Not quite sure what to make of this, but the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London has bought Opus Arte, a leading for-profit maker and producer of performance DVDs. The economics of high music culture have changed and more and more music groups of all sizes are moving toward control of production and distribution of their artistic “products,” as traditional avenues like record labels go belly up. Where is our friend Pliable on this one?
Here’s an update on David Salvage’s piece at the Harvard Club on June 11. Starting time is 7pm, not 7:30 as we reported here yesterday. The requirement to dress “spiffy” remains in effect.
Update: EMI has joined the other three major record labels in distributing music videos on YouTube. In addition to making available clips, EMI and YouTube plan to develop a system that provides for consumer-created content that uses EMI music and video. Additionally, thanks to some new Apple software, the clips won’t just be available online but also on Apple TV — the device that lets people watch Internet video on TV screens
I just read Daniel Wakin’s NY Times story, and I find this ROH-Opus Arte coupling rather exciting. My hope is that ROH/OpusArte will now have the resources to record, produce, and market on DVD such contemporary opera productions as Birtwistle/Harsent’s past [1991] “Gawain”, or the pair’s upcoming “Theseus” [2008]. My hope is that more contemporary operas can now be produced on DVD due to the ROH subsidizing the ‘new’ with incomes/revenues gained from either philanthropy, or from sales of DVD’s of new productions of warhorse operas perhaps staged by avant-garde directors and featuring the cream of the current vocal talent. (Most of the DVD’s in my small DVD collection are Opus Arte productions — most quite good to excellent.)
On a similar note, I was rather disheartened to have attended an excellent Philadelphia Orchestra concert yesterday late afternoon, under Christoph Eschenbach, featuring orchestral settings by Brahms, Webern, and Reger of Schubert Songs (with baritone Matthias Goerne); Brahms’s Symphony #1, and the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony. The CD table afterwards had only Philadelphia’s own label (with Ondine) CD’s of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Saint-Saen’s, Poulenc, and Barber. (The Tchaikovsky account’s of Symphonies #4 and 5 were rounded out by new Eschenbach recordings of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, for piano.)
I also looked at the Philadelphia Orchestra site and saw that MP3/Flacs were available for new works by Magnus Lindberg and Matthias Pintscher (and some older American works were available on archival CD compilations); but I didn’t see Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Feast in Time of Plague” (which I recall Alex Ross praised highly to his national and international audience); nor any of the American works by younger American composers now featured more regularly on Philadelphia Orchestra programs as it sheds it former conservative image.