High Cost of Gold

One of the top commercial accolades in the music business is a gold record, signifying that a given release has had retail sales of $1,000,000 or more. In the pop field, goldies are a dime a dozen, but in the 21-year history of LP, there have been only five million-dollar classical bestsellers. Three of them -- The Glorious Sound of Christmas, the Messiah and The Lord's Prayer -- were made by the Philadelphia Orchestra,* a top seller down through the years, and the most-recorded orchestra in the U.S. Small wonder, then, that it finds itself right in the middle of one of the fiercest, most extraordinary competitive battles the record industry has ever known.

For 25 years, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia recorded exclusively for Columbia Records. Last May, when the orchestra's contract came up for renewal, RCA, which had recorded it from 1917 to 1943, grabbed the ensemble off by outbidding Columbia. Even though RCA now has exclusive rights to the Philadelphia, Columbia has been acting all along as though it had never lost the orchestra at all. As of March, Columbia had issued ten new releases, and this month it released four more, with a $65,000 promotion and advertising campaign to back it up. These were all items recorded by Columbia while the Philadelphia still worked for it. Columbia also says it has about 40 more unreleased recordings in its vaults -- including all the orchestral works of Brahms, one Bruckner symphony, and two albums with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Says Columbia Artists and Repertory Music Director Thomas Frost: "We have so much material in the can that we can release new records by Ormandy and the Philadelphia regularly for the next five years -- and that is exactly what we intend to do."

No Backlog. There is a good reason why RCA signed up the Philadelphia: it desperately needed a big-name orchestra on its roster. The Boston Symphony, a big seller in the days of Serge Koussevitzky, has not done nearly so well under Conductor Erich Leinsdorf. Columbia has two other popular orchestras on its roster: The New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein, and George Szells Cleveland Orchestra. RCA's winning bid was a reported $340,000-a-year royalty guarantee over the next five years. That is a lot of money, but RCA thinks it has a very good chance not only of recovering its costs, but of coming out ahead as well.

It may take a while. The Philadelphia's highest yearly earnings with Columbia were $400,000 in 1963, but its recent average has been $300,000. Columbia estimates that 80% of those royalties have come from the backlog of more than 200 old releases built up over the years; new records have accounted for only 20%. Not only that; RCA cannot record anything in the Columbia catalogue until five years after its release.

From a critical standpoint, RCA's first Philadelphia records are a distinct disappointment. Recorded in the Philadelphia Academy of Music rather than in the ballroom used by Columbia, their sound is often dry and devoid of the luster for which the orchestra is famous. Charles Ives' Third Symphony and an LP of Grieg and Liszt concertos with Pianist Van Cliburn as soloist are the best of the lot. But the Chopin F-minor Concerto with Artur Rubinstein is heavy and graceless, and Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony lacks the bite and immediacy of a nine-year-old version that Columbia re-engineered and rereleased last year. Bruckner's Seventh Symphony has a glossiness that does not suit the music at all. Mozart's Jupiter and Schubert's Unfinished symphonies are the most unresonant of all.

Royalties and Pops. Nonetheless, the orchestra itself has reason to be content with its new lot. Royalties are coming in from both companies. In addition, Ormandy can now record material that was closed to him at Columbia, because Mahler belonged largely to Bernstein, and Mozart to Szell. To be released in the fall are Philadelphia versions of the Mahler First Symphony and Mendelssohn's Elijah. After that will come DeFalla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Rubinstein, Mahler's Second Symphony, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and several contemporary works, including Krzystof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

* The Mormon Tabernacle Choir also received gold records for The Lord's Prayer and Messiah recordings.

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