Results tagged “cleveland” from Slipped disc

Here are some breaking updates on recent stories in this blog.

- The free Haitink downloads have gone live in Holland - and in English. The first music comes free on March 9. Thanks to Rolf den Otter for these links.

http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/kijkenluister/http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/home/80-years-bernard-haitink.html 
http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/kijkenluister/

- Cincinnatti fears the demise of Telarc will consign its orchestras to oblivion. Cleveland, too, is not that happy.

- Rainer Mockert has sent me a brilliant user-friendly site for classical recordings. The group behind it, he reports, were 44 percent down on record sales in their shops but are enjoying a 5.8 percent rise online. You'll need German to get the most out of the site, but here's an English bite:

Our database currently includes around 390,000 CDs, 31,000 DVDs, more than 2,000,000 books, and 23,000 special interest offers like vinyl LPs, SACDs, and music DVDs, so that no wish is left unfulfilled. Moreover, we have more than 4,000 PC, console, and board games as well an amazing number of dirt-cheap offers and limited items on the offer pages and in the bargain market.

- From Australia, I'm delighted to hear that Libby Christie, who turned around the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, is taking charge of national arts funding. And from Canada .... oh, Canada. I guess that'll have to be another day's blog.

I try to update old blogs with Late Extra breaking updates, so do check back.

LATE EXTRA: And New York has woken up this morning to a stunning new opera reviewer - it's the Post taking on the Times in the sleepwalker stakes. More of it, please.

Telarc, the first label to issue a digital release, has ceased production.

The founder, Robert Woods, will leave this month, along with the chief recording engineer, Michael Bishop. Half the workforce has been laid off - that's 26 jobs - and the backlist becomes heritage. More details here.

Telarc had first call, as local patriots, on the superb Cleveland Orchestra and the quality of its sound was an audiophile's delight. The label won 40 Grammys over the years and produced 800 recordings across several genres.

My guess is that its all-time bestseller was Wagner's Ring Without Words, an improvement in certain respects on the original in a concept created by the conductor Lorin Maazel. Of late, the label blazed a trail for Paavo Järvi and his Cincinnati band. It has yet another version of the Gorecki third symphony coming up from Atlanta.

A sound philosophy, though, is not enough to save a label. Telarc, for all its merits, never took much risk by way of extending repertoire when the going was easy. I am really sad to see its purist values fall by the wayside and I fear that executives in the major labels will be encouraged by its fall to cut corners and compromise standards still further.  

Telarc's values, however, endure as a permanent record. Its disappearance suggests that, in times of technological and financial upheaval, only by using creative imagination as a driving force can a musical enterprise be saved from extinction.