LONDON — Maestro Colin Davis, or Sir Colin as he's known in these parts, had every reason to welcome the new year in January.
His 2001 recording of Berlioz's opera "Les Troyens," with his band, the London Symphony Orchestra, had already made many of the best-of year-end lists.
Then came the Grammy nominations: The CD, recorded on a fledgling label called LSO Live, garnered three nominations--for best classical album, best opera recording and best engineered recording.
And that wasn't even the beauty part.
Davis and company had created this "Les Troyens" entirely on their own.
LSO Live is the London Symphony Orchestra's private label. Other orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, have gotten into the record business, issuing special sets of recordings from their archives, with limited distribution, but LSO Live is a different kind of enterprise: an orchestra going head to head with the commercial record business--and winning.
What makes it especially delicious--what "makes them feel rotten," says the maestro, "and us really good"--is the nyah-nyah-nyah factor: The major record labels have deserted classical music in droves in the last decade.
Davis, music director at the LSO since 1995, is now 74, and he has seen plenty of ups and downs in his trade over the years. But with LSO Live in his back pocket, he can afford to see the current situation as a bigger problem for "them" than for "us."
"Since big business has removed its money from classical music, the actual standard of the orchestras has gone up," he says, with evident satisfaction.
"The big companies have missed the peak of the profession in some way. They were interested in making money and they exploited the repertory and the orchestras and the artists, [and then] they chucked it in. But, you know, we're still there. Big business isn't going to destroy classical music. It didn't invent it in the first place."
The Barbican Centre is an imposing citadel of reinforced concrete in central London, a city within the city, with countless flats surrounding a huge arts center, within which sits the LSO's wood-lined concert hall.
The orchestra almost matches the center as a monumental force. There are five major orchestras in London, but the LSO is literally at the center of things, giving more concerts than any of the others and maintaining its claim to being the most recorded orchestra in the world. That's LSO on Diana Krall's latest hit record, "The Look of Love," and that will be the LSO, under John Williams' direction on his score for the fifth installment of "Star Wars."
It is just that recording strength that turned the LSO into a do-it-yourself operation. Since its first recording in 1911, it had been a major player in classical recording as well as film music and other genres. Over coffee in the Barbican Centre recently, Chaz Jenkins, general manager of LSO Live, laid out the saga. The push toward self-recording came two years ago, when the orchestra's diminishing classical recording schedule couldn't be ignored.
"If you look at the LSO's schedules in the '80s and right back through its history, it has had constant recording sessions. A typical day would be morning and afternoon at Abbey Road [studios], and an evening doing a concert. Quite often, the concerts would be done here, and they'd do the same concert at Abbey Road. Come the '90s, the number of recordings went down and down as companies came to re-evaluate classical recordings in the current market."
The real impetus for LSO Live, he says, "all stems from the line that we think, generally, what we're doing in concert is the very best the LSO has ever performed--the best conductors, the best soloists--and since the standard of playing is better than ever, we thought it was a shame that what we're doing doesn't get regularly recorded."
It doesn't hurt that the LSO is used to going its own way. The 98-year-old ensemble was London's first self-governing orchestra; there is no outside board. As Jenkins says, "In the LSO, technically, I'm an employee of the musicians."
The label was actually the brainchild of LSO general manager Clive Gillinson, once a cellist in the ranks before he was drafted for the "temporary" task of aiding an ailing administration ("I switched loyalties," he explains). Starting in the late '90s, Gillinson looked at the same history that Jenkins cites, and decided that the orchestra should take matters into its own hands.
He faced a few obstacles. First was the musician's union contract. It called for the orchestra, conductors and soloists to be paid a fee upfront for recording sessions, which made costs of experimenting prohibitive. In 1999, however, the contract was eased. In the case of live recordings, the musicians could be paid on a royalty basis. If the CDs made money, the players and guest artists would too.
