Melba Recordings

"... a label of fragrant distinction"

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Maria Vandamme and Melba Recordings give classical music to the world

Vandamme’s way: why no one messes with Maria.   

Maria Vandamme, director of Melba Recordings, campaigns tirelessly to bring Australian music international exposure. Picture: Aaron Francis Source: News Corp Australia 

Maria Vandamme, founder and managing director of Melba Recordings, lives in a heritage house in Melbourne’s St Kilda that was once Ron Barassi’s place. The house is on a corner block and has a front garden blooming with pink roses. The interior decor, too, is overwhelmingly pink. It’s difficult to imagine Australian football great Barassi being so fond of roseate hues, but pink is very much Vandamme.

In terms of brand identity, Vandamme and Melba are virtually inseparable. The Melba catalogues and marketing materials have pink covers and printing, and cite a CD review that has become a kind of motto: “a label of fragrant ­distinction”.

Vandamme started Melba Recordings in 1999 with ambitions to be an antipodean ­Deutsche Grammophon, the legendary German label – also known by a colour, yellow – whose market dominance she had witnessed at the Salzburg Festival. To support Melba’s recording activities she started the Melba Foundation in 2002, a not-for-profit organisation that raises funds from donors and government.

“Mostly it was about correcting the imbalance of Australia’s reputation internationally,” Vandamme says of Melba’s origins. “We were known for our sports, our lifestyle, our beaches, our spiders, our films, but not our music. We have changed that, we have supported artists to do what they do best.”

Her business case was simple. The federal government spends millions of dollars a year on the six state symphony orchestras, opera companies and other musical ventures. Why not spend $1 million more to promote our music-making to the world, via superlative recordings? Indeed, the Adelaide Ring cycle in 2004 would not have been recorded without Vandamme’s doing, and the Melba Ring is among the most important documents of Australian music.

Melba’s first federal grant, from the Howard government, was supported by such figures as former Australia Council chairman David Gonski, Coalition arts minister Rod Kemp, treasurer Peter Costello and, from the Labor side, former science minister Barry Jones.

The Coalition in 2004 granted Melba $5m across five years, Labor in 2009 gave $2.25m across three years and, after Simon Crean discontinued funding in 2012, Arts Minister ­George Brandis gave $250,000 plus GST earlier this year.

Such are the diminishing returns, but it’s almost a given that a grant of any size to Melba will have Vandamme’s opponents in a pink fit. The shouting started in September when news got out about the latest allocation, and there were the familiar accusations of special treatment and secret deals.

Direct grants of the kind that Melba has received are not subject to the arm’s-length, peer-review business of the Australia Council, the federal government’s arts funding agency. They are at the minister’s discretion. Vandamme insists she has never bypassed the Australia Council; it didn’t have a suitable funding category for Melba’s activities and she went straight to the source.

Melba is not the only organisation to benefit from direct funding. In the same round as Melba’s $250,000, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra received $100,000 for its recent Eur­opean tour. The Australian World Orchestra, the all-star festival orchestra founded by conductor Alexander Briger, received $600,000.

The AWO story is similar to Melba’s. The orchestra brings together, at some expense, the worldwide diaspora of Australian musicians for concerts at the Sydney Opera House and Hamer Hall in Melbourne. AWO chairman Neil Thompson describes the venture as a large start-up whose needs were beyond the grant programs available to it at the Australia Council. The first concerts in 2011 had no federal support; the second season last year had $100,000 from former arts minister Tony Burke.

Last year the AWO invited Brandis to a concert and Thompson asked for a meeting with him to discuss funding. “He was sympathetic to the cause, he understood what we were trying to achieve, and asked me to put a more detailed proposal forward, which I did,” Thompson says. The proposal went through to the Arts Ministry and did not involve Brandis’s policy adviser, Mich­ael Napthali, who was formerly on the AWO board.

Vandamme has aggravated enough people in her time, and even those in Team Melba know she can rub people the wrong way. “Tact is not her forte,” says Jones.

She would possibly rethink mentioning, in the same breath, the comparatively small amount of money Melba requires, and the millions spent on the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. But she is adamant about the exceptional nature of her project and why it deserves exceptional support. Asked about the purpose of arts subsidy, she says it is to encourage excellence and to reach new audiences. She adds: “The Australia Council is very egalitarian, thinks everyone should have a go, and that’s fine. But there’s also a place for the exalted, which is a bit different.”

