Orchestra hooks up with online distributor

The Philadelphia Orchestra has struck a deal with an online music distributor to bring its live recordings to iTunes, Amazon.com, and other heavily visited retail sites for download.

The orchestra will work with IODA, a San Francisco digital distribution firm, which will place and help market the orchestra's newest recordings.

With the launch, the orchestra has made available several dozen previously unreleased works - all the Beethoven symphonies conducted by Christoph Eschenbach; Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies led by Wolfgang Sawallisch; Albéniz, Respighi, and Stravinsky with Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos; and the Mozart Symphony No. 35 in D major (K. 385, "Haffner") and Ravel's La Valse under Charles Dutoit.

No firm schedule has been set, but orchestra artistic vice president Jeremy Rothman says the goal will be to put out about 10 releases each year mined from the archives of previous seasons.

Recordings are not being planned with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops, Rothman said. The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pops are in discussions over the possible termination of their five-year-old merger agreement.

The Philadelphia Orchestra was once among the world's most recorded orchestras, most visibly during the Eugene Ormandy era, which brought it financial stability and enviable name recognition. Recording income in the 1970-71 season accounted for 20 percent of the orchestra's earned revenue.

But in 1996 the orchestra was dropped by EMI Classics after a relationship of nearly 20 years, and, like almost all other American orchestras, has since cobbled together a recording presence with projects or short-term deals.

Its last contract, with the small Finnish firm Ondine, chronicled much of Eschenbach's five years on the podium, but the Ondine deal is now over.

No one is forecasting that the orchestra's availability on iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody, eMusic, HDtracks, and other sites will mean a restoration of the golden age of recording in terms of income or prestige.

"That model doesn't exist anymore," says Rothman. "[This deal is] not on the order of what the orchestra used to get in terms of royalties. In the glory days there were very few record labels, and you had major companies putting them out and distributing very large quantities."

Still, he said it does likely mean some income, though it's hard to say how much.

"It could provide a helpful amount of money for the organization, but this is not a silver bullet or even a Band-Aid. The goal is to get the orchestra out there. It's not about making money. This is not a line item that is going to solve any major problems."

Erik Gilbert, IODA's vice president of content, said that sales for another IODA client, the London Symphony Orchestra, amounted to "hundreds of thousands of dollars each year," and that the Philadelphia Orchestra "could easily be in the same realm."

The recordings world that thrived through the beginning of the CD era was part of a lucrative promotional machine for orchestras. Tours, recordings, and radio broadcasts reinforced one another with their presence. When CD shelves became overcrowded, American orchestras, with their high fees, found themselves priced out of the market.

The arrival of the digital age, though, has created a new Internet agreement with musicians, and for listeners it has brought a distribution system of tremendous advantages. Even at their best, record stores could not efficiently stock a classical repertoire a mile wide and an inch deep. But online stores have no such challenge.

Rothman said there was a complex formula for splitting revenues, but percentages are doled out to the retailer, aggregator (IODA), Philadelphia Orchestra Association, musicians, and conductors. He declined to say specifically what the cut was for each partner.

The orchestra is somewhat limited in which recordings it can release. Approval by musicians and conductors is required, and some guest soloists may be precluded from participating by existing recording contracts with commercial labels.

However, "Most of the artists we approach are very enthusiastic," Rothman said.

The orchestra will continue to run its online store, and IODA - which also works with the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony - will help win visibility for the downloads on retail sites.

The newly released recordings will be in addition to the old discs of Stokowski, Ormandy, Sawallisch, Muti, and others recorded commercially and already available on amazon.com and iTunes. As a recording genre, the new live recordings are musically distinct from those professionally engineered by EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, and other labels. That kind of recording is typically patched and manipulated - sometimes to the point where the results represent more of a musical ideal than a performance that actually happened.

While significant editing and engineering take place in the orchestra's live recordings, the aim is to replicate the live experience as much as possible. A week's worth of performances of the same program are considered, and one is chosen, even if sometimes an entire movement is "swapped out" for another.

"There can be some correction and adjustment, but we don't have retakes or patch sessions," Rothman said.

A Sawallisch recording of the two Brahms serenades for orchestra (from 2003 and 2004), which I downloaded for $9.99, is a good case in point. There is a dull stretch or two, to be sure. But then you encounter a surge of energy or a revelatory phrase. And you remember how wonderfully tight and assured this orchestra was under Sawallisch, and how often it was so much more: Sawallisch knew how to husband this orchestra's expressive firepower like no one else. The Serenade No. 2, which I somehow missed in concert, is among the most intense and dramatically detailed work I can remember from that decade.

Rothman declined to identify future releases - they won't be from the current season, for now - but he did say the orchestra's relationship with its current chief conductor would be highlighted.

"Absolutely, without a doubt, more Dutoit recordings."