The Music of My Life: Georges Bizet Edition

 

I have been listening to music since the mid-1960s. Memory is fuzzy here but I think I have been listening to art music or classical music since the 1960s as well. I probably heard it first in films and cartoons, specifically Looney Tunes cartoons, and fell in love with it. I have never looked back.

I have been buying classical records since the early 1970s. The first one I bought, if memory serves, is the 1970s Bohm performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.

At the time I started buying classical records the big boys included the late lamented Philips Classics, which was my favourite since they had the glorious Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon (DG), and EMI. At the time all these giants of the industry seemed to have been run by people who actually liked classical music and who, while they saw it as a commodity, did not, as the people who run these labels seem today, to see it as little more than something similar to a Serta bed or a Cadbury’s candy bar. 

Between the 1960s and the early 2000s these labels released tonnes of great, good, and adequate performances of classical music, mostly the hits: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and all that jazz. Today, Philips is gone. It was gobbled up by Decca, who, like Philips and DG,  was gobbled up by the megacorporation Universal. EMI went belly up and is now part of that other bureaucratic giant of the classical music industry, Warner Classics. Today DG and Decca don’t release much in the way of art music. Presumably, it isn’t a big enough seller for them to warrant the release of new performances unless of course, a performance is given to them by some conductor or symphony orchestra and they don’t have to pay for the recordings. They are releasing old music, much of it in the form of monster conductor boxes like those of Herbert von Karajan, the pride of DG and perhaps the best known conductor, along with Bernstein, of the 1970s and 1980s. 

The action in classical music these days is with the independents though even those are getting gobbled up by the big boys. The wonderful English independent Hyperion was recently purchased by Universal making its future an open book. The wonderful Swedish independent label BIS recently got gobbled up by Apple making their future open and raising the question what does Apple want with a label that has recorded tonnes of Scandinavian music? We still have Naxos and other independents like Brilliant Classics, thank god. Naxos and Brilliant are perhaps the most interesting labels today given how much interesting music, including art music outside the mainstream, they record and release.  

Of the big boys my favourite label at the moment is Warner Classics. I love to buy composer box sets and recently Warner Classics has been releasing a number of interesting one. I have their wonderful Mendelssohn and Prokofiev box sets, for instance. But the box sets I love the most from Warner are those of French composers. Erato and EMI France, which are now part of Warner, have recorded some wonderful French art music over the years, and Warner is slowly but surely collecting it, collating it, and putting it in box sets for release. I have their Berlioz, Dukas, Faure, Franck, Pierne, Poulenc, and Saint-Saens box sets, all of which are wonderful. I recently purchased their Bizet box set.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the Bizet box set. It contains some wonderful stuff in good and very good performances. However, it does not contain several EMI and Erato recordings of Bizet that should be in the box. The box contains two performances of Carmen: the Pretre/Callas and the Rattle, both of which are good (I actually preferred the “original” edition conducted by Rattle to the Pretre). It doesn’t, though it should have, contain the Beecham, Mazel, Plasson, and Burgos performances of the opera, an opera that is one of the most popular in the repertory. It has the Pretre Pearl Fishers but not the Cluytens. It has some of the Plasson Bizet but should have it all. The Plasson performance of the L’Arlesienne incidental music is complete unlike the Gardiner in the box set making one wonder why the curators of the set chose the Gardiner instead of the wonderful Plasson. It has no Martinon Bizet but should. As for the concern that this might be too much repetition in the set, I say the more the merrier.

I hope Warner keeps releasing box sets and particularly French classical music box sets. I am praying for uch needed Chabrier and a Chausson box sets from then. Here’s hoping.