Results tagged “pavarotti” from Slipped disc

The Times of London, which used to call itself a newspaper of record, has turned into the puff paper of the record industry.

Last week, the Times published a piece by its media correspondent about 13 year-old Faryl Smith, who appeared a year back on a television talent show and, though she lost, was signed by Universal Classics & Jazz (UCJ) - yes, them again - for a reputed £2.3 million ($3.1 million).

The comments of Dickon Stainer, UK head of UCJ and the man who signed the cheque, are worth quoting in extenso for future deconstruction. Stainer said: "She is our major international priority. She is an absolute once-in-a-generation talent. For her age there's probably never been anybody who can sing like she can. If she looks after her voice and is nurtured properly she will be successful all over the world. She can make classical music more accessible than any other artist since Pavarotti."

Right. So I guess we had better take her seriously. After all, the Times reports that 80,000 copies of her disc have been shipped, a higher volume than the new U2 album.

Today, the Sunday Times turns the advance hype into 'the fastest-selling solo classical album' and states that Faryl is 'expected' to break into the Top Ten. The record business used to pay for advertisements in Times Newspapers. Now they get promoted for free.

Faryl seems like a sweet young girl from Kettering, Northants. She admits that she neither listens to nor respects classical music. 'Classical singing is mainly aimed at older people,' she says. So why is she being published by Universal Classics & Jazz? And why is she is expected to make classical music more popular?

To crack these nuggets of wishful marketing, you need to hark back to recent events. UCJ last month demolished Decca label because its UK boss, Strainer, could not agree a policy with the international chief, Chris Roberts. A great classical heritage was sacrificed on the altar of their corporate feud.

UCJ is now shovelling its cash into crossover trash after Warner stole its headline act Katharine Jenkins and Sony outsold it with Il Divo. This is not a company that knows - or even remembers - what classical records are about. It is a pathetic, passive offshoot of couch-potato reality television.

Young Faryl herself is a familiar phenomenon. She was once called Charlotte Church. Then Paul Potts. She will go on to different things. Or not. Who cares?

The sackings have started at Decca. Out of 32 staff at the London headquarters, just six are being retained.

That is one to manage the office, one to answer the phone and open the mail, two to look after the royalty accounts and two more to deal with whatever instructions come down from corporate headquarters.

One thing is clear: there is nobody left at Decca to make records.

Classical artists, including the now-celebrated Tutula Bartley, are being transferred to Universal Classics and Jazz (UCJ), a crossover business that produces such half-baked trivia as the boy band Blake and the East London lad who gave up his junior football career to play the saxophone. Cecilia will feel in good company.

The residual staff at Decca will report to Michael Lang, head of Deutsche Grammophon in Hamburg.

The notion that Decca will continue to function as a production centre after these abolitionary measures is a mixture of wishful thinking and corporate fiction. The author of the fantasy is Christopher Roberts, head of UCJ.

Roberts once tried to persuade me that corporate ciphers like himself earn huge salaries and bonuses in order to protect madcap artists from their wild whims and maximise the revenue potential from their works. Given that Roberts has dedicated so much of his energy to eliminating outlets for classical artists, I wonder if should perhaps think of revising his job description - so long as he still has a job.

Decca is dead. A grand tradition has been laid waste. What remains is history - and a golden opportunity to reinvent the spirit of enterprise in classical music.  

Newbies and start-ups, post your plans and logos in the comment space below.

LATE EXTRA: A sharp-eyed reader directs me to a news release from Universal Music Group, the monster that killed Decca. UMG has just appointed three more vice-presidents, just what the music world most needs right now, to 'erase lines between physical and digital'.

One of the new bonus-guzzlers is called Rotter, Mitch Rotter. You couldn't make it up.

Let me share with you a memo from a Promotions Executive at Universal Music Group:

Hi

I have had a request from Int Tune (Radio 3) to have Tutula Bartley on the show today to discuss Christopher Ravens sad departure and to speak of her memories of him. I don't suppose she is around and in the UK

x

I have withheld the names of the parties to this correspondence and reprinted the document verbatim. At first sight, I thought it must be someone on the pop side of Universal who had never heard of Ms Bartoli and Mr Raeburn. But no: the person who wrote this missive actually works as an executive for the classical side of Universal.

She knows not Cecilia Bartoli, fancy that. What of Luciano Epiglottis, Joan Scuttlebutt and George Shorty?  Are there no limits to Universal ignorance?

Chris Roberts, head of the UCJ division, insists that Decca is still functioning and that its artists are valued assets. This memo, and much else, gives the lie to that. I must get some of those Tutula Bartley records.

