Odds are that this week someone, somewhere, will write about the downfall of the classical record industry. The situation is dire; classical recording is all but dead; life support is being withdrawn and the body still, barely, clinging to life will soon be an undeniable corpse, &c.

The developments leading to “crisis” talk are obvious enough. The “major labels” (Universal — better known as PolyGram — EMI, BMG, Sony) have been scaling back their classical divisions to the point where (for Sony and BMG anyway) there is hardly more than a cosmetic sliver of a classical department left. Sony has been (characteristically) especially crass about it, pretending that the classical department is just as big as it ever was, while padding it with film scores and crossover projects that often take up more than half a month’s “classical” release list.

At the same time, the classical-music departments of major record stores are shrinking. Tower Records’ announcement last year that it would stop carrying most independent classical labels met such protest that the decision was quickly withdrawn, for the moment anyway. But it hardly matters; the classical departments in Tower stores (in the Bay Area, anyway — I can’t speak to the situation in the rest of the country) are pathetic remnants of their former selves. The Berkeley classical department that used to have a floor of the store to itself now shares it with jazz, world music, and (I think) New Age; the stock must be a quarter or so of what it was when the classical department had a whole separate store to itself, less than ten years ago. Mountain View Tower’s once-unrivaled classical stock has likewise been cut at least in half.

OK, that’s the dire news. Why am I not panicking? Because there’s nothing here worth panicking about. The doom-sayers are overlooking the first and most obvious fact about the current classical record market, which is that there is an amount and variety of classical music available on CD that would have looked literally incredible two decades ago. And anyone with access to a computer and a modem can order any of it, either direct from the source or through a distributor.

Take the distribution first. I do wish I could browse through music as I could a few years back; this is the one real loss of the last few years. But these days, anything you know about, you can buy. You can go to Allegro or Qualiton or Koch or Harmonia Mundi, and purchase whatever you want directly. In many cases you don’t need even the distributor’s name, but can buy direct from the label. (Though a ten-second search on Google will generally get you the distributor’s name if you need it.) And in still others you can go direct to the artist and not bother about labels at all.

And then the recorded repertoire. The “majors” are coy about this, but one of the factors that’s eaten into their meager classical profits is Naxos, the super-budget classical label that damn near took over the world. It was easy to chuckle about Naxos when its catalog consisted mainly of standard-repertoire recordings by obscure Bratislavan chamber orchestras, but if you giggle at it now, it’s you who look silly. Naxos has lately been doing things like the complete orchestral music of Lutoslawski, and very well too.

But Naxos isn’t the half of it. Let’s suppose that every major-label classical recording made in the last ten years spontaneously disintegrates, and we’re left with only the productions of the independent labels. Well, we would lose many very valuable things. (Of course, if there weren’t any major labels, the musicians now recording for them would still be recording, only somewhere else. But set that aside for the moment.) But look at what would still be there: maybe eighty percent of the Handel opera recordings of the last decade; a fine complete Haydn quartet cycle, and four even finer cycles-in-progress; two excellent Schubert quartet cycles; at least two Beethoven ditto.

We would have magnificent recordings of most of Monteverdi’s madrigals — Books 2, 4, 5, 6, and part of 8 from Concerto Italiano (Opus 111 and Arcana), Book 7 from La Venexiana (Glossa). We would have the complete Schubert songs (Hyperion) and the complete Liszt piano works (Hyperion again) and the complete Byrd keyboard music (Hyperion yet again — they have this annoying habit of taking on important projects and actually finishing them). As for orchestral music, I hardly know where to start, though Osmo Vänskä’s Sibelius (BIS), Georg Tintner’s Bruckner (Naxos), and Charles Mackerras’ Brahms (Telarc) cycles are as good a place as any.

Well, you get the idea. There really isn’t any way to convey the richness of the independent-label production beyond an exhortation to go check it out — a thing best done by going to the distributors’ websites and reading the listings. But the one-sentence summation is this: The “major” labels are not the future of classical-music recording, and this has been obvious for some time.

The truth is that the crucial statements about the classical record industry have been read from the wrong end. If some major label announces (or, more often than not, doesn’t announce, but just implements) a cutback in its classical division, it is generally glossed: “Another nail in the coffin of classical music.” Whereas what we really ought to be reading is “Major labels become yet more irrelevant to classical music.” Because classical-music recording is still going on, just without the allegedly all-important imprint of Universal or EMI or BMG or Sony on the “product.”

___________________________By Michelle Dulak

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