Reviews

GRAMOPHONE

Mozart to go (10 Feb 2006)

Classical music covered live on the BBC’s 10 o’clock News? Inconceivable? Well, a news crew was out in force last night to cover a Mozart concert conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner at Cadogan Hall in west London. For the first time in the UK the opening half of the concert - Mozart’s Symphonies Nos 39 and 41 - was recorded and made available as a CD at the end of the evening.

Audience members could buy the cardboard CD sleeve at the start of the evening or during the interval for £10 and as the second half (the C minor Mass) was being performed the CDs were burnt on site, slipped into paper jackets and then given to anyone who had already bought the outer sleeve complete with its track listing and sleeve notes. And there were 400 takers at the end of the evening.

‘It’s a life-belt,’ Gardiner told the BBC. ‘I think it’s a marvellous thing. The way things were going it looked as if audiences were going to be dwindling and getting older and greyer. And this is a way of actually bringing it right into the technological present tense.’

Gardiner, who founded his own label - SDG - last year when his contract with Deutsche Grammophon was terminated, took Record of the Year in the 2005 Classic FM Gramophone Awards for the first volume in his live Bach cantata series. Last night’s Mozart CD was issued on SDG’s new imprint, ‘SDG On the Night’ and was produced by Floating Earth.

This is not the first example of a classical audience being able to take away a CD of the concert they’ve just heard. Cologne’s Gürzenich Orchestra launched a venture, GO Live!, last year allowing their audiences not only to buy CDs of the entire evening’s music-making (one disc per half) but also offered on-the-spot download facilities for users of MP3 players. So far Cologne concerts by Markus Stenz and Marin Alsop have been issued ‘on the spot’.

James Jolly, The Gramophone, editor-in-chief

www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?storyID=2529&newssectionID=1