Some of those who, in the past, would enter the fray with Vandamme have grown tired of the shouting. Good on her, they say, she’s worked the system and got what she wanted. Instead they question the practice of ministers handing out cash in what appears to be arbitrary fashion, with no formal public process of application and assessment.

The Australian Institute of Grants Management regards such practices as antithetical to clear and fair grant-giving. The organisation’s Denis Moriarty says it is better if governments identify a gap in the market – to produce export-quality recordings of Australian musicians, for example – then open a tender process. “The age of entitlement is over,” he says, adding that direct grants are often highly politicised because the recipient has “not been able to navigate the normal democratic process”.

The Australia Council was set up to remove from government the task of distributing money to artists. Grants would be free from political interference and awarded by peers: those engaged in similar activity, and at a similar level of accomplishment, to the applicants. Van­damme argues that Melba could never be assessed impartially by peer review, given its international mission and reputation.

“I think peer assessment is a sacred cow that should be really examined carefully,” she says. “The peer assessment we have are the inter­national reviewers who are not parochial, all over the world. And they greet our work with astonishment and delight.”

Jones, science minister in the Hawke government, and a former director of Melba’s board, says there is a case for ministerial prerogative in funding matters. For example, when he was minister for Customs — “not in the anthropological sense but in tariffs and all that stuff” – he was able to “lift the barrier” for fledgling Tasmanian distillery, Lark Whisky. He says he would never interfere in a competitive grant process, but there were occasions when an innovative venture didn’t match an established grant program and would benefit from some help.

“You never did these things absolutely on your own,” Jones says. “You’d say, ‘I’ve got some confidence, my judgment is good about this person, I’d like to hear what the arguments against are.’ You might do that by consulting the secretary of the department… You wouldn’t just do it by whim.”

In the case of the recent grant to the Melba Foundation, Brandis told the Senate he had meetings with Vandamme to discuss funding, and the proposal was assessed by his department. He went on to explain the workings of arts funding to Labor senator Jacinta Collins. Most funding to artists and organisations is through the Australia Council. “But a very large proportion of the arts funding... is not provided through the Australia Council, it is provided through a variety of programs, and in each of those cases the minister for the arts makes an assessment and ultimately a discretion is exercised by the minister for the arts. That is the way arts funding has always worked in this country.”

Part of the skill set of record producers is the ability to talent-spot and Vandamme, as they say in the business, has good ears. She produced a CD with young violinist Ray Chen when he was on the up, having won the Yehudi Menuhin international competition. He now records with Sony Classical and was on tour last month with Musica Viva. Another gifted young fiddler, Kristian Winther, recorded a cracking version of Ravel’s virtuosic show stopper, Tzigane.

Kristian Winter photo Terry Lane

Melba’s forte is not Australian composition – one would look first to ABC Classics or to the small label Tall Poppies — but it has released a disc of music by Roger Smalley and another with poetry by Samuel Wagan Watson, with musical interludes by Australian composers.

Some of Vandamme’s program choices may be esoteric but she is not duplicating the well-worn repertoire. She unearthed and produced the world premiere recording of Helene, a “poeme-lyrique” by Saint-Saens, commissioned and sung by Nellie Melba in Monte Carlo in 1904. A recent CD – one of three released by Melba this year – features the inquiring Melbourne pianist Benjamin Martin playing English pieces from the 1920s by Delius, Bax, Vaughan Williams and Bridge. It includes Martin’s arrangement of the Charles Chaplin melody Smile.

Vandamme is renowned for exacting standards. You’d need some nerve to tell the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to do another take, especially of a standard concert piece such as Bolero. But when she was in Salzburg recording concerts for Austrian radio ORF, in the late 1980s, she told conductor Riccardo Muti, “We are going to have to record Bolero again.”

She demands the same of herself. She learned the piano when she was a teenager in Melbourne but says she started too late to have a shot at a performing career and didn’t want to be “one of the second-rate pianists in the world”.

Vandamme has Greek heritage – the family name is Nikolithakis – but she kept the name of her German husband. Her grandfather was an immigrant from Crete who went on to open Melbourne’s first 24-hour cafe, the George N, in Russell Street. Vandamme’s father died when she was three, and it was from her grandfather that she caught the entrepreneurial spirit, the belief in “one’s right to achieve”.