Today is the funeral of Jimmy Lock, the last defender of the Decca Sound. May he rest with the immortals.

James Lock's funeral will take place this Friday in Golders Green and Christopher Raeburn's the following Friday in Amersham. I guess the Universal Music Group will send a wreath or two.

After repeated inquiries from musicians and members of the music profession as to why Decca had not issued any notice of the deaths of its last backroom legends, an external publicist was contracted to put together a press release at the very end of the working week - and almost a week after Jimmy died.

The press release, needless to say, was as personal as a parking ticket. It was constructed around a paragraph from Universal Classics and Jazz chief Chris Roberts, who gave no intimation of having met either man. Its opening sentence, a semi-literate sales blurb, is about as far you need to read:

Christopher and James'  legacies are incalculable as both worked for decades on hundreds of recordings that will always be listened to and enjoyed by millions of people.

How absolutely miserable that none of the remaining staff at Decca was allowed by the bonus-chasers at Universal head office to offer anything like the personal tributes that former colleagues are contributing here and elsewhere.

Valerie Solti has posted a fond tribute to James Lock on the Gramophone website.

And an aide of Luciano Pavarotti has been in touch to say how much he loved Jimmy and Christopher Raeburn, staying in touch almost till the day he died. 

If any readers want to share personal memories of Jimmy and Christopher, from within the Decca studio or one of those famously indiscreet lunches, do use the comment space below as a message board.

If your life was changed by one of their records, likewise let us know.

I don't expect Universal Music Group to commemorate their legacy.

LATE EXTRA:

a  friend in London, who was at the Royal Festival Hall last night, reports :-

See LATE EXTRA below

The sad news has just reached me of the deaths, within days of each other, of the last two stalwarts of the Decca golden age - Jimmy Lock, the chief sound engineer, and Christopher Raeburn, the label's driving-force producer.

Jimmy was in the throes of selling his north London house and moving to work in a Portuguese studio when he was found dead by a visiting estate agent. He had joined the label in 1963 and advanced the famous Decca Sound into digital and beyond. Sir Georg Solti, I seem to recall, had great respect for his ears and great affection for his character.

Christopher joined Decca in 1954 and, as I related here, was conscripted almost immediately into John Culshaw's Ring project in Vienna, the first studio recording of the Wagner cycle. He could have succeeded Culshaw as head of the label by chose not to compete with the shadowy Ray Minshull. From 1975 he was Decca's director of opera productions. His greatest discovery was Cecilia Bartoli but he also worked happily over the years with Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Renee Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu and other Decca properties. Unusually for a Decca man, he was notably fond of female company. He stopped taking phone calls early this month, dying discreetly of lung cancer.

Why are you reading of their deaths here? Because no-one at Decca has put out a press release on the passing of these company lions. Decca, as I've reported, has been eviscerated by corporate paper-shifters at its Universal owners and no longer functions coherently.

Decca, sad to say, is deader than Jimmy and Chris, whose work will live on. The label has lost its classical core, its educational drive, most of its staff and the last relics of its soul. Hard-copy evidence of the Decca Sound and the Decca style will outlast the label's bonus-seeking executioners. 

LATE EXTRA: BBC Radio 3 have responded to this blog by invting Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge to reminisce about Raeburn and Lock on In Tune tonight. If you miss the live tx, you can pick it up later on streaming.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 

This just in from a veteran Decca producer:

It's all over, bar the paper shuffling.

In response to my column last week, the Universal Music Group issued a statement confirming that Decca's crossover output will be absorbed into the parent company's UCJ. It maintains that the label itself will remain 'active' and that London will continue to be its 'creative centre'. It names this process 'realignment', which I shall promptly add to my growing lexicon of recession-era synonyms for corporate elimination.

The facts are simple. Without crossover, Decca is dead. Its pop side has been defunct for years and its few extant classical artists - Renee Fleming, Julia Fischer, Erwin Schrott - are being shunted over to Universal's other property, Deutsche Grammophon. 

Conversations with staff members suggest that all that will remain is an office front, one desk-jockey without a budget and a PA to answer the phone. A helpful cross-poster from the classical music forum brightcecilia comes up with much the same conclusion.

The death of Decca may be inevitable in present economic circumstances and it is certainly very sad. But, by covering up with factoids, euphemisms and simulations of continuing life, the bonus-seekers at Universal merely sustain the corporate make-believe that brought Decca to its knees in the first place. Some day Universal's head of classics and jazz will be called to account for demolishing a sub-culture by a thousand cuts over a dozen years. Maybe Georg Solti will come back to haunt the vandals from his Hungarian resting-place. Or Pavarotti's ghost will rise to sit on them. He knows where they live.