BOWS & ARROWS Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink leads the CSO’s strings.
When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced almost two years ago that it would launch its own in-house label, CSO Resound, several question marks hovered above the emerging enterprise. Was America’s supreme, but also traditional, symphony orchestra spawning a promotional product to tout its name, or would the label mold an identity of its own? And weren’t CDs and record labels passé anyway?
Yet in just over a year after its debut release of Mahler’s 3rd conducted by Bernard Haitink, Resound has become an artistic force on the cutting edge of classical-music recordings. With five releases, the live-music label is a work-in-progress, testing out new formats with each outing. One release went exclusively to iTunes (all Resound records hit iTunes exclusively for 60 days before their physical release), others were recorded on crystalline Super Audio CD (SACD) technology, and the most recent includes a bonus DVD filmed at Symphony Center.
“We want the whole enterprise to be self-sustaining,” says Vanessa Moss, vice president of orchestra operations, although she emphasizes that artistic goals must be met first before worrying about any financial consequences. The label has already entered fertile markets in Asia and Europe, whose populations still remember the CSO’s halcyon years with hall-of-fame conductors Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti. Surprisingly, the biggest market for the label has been Japan, and with the release of Yo-Yo Ma’s Eastern-tinged Silk Road collaboration last winter, the label’s presence in both hemispheres continues to grow.
Extending the CSO brand to an international audience is precisely what Kevin Giglinto, the label’s marketing vice president, says he wants to accomplish. Moss adds that she wants the Resound label to highlight the first-rate partnerships the CSO cultivates, such as its collaborations with resident CSO veterans Haitink and Pierre Boulez. As for tapping new listeners, Giglinto digs out some stats from Apple that reveal a whopping 25 percent of Resound’s iTunes purchasers have been nonclassical fans who predominantly buy pop. Likely this comes simply from behaving like a modern, tech-savvy pop label.
The idea for the label began when the London Symphony Orchestra encouraged the CSO to market its renowned and historical brand. Yet the CSO didn’t want to attach itself to an established label as the New York Philharmonic and L.A. Phil had done with Deutsche Grammophon. “We really wanted to make our media destiny in general, like with the radio broadcasts and the Beyond the Score series,” Moss says, noting that the decision to go it alone wasn’t difficult. “I guess you could say we’re control freaks,” she adds with a laugh.
Being master of its domain has allowed the CSO to fulfill one of its goals: to distinguish the label and freely experiment in ways others haven’t.Whereas major-label symphony releases are more premeditated and often studio productions, the CSO can quickly release a particularly spirited or popular live performance purely for documentation or due to audience demand. With a slew of Haitink recordings focused thus far on Mahler, Bruckner and Shostakovich, Resound may issue a preview of the anticipated Riccardo Muti era, which will begin in 2010, soon after the popular Italian maestro guest-conducts Verdi’s Requiem in January 2009. That ability to decide after a concert if it’s CD worthy or download-only can’t be undervalued. Of course, it works both ways: The popularity of certain albums might end up dictating the CSO’s programming.
Even as CD sales continue to fall in nonclassical markets, classical music fans still buy up discs like it’s 1992. (In part, that’s because of the inferior sound quality of MP3s.) But it’s naive to think that will last forever. By appealing to audiophiles, casual fans and newcomers, CSO Resound is doing that rare thing in a field that honors the past: fighting for the future.
CSO Resound releases Shostakovich’s 4th on Tuesday 9.