Her first job was with the ABC and she stayed for 26 years: first as a music programmer for local radio in Perth, and later as a producer of concerts and recordings. But she was becoming fed up with what she regarded as inconsistent standards in ABC recordings, and decided to go it alone. At the time, she says, the market for classical CDs was still strong, but it became apparent Melba could not be a commercial proposition. More important was the international exposure the label could give Australian musicians through its recordings.

The company is run from a flat near Vandamme’s house and has two employees: her partner, Ian Perry, is the artist and repertoire manager, and her sister Michelle Jeffries man­ages the business side. Melba Recordings, Vandamme says, provides a service and gives “all the income” to the Melba Foundation. The org­anisations are bound contractually to the Australia Council, which audits Melba’s activities.

“It is not a family business, because that implies profit,” Vandamme writes in an email, punctuated with bold text, capitals and underlining. “The foundation owns the property, stock, and income — Melba Recordings is just the operational arm.”

Melba is not alone in taking Australian music to the world. ABC Classics, which will release 34 titles this year, recently issued a Strauss CD with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, chief conductor Andrew Davis and soprano Erin Wall (the conductor and soloist are British and Canadian, respectively). The discs were on sale at the Royal Albert Hall and other venues and shops during the MSO’s European tour. A recording of the Australian World Orchestra, with Alex Briger conducting Beethoven’s Choral symphony, was co-released by Deutsche Grammophon and ABC Classics. The peripatetic Australian Chamber Orchestra has made recordings with international labels Hyperion, Chandos and BIS.

The classical CD industry has changed beyond recognition since Melba arrived on the scene. Once indomitable labels have merged or been subsumed into multinationals. Digital delivery and declining customers have closed all but the most steadfast of specialist classical stores. At the same time, independent labels have proliferated, with orchestras producing in-house CDs and musicians making their own.

The market share for strictly classical is minuscule: a top-selling CD may amount to sales in the low hundreds. The biggest sellers are compilations or albums by artists with crossover appeal, such as Andre Rieu and Andrea Bocelli.

Melba recordings are available on CD and as high-quality downloads. The label does not report sales figures but instead demonstrates its value by citing reviews of its albums, published in mainstream press and specialist publications.

How much attention can Melba realistically command in the music world? Alex Ross, classical music critic at The New Yorker, knows of Melba but doesn’t recall being sent any recordings. In London, author and industry-watcher Norman Lebrecht describes Melba as a very small player in a shrinking market. He says of Vandamme: “I do appreciate that someone is trying to tell the world that there are good and interesting artists in Australia. I just think that the way she’s doing it has outlived its time.”

Melba’s federal grant will be used, in part, to develop a new business model, which Van­damme is due to deliver this month. She doesn’t want to say too much about it or discuss how much Melba will seek in future funding but says it will acknowledge the changed nature of the classical recording business. One idea is that artists would help raise funds for recording projects, and Melba would grant them the copyright in their recordings.

“We are trying to continue this great enterprise, we are trying to see what we can do,” Vandamme says.

Asked if she would rather be lobbying for funds or making records, she doesn’t hesitate: making records, of course. “Do you think I like lobbying? Give me a break! I shouldn’t have to, it’s so obvious that it’s needed.”

On a recent Saturday I was going to a party in St Kilda and called at Vandamme’s house on the way because there were some documents she wanted me to see.

In a cardboard box, she had put a bound sheaf of letters of endorsement, about 60 of them, from figures as various as James Wolfensohn, Baz Luhrmann and Barry Humphries. It included one from Dame Elisabeth Murdoch – Melba’s founding benefactor was 102 at the time of writing – urging Julia Gillard to continue government support for the Melba Foundation, which had done an “extraordinary job of focusing the world’s attention on our fine musical culture”. There were marketing leaflets, a music magazine and several bulky compendiums of CD reviews, many of them with four and five stars.

Vandamme could never be accused of selling herself short. Walking home that night after several wines and hauling that box of fragrant ephemera, I reflected that the Melba story was so often about Vandamme and her tireless crusade for approbation and money.

In the morning I regarded the box again. It was a shipping carton whose original contents had been 36 CD sets of Götterdämmerung, the performance recorded by Vandamme at the glorious Adelaide Ring.

If those CDs are not dusty inventory on a shelf in St Kilda, they are out in the world somewhere, being played and enjoyed.