named Second Symphony (though actually his third), was overshadowed by something more sensational: a duet between Schumann's celebrated pianist wife Clara and the charismatic violin superstar and composer Franz Liszt. In the end, the rewritten Fourth Symphony turned out to be a triumph for Schumann, but one that came too late or didn't hit deep enough to save the composer's sanity. In 1854, suffering from tinnitus and hallucinations, the composer was admitted to an asylum where he died the following year.
Since that sad, premature death, much of Schumann's work swiftly solidified its reputation. His symphonies, however, were still held in low esteem in some quarters for their underplayed formal structure and for an orchestration sometimes damned as muddy. Couched within a more broadly positive appraisal, The New York Times critic John Rockwell once noted their "formal awkwardnesses, thick orchestrations, earnest pictorialisms and lumbering rhetoric".
Given the anxiety around having the “right opinion” in classical connoisseurship – and that the vastness of the repertoire is hard to know in its entirety – these hearsay verdicts gained perhaps more solidity and repetition than they deserved. The release of the Berlin Philharmonic’s new album, however, is a fine time to make up your own mind – and personally I was surprised and delighted by what I heard.
That Second Symphony, for example, has long sections of real phosphorus spark. Its finale in particular is a joyous explosive burst of major strings, sweetly tuned but frenetic, that works through themes appearing earlier in the symphony with remarkable energy and control. Then, almost out of nowhere, Schumann puts the brakes on, introducing a slow, serene new melody before building up to a final climax. It's unexpected, a radical contrast with the preceding slow movement. Here a beautifully restrained rendition of what sounds like a sunrise scene shows how Schumann could wrest melancholy even from pastoral nature poetry in a major key.
And then there's that problematic Fourth Symphony, played in its original 1841 version, which Rattle suggests was partly adapted to cover up the poor skills of the orchestra at its second premier. While the piece is full of joy, there is a manic, testy intensity to the Berlin Philharmonic's performance, while the piece also sounds ahead of its time in places. Between the third and fourth movements, for example, there is a stunning brass chorale whose grand simplicity could almost be from Schumann's successor Wagner or even the much later Strauss. The symphonies thus read as not just a sensual delight, but a valuable jigsaw piece in a greater puzzle, a new beautiful bend in the river that I had barely looked at before. If the Berlin Philharmonic are going to use their label to shine a torch into misunderstood parts of the repertoire like this, then we'll all be the better for it.
Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.