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Sony BMG Music Entertainment said yesterday that it would restructure its classical music division with the introduction today of Sony BMG Masterworks. The division will encompass the former Sony Classical and BMG Classics lines.
The individual labels, including subsidiary imprints, will retain their names, logos and artist rosters. So, as examples, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the pianists Emanuel Ax and Murray Perahia, and the violinists Midori and Joshua Bell will continue to be marketed as Sony Classical artists; the pianist Evgeny Kissin and the tenor Ramón Vargas will still record for RCA Red Seal; and the conductors Nikolaus Harnoncourt and David Zinman will record for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and Arte Nova, respectively.
But Gilbert Hetherwick, who became president of the division in January, said yesterday that the new name was meant to suggest a change of philosophy. It is intended not only to evoke past glories - Masterworks was CBS's flagship classical line long before Sony bought the company from CBS in 1989 - but also to signal what Mr. Hetherwick described as a renewed commitment to the core classical repertory.
Mr. Hetherwick reports to Michael Smellie, the chief operating officer of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and both men repudiated the notion, standard at classical labels since the mid-80's, that pop-classical crossover projects were necessary to keep a classics line afloat. Peter Gelb, who ran Sony Classical until Mr. Hetherwick's appointment and who is to become general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, was a strong proponent of crossovers.
"This is a dream job for me and an amazing opportunity to get it right," said Mr. Hetherwick, 52, who joined BMG Classics in 2003 after running EMI's American classical operations and holding positions at Polygram, Telarc and Sony Classical. "The people above me totally buy and support what I'm trying to do, which is to put the focus on classical music. We will do some Broadway and soundtrack recording, as we've always done. But it has to start with classical artistry."
Mr. Hetherwick pointed out that in the 15 months he ran BMG Classics, before the merger, he was able to turn a profit with a line devoted fully to classical repertory. At BMG, the theater and film departments, originally part of Red Seal, had been spun off, and there were no crossover projects: just straightforward standard repertory recordings by the likes of Mr. Kissin and Mr. Harnoncourt.
Mr. Hetherwick added that during his years at EMI, when crossover projects by Sarah Brightman accounted for 30 percent of the label's sales, he ran the numbers for the classical projects alone and found them to be profitable as well. (He declined to provide numbers.)
Mr. Smellie, who professed to know nothing about classical music, said he found Mr. Hetherwick's approach persuasive.
"I don't buy the reports that the classical record market is collapsing," Mr. Smellie said. "It's just a question of recording the right repertory, marketing it convincingly and applying the right discipline. And in my view, getting rid of crossover allows people to be focused.
"Crossover distorts people's values. You have a record that sells a million copies, and the universe shifts towards finding the next one. That's not what we want to do."
Central to Mr. Hetherwick's plans is exploring the back catalog of the combined label. That trove reaches back to the 1890's, when Sony's original predecessor, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and BMG's ancestor, the American Gramophone Company, were rivals in the nascent record market.
In the heyday of classical recording, from the late 20's through the late 70's, each label amassed a huge library of recordings that are now considered classic.
Mr. Hetherwick said that he had no idea how many master tapes the company's combined archives now hold, but that a computer catalog is being created. In any case, the trove is extraordinary, with legendary recordings by the conductors Fritz Reiner, Arturo Toscanini, Charles Munch, Pierre Monteux, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy and Pierre Boulez; the violinists Jascha Heifetz and Isaac Stern; the pianists Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin and Glenn Gould; and a vast array of vocal stars, from Enrico Caruso to Plácido Domingo, many of them appearing in complete recordings of operas.
Before the merger, Mr. Hetherwick restored some of RCA's legendary recordings, reissuing them as hybrid conventional and Super Audio CD's. He said he would do the same for Sony's Masterworks Heritage series, an archival project that was shelved after several well-regarded releases in the late 90's.
Reissues may, in fact, become the engine that drives Sony BMG Masterworks. Mr. Hetherwick said he would probably release more than 100 (but probably fewer than 200) reissues a year, a number that dwarfs the 20 to 25 new recordings. He said, too, that he hoped to use the Internet to revive even more of the back catalog.
"For the collector, you could have the complete Toscanini always available online," he said. The Internet, he added, "would be ideal for some of the contemporary-music recordings that Sony has: avant-garde productions from the 1960's that are important but that we couldn't afford to remaster, put into a plastic box and sell in stores."
The Internet is crucial for marketing, too, he said, pointing out that Yo-Yo Ma's latest disc, "Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon," has sold extremely well through iTunes, where it was the No. 4 seller for a time.
"What the Internet offers," he said, "is a place where nonspecialists can go and listen to samples to see what they like in the privacy of their homes, without being embarrassed."
More broadly, the label's plans are still vague. Mr. Hetherwick did not hold out great hope for a revival of operatic or symphonic recording, at least in the United States, although he is interested in opera DVD's. As for expanding the currently small rosters of his labels, Mr. Hetherwick said he would do so cautiously.
"There are two kinds of artists," he said. "Those who look at a recording as a work of art and those who see it as a snapshot of what they were doing that day. I like the ones who see recordings as art, who are passionate about making statements with their work in the studio."
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