It's quite remarkable considering that CD is still a major player in Classical music. Not releasing music on that format is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Neither her nor her record label deserve my hard earned money. And Lisa Batiashvili is much prettier than her anyway.
But you don't need to purchase the download. You can just listen to it on Spotify, and the artist will get her fraction of a penny.
I wonder when are we going to start to talk about men like that. Who is more pretty? Klemperer or Bruno Walter? James Levine or Charles Dutoit?
Listening to "Medieval English Music - Masters of the 14th and 15th Centuries" performed by The Hilliard Ensemble on Harmonia Mundi.
Klemperer may have that severe, thousand yard stare that feels more like an android sizing you up, but he's definitely prettier than Walter. Not even a competition. Venturing out of the names you listed, you've also got to consider Karajan's austere beauty against Bernstein's more rugged and affable charms. And no, I don't just play "devil's advocate," I method act the hell out of it.
I prefer Bernstein over Karajan, myself. I think Karajan’s entire head is too small for my taste. Nothing against diminutive persons otherwise. Now, when it comes to Bernstein, I’m not certain about that constant cigarette smell which even oozes out of his photos.
I'd consider buying an LP or even a download, but streaming has extremely little appeal to me even though my wife has a Spotify account. Besides, as you point out streaming, is royally screwing the artists who create the recordings. I can't support that in good conscience.
I am curious to find out how much more royalty payment an artist receives for a recording on physical media vs. streaming.
A lot more. But, in the case of classical music, I wonder if the players in the orchestra for, say, a recording marketed under the name of Von Karajan or some other star conductor ever received royalties under the old system, or simply received a one time session/recording fee. Even if they did receive royalties, they’d have to be split into tiny fractions among the members of a symphony orchestra.
On the issue of streaming vs. physical media, my CD of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla conducting Weinberg showed up, and, if you miss the old days of CD booklets and liner notes, this is the CD for you. The booklet is so thick it’s difficult to remove from the jewel case, but it’s nice to have several well-written essays about the music and the conductor and performers. It will be a sad day if and when DG goes download only.
I believe to have read in Richard Osborne's Karajan biography that the Berliner Philharmoniker had a special contract through which they would get royalties from the recordings. Either that, or their fee was substantially higher than any other orchestra. It's being suggested in the book that that is the reason why they put up with Karajan so long; as much as they disagreed with his hands-on approach to everything, they accepted that because he constantly kept the cash flow going through recordings.
I like the music, Mirga is an interesting young conductor who may be the next big thing, or as big of a thing as it’s possible to be in classical music in 2019, and I also like that the two symphonies presented here are split between two separate CDs so that you can focus on each one as a separate listening experience. This is a very petty pet peeve, but I don’t like symphony or string quartet cycles that program multiple works on one CD so that they run together. I get that you can fix that by programming tracks on your CD player, but that’s hard to do on many modern players.
Thanks for that information. I would still have to think that, even in a case where members of an orchestra did receive actual record royalties beyond the initial session fee, they would be split into tiny fractions.
At least DG put a 10-second break between works on their CDs. A lot of smaller labels like Hyperion and Harmonia Mundi do that as well, and I love them for that. For me, the pause could be even longer. Decca is the bad counterexample: there is basically almost no discernible pause between different works, and it's always jarring. They treat it like it's pop, as if a little bit of silence will cause people to turn off their CD player.
The estate of Karajan is supposed to be worth hundreds of millions of Euros. Bernstein is probably a distant second ...
CD 10. Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 4, 6*, and the Tallis Fantasia. New York: Mitropoulos and Stowkowski*
