Several goals, obviously, but key ones, surely, are:
to create an artistically and commercially viable, international-facing classical music label headquartered in Australia. There’s every reason this is achievable given the classical music marketplace and audience is now an international one and, as never before, the means to connect with and sell to audiences irrespective of geographical distance exists via the platform of digital downloads. The success of established labels with a strong national identity, outside of their home territories proves that it can be done.

On the contrary, the market place IS supporting music sales and continuing to grow. In the UK, for example, recent figures compiled by the BPI, the trade body for the recorded music industry, show that 2009 was a record-breaking year with sales of digital albums growing by more than half (56%) and digital singles by almost a third (32%) with 128.9 million albums sold and 152.7 million singles.

In a digital age, where online purchase and delivery of a recording is often compressed, the need for state-of-the-art recording is all the more imperative to ensure as much of the artistic quality of the performance is protected.

As for sumptuous packaging and libretti and other added-value elements, look at the latest development on iTunes, the global leader in the digital music delivery: a new application allows users to download sleeve notes, lyrics and album art. So, these physical things that have drawn attention to Melba alongside the state-of-the-art quality of the recordings themselves, are not luxuries or indulgences; they are an integral part of the value-for-money proposition that is at the heart of Melba’s contract with record buyers.

Do you think that the classical repertoire still has little masterpieces that have been heretofore unjustly neglected? Is bringing such rarities to the attention of music lovers one of the goals you’re pursuing?

Definitely! Look at the critical response to Hélène and Turbulent Heart! The success of many independent labels in the past 20 years has been due in large part to their willingness to re-interrogate and re-fresh the classical repertoire in a way the so-called ‘majors’ have palpably failed to do.

The Melba Foundation was established to support high quality Australian classical music recordings and to promote Australian musicians internationally. Our actors are well known abroad, and so many of our musicians deserve to be! What works against us is geography – we are so far away from the world’s music capitals. But records are an efficient solution to that challenge. And many musicians and orchestras in this country are of a fabulous standard, deserving of wide recognition.

France seems to have a buoyant classical sector, with the venerable Harmonia Mundi, headquartered in Arles, clearly demonstrating that a label can have strong, recognisable national characteristics and still achieve a commercially and critically lauded international profile.

France certainly has many more classical labels than Australia – Accord, Aeon, Alpha, Arion, BelAir, Calliope, l’empreinte digitale, Intégral, K617, Mirare, Naïve Classique, Timpani, Zig-Zag Territoires, just some off the top of my head, although there are more – and each has its own identity and all have made a contribution to widening the choice of repertoire available on disc.

An active, inquisitive and innovative independent sector is what saved the classical music recording industry once the major labels began to collapse under the weight of catalogues saturated with multiple accounts of core repertoire works and a celebrity-led rather than music focused approach to recording. Audiences grew tired of the same musical diet repeated year after year and suspicious of marketing that promised much but delivered little. It was the independent labels who had the courage and the imagination to look for neglected areas of the repertoire to record and to support new, young artists that kept the industry from destroying itself.

Our own development plans do not include acquisition – we just want to grow by making great recordings.

Is it? Really? How then do you explain the record prices paid for art in Europe’s auction houses? The financial problem with virtually every art form is simply that it is either labour intensive or the product of individual artists that requires time and effort to produce. Because it doesn’t have access to the economies of scale or industrialisation that most other manufacturing sectors can make use of, unavoidably it may seem to be in opposition to the “free market”. But worth and merit can’t always be measured in brute utility.
Nobody complains about the exorbitant wages that sportsmen and television personalities are paid even though that usually means ticket prices for sports events cost more for, say, a 90-minute football match, than for a three-hour opera.

No. CD buyers (or digital downloaders) today still want what LP buyers did 30 years ago and more: value for money when they purchase a recording. Melba’s attention to the quality of the recording also extends into booklet content and packaging because there is no reason why it shouldn’t and every reason why it should.

Yes to the first question. It’s a difficult proposition to sell into and establish a presence in Europe for an Australian label purely because of distance. But that’s an historical problem and one that is being eased and solved by Melba’s strong distribution network, the fast-developing critical profile for the label and the direct contact with the record buyer that the digital platform allows.

Early days yet, but The Ring, Hélène and Turbulent Heart were surely instances where Europe responded favourably and enthusiastically to what Melba is offering.

They’re a vital part of a long line that started many centuries ago and that hasn’t yet reached its end. Where would we stop recording classical music? After Bach? After Mozart? After Beethoven? After Wagner? Pop music didn’t stop after The Beatles, so why shouldn’t classical music continue to be (as it always has been) music of the present rather than of the past. The great gift that modern technology has given us is that all music, however old and whatever style or genre, is contemporary music. That is something to celebrate and to commit to continuing. That’s what Melba Recordings is about: the future of classical music as well as its past.

 

Xavier Barnich and Maria Vandamme