Product Description

In this compulsively readable, fascinating, and provocative guide to classical music, Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators tells the story of the rise of the classical recording industry from Caruso’s first notes to the heyday of Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Callas, and von Karajan.

Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point–but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the full story of a minor art form, analyzing the cultural revolution wrought by Schnabel, Toscanini, Callas, Rattle, the Three Tenors, and Charlotte Church. It is the story of how stars were made and broken by the record business; how a war criminal conspired with a concentration-camp victim to create a record empire; and how advancing technology, boardroom wars, public credulity and unscrupulous exploitation shaped the musical backdrop to our modern lives. The book ends with a suitable shrine to classical recording: the author’s critical selection of the 100 most important recordings–and the 20 most appalling.

Filled with memorable incidents and unforgettable personalities–from Goddard Lieberson, legendary head of CBS Masterworks who signed his letters as God; to Georg Solti, who turned the Chicago Symphony into “ the loudest symphony on earth”–this is at once the captivating story of the life and death of classical recording and an opinioned, insider’s guide to appreciating the genre, now and for years to come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182558 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-10
• Released on: 2007-04-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
British novelist and music critic Lebrecht (The Song of Names) revisits the question raised in the title of his 1997 exposéWho Killed Classical Music? Here he delivers a barbed requiem for the classical recording industry, reviewing its historical and technological arc from "Caruso's first scratchings to the serenity of the CD," while measuring the rise and fall of classical music in terms of its popularity, availability, producers and performers. His dishy, personality-driven prose features both intelligence and point of view, while his commentary and list of the best and worst recordings—arguably the freshest element in the book—make plain the author's pugnacious, critical tastes. With subjectivity acknowledged, the author's pick of the best includes discs that have influenced public imagination or the development of recording. The worst recordings note the "things that can go wrong when we aspire to the highest." Finding favor is a 1987 release of Debussy's La Mer and Elgar's Enigma Variations performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. The Debussy, says Lebrecht, "shimmered like the English Channel at Eastbourne on a summer's day, a pointillist's paradise." Among the worst is a 2000 recording of Verdi's Requiem featuring tenor Andrea Bocelli, whose technique is deemed so insufficient that he "is exposed as cruelly as a Sunday morning park footballer would be in the World Cup final." In its arguments and attitudes, this is a lively approach to this art form. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The history of recording classical music spans the twentieth century. Competing intensely for market share, EMI, Decca, RCA, Columbia, and DGG exploited technological advantages and vied for star performers. Now, despite clear, undistorted digital recordings that capture only the music, the classical music recording industry has collapsed, perhaps largely because of competition with other forms of entertainment and changes in musical tastes. In a fast-paced narrative history, Lebrecht, assistant editor of London's Evening Standard, first introduces all the personages and describes the rivalries that made and broke the business. Then, in the book's second part, he lists and comments about the 100 most significant recordings and the 20 recordings that never should have been made. These are subjective choices, yet they illustrate the recording-industry history of the first part. A remarkably concise and thorough compendium of the larger events and milestones in the rise and fall of the classical music recording industry, for die-hard record collectors and the more casually interested alike. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Norman Lebrecht, assistant editor of the Evening Standard in London and presenter of BBC’s lebrecht.live, is a prolific writer on music and cultural affairs, whose weekly column has been called “required reading.” Lebrecht has written eleven books about music, and is also author of the novel The Song of Names, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003.

Customer Reviews

the life and death of classical music
I love this book and have bought many copies to give to friends. I was not so interested in Mr. Lebrechts opinions (I have my own) about which are the best and worst recordings, even though it is fun to read them, but was fascinated by the behind the scenes stories of how the classical recording world was shaped by a few visionary record executives and the intrigues and battles they fought to attract the greatest musicians and conductors to their labels, not unlike the story of how the great Hollywood studios came into being and identical to how the popular music labels thrived.
The other main subjects that were so interesting to me were how the advent of recording changed performance and perfection in recording techniques changed the way we listen to music.
The sad part of the story is where we are now.

An interesting but sloppy book
Unlike a lot of musicians and music lovers, I generally quite like Norman Lebrecht, find him one of the more interesting and provocative writers about the music scene, and have read several of his books. The first part of the book is interesting for his account of the many behind-the-scenes goings-on that have gone into the making of so many recordings, the personalities and egos of the musicians making them and, perhaps more critically, the enormously small stakes involved. Even though I've often been amazed that commercial enterprises would spend so much money producing recordings that at best will appeal to five percent of the record-buying public, it's still astonishing to learn just how few copies some classical recordings, even by major artists, tend to sell.

My major criticism of this book (and indeed most of Lebrecht's books) is that it's sloppy. He could use a good editor and fact-checker to catch such obvious errors as saying that around 1970 the Boston Symphony was still a non-union orchestra that worked "cheap." He also criticizes companies for continuing to issue new performances of the same repertory (fair enough), but then also ridicules them when they make recordings of less familiar repertoire that fail to sell in order to satisfy egomaniac conductors. Also, he often strings together anecdotes with very little thematic context or chronological coherence, often jumping several decades in the space of a sentence or two; if you aren't at least vaguely aware of a lot of these events, you'll be entirely lost (then again, if you're not vaguely aware of them, you probably won't be reading this book).

As for his 100 best/20 worst list, his 100 best has a few whose significance I would question, and excludes some others I would add. I had a few disagreements with the "20 Worst" list, though: I LOVE Simon Rattle's "The Jazz Album" for the amazing clarinetist Michael Collins and the only performance that has ever made me like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue). He also calls Gidon Kremer's Beethoven Violin Concerto recording (with the Schnittke cadenzas) a failure, not because it's a bad recording or was a bad idea, but because Philips apparently chickened out of promoting the novel cadenzas. I'm more in agreement with him about Bernstein's disastrous Enigma Variations. He probably should have added Bernstein's recording of West Side Story with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras.

It's also important to point out, as others have, that the title is misleading: Lebrecht is talking mostly about the life and death of the classical record industry, rather than classical music itself (though he does make the usual points about declining audiences).

Definitely worth reading if you're into this sort of thing.

The crisis of classical music?
In the last times several books and articles have cast doubts about the future of classical music. Evidences like the ageing of audiences attending concerts or the lack of renewal of repertoires support that thesis. In this context, the writer and critic Norman Lebrecht has published a new book on the subject. To support his thesis, the first part of the book is devoted to the history of the record industry, its rise and its fall, how were founded the companies that lead the sector for half a century; the impact of new technologies (stereophonic sound, digital recording) and formats (LP, CD) in its evolution; and, finally, the present situation where big companies face a shrinking production and a fierce competition from small independent publishers besides the internet and downloads.
Any selection is obviously subjective and the criteria applied can be questioned. Nevertheless it is worth to know the circumstances and fact that were around the making of these records, some of them unanimously considered as absolute references.
What is left after reading the book is a certain air of pessimism. However its reading is worthwhile as it offers a vivid description of the recording industry, well documented with bibliographic references, and what is more important, with the author's personal experiences.