The Slow, Sad Death of Sony Classical

During the 20^th Century, there were two great American Classical Music record labels, Columbia and RCA.  Columbia had sub-labels like Epic and Odyssey, and RCA had Gold Seal.  Columbia’s artist roster included conductors Bruno Walter, George Szell, and Eugene Ormandy – to name but three, along with pianist Rudolf Serkin and, for an eleven-year period, Vladimir Horowitz.  RCA had Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch, Ormandy after 1968, violinist Jascha Heifetz and pianists Artur Rubinstein and Van Cliburn – along with Horowitz for most of his career. 

Columbia and RCA fought for supremacy in the American classical market.  They also marketed to Europe, but the United States was their priority - and they endured through competition with European labels including Decca/London, Deutsche Grammophon, and Philips, along with American upstarts like Mercury records.

As older generations of performing artists died, new ones rose to prominence – for example, Leonard Bernstein, who was a Columbia artist until defecting to DG.  Horowitz’s pupils Byron Janis and Gary Graffman were RCA performers until the label dumped them in favor of Cliburn, who had just won the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition.  Janis went to Mercury records, while Graffman went to Columbia – and subsequently helped persuade Horowitz to join him there after the elder artist became disenchanted with RCA’s approach to recording and marketing. 

It was during this period, the 1950s and 1960s, that both RCA and Columbia were recording large swaths of the Classical repertoire in stereo, with their labels boasting of “Living Stereo” and “360-degree sound.” 

The 1970’s saw a precipitous drop in Classical record sales.  The issue was mainly that the core repertoire had been recorded umpteen times and listeners saw little reason to buy, for example, Rubinstein’s 1971 recording of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy when they had a perfectly fine version with Rubinstein and the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner from 1956 – in “Living Stereo” to boot.  If memory serves, the 1956 recording sold some 250,000 copies, whereas the 1971 remake sold a mere 13,000.  “Advancements” from both RCA and Columbia including Dynagroove, Quadrophonic sound, and gimmicked microphone placement resulted in some atrocious sounding records – particularly from RCA.

But there were two changes which briefly revived sales industry-wide: the advents of digital recording and the Compact Disc.  Suddenly, the core repertoire was being recorded again with unrestricted dynamics and without tape hiss.  Telarc Records, the Mercury records of the 1980s-1990s, recorded a good deal of that repertoire with the Cleveland Orchestra.  RCA’s big names, Rubinstein, Ormandy, Horowitz, had either died, retired, or defected to other labels.  Columbia’s biggest name at the time, Leonard Bernstein, switched allegiances to Deutsche Grammophon, as did Rudolf Serkin.  Glenn Gould was dead.  For new recordings RCA and Columbia largely had to rely on solid performers who, with the exception of Yo-Yo Ma, never really caught fire with the public like the old-timers had: Emanuel Ax, Murray Perahia, Paavo Berglund.

In 1989 Sony Classical bought Columbia Masterworks and, as their first coup, signed Vladimir Horowitz for what turned out to be his last recording – and what a fine recording it is both in terms of recorded sound and performance.  By then, RCA – once such a corporate giant that it owned the NBC radio and television networks – was part of the Bertelsmann Music Group and was struggling.  Much of their business was driven by reissues of varying quality from their back catalogue.  As someone who worked at a Classical record store (the Music Box at Cleveland’s Shaker Square) in the 1980s, I saw early on how the back catalog continued to have market potential.  One day in 1985, we received four copies of Artur Rubinstein playing Tchaikovsky’s and Grieg’s Piano concertos on CD – recordings which originated in the 1960s.  My manager scoffed and said “these will never sell – CD collectors only want pure Digital recordings, not this analog crap.”  In fact, all four copies sold within a few days while newer digital recordings of the same repertoire languished.    

During the 1990s, both RCA’s and Sony’s releases included a combination of new material and reissues.  RCA’s included Toscanini’s complete authorized recordings (which included a cabinet for those who purchased the complete edition), a 22-CD set of Horowitz’s RCA recordings, and, in 1999, a 107-CD deluxe edition of Rubinstein’s complete RCA recordings – which reportedly broke the bank and sold poorly until the CDs were issued individually.  During much of this period Sony was headed by Horowitz’s old manager, Peter Gelb.  Under his directions, Sony’s new releases, controversially, included non-Classical “crossover” material with artists including Yo-Yo Ma recording an album of Americana; electronic composer Vangelis recorded an album; and James Horner’s score to the film Titanic which – whether or not one agreed with including film scores under a Classical label – sold like gangbusters and made a lot of money for the label.  During this era Sony’s reissues included a well-engineered reissue of Horowitz’s complete Columbia recordings and a lavish box of composer Igor Stravinsky’s recordings.   

It was also during the Gelb era that RCA found itself in a position to be acquired and, fortuitously, it was Sony which took RCA over.  Suddenly, America’s two largest classical labels were one enormous label.

With access to both the RCA’s and Columbia’s deep back-catalogues, Sony produced some excellent boxed sets which have done their core artists proud: not just the big boys like Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Szell, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Horowitz, and Glenn Gould; but Pierre Boulez, Robert Casadesus, Cliburn, Graffman, Janis, William Kapell, Murray Perahia, Charles Rosen, both Rudolf Serkin and his son Peter, André Watts, and others too numerous to mention. 

A selection from some of Sony Classical's many 

Original Album boxed sets. 

(The Horowitz photo includes a few DG recordings.)

During this period, many claimed these issues were folly and that the era of the CD was over as the era of streaming approached.  But sales of both CDs and LPs increased during COVID, and most of the boxed sets mentioned above sold out almost immediately upon issuance – necessitating reprints and creating a lucrative resell market on eBay and other sites.

Then, last year, there was a bloodbath at Sony.  Those with knowledge of the of the label’s storied history and the ability to restore the historic recordings were given the ax.  No reason was given for this evisceration – and given the documented strong sales of these boxed sets, it’s difficult to believe they were losing the label money.  So, the reissues came to an end – and at the most inopportune moment.  Collectors were awaiting the final box of Sony’s multi-part Ormandy set comprising his post-1968 RCA recordings.  Pianophiles were also hoping that Sony would, finally, issue Horowitz’s complete privately recorded Carnegie Hall recitals from 1945-1950 – which have been floating around on the internet in poor sounding transfers.

Sony’s classical department has now been downsized so that what was once a Mississippi River of releases has slowed to a trickle.  The back-catalogue is now ignored and at this rate, Sony’s Classical division is seems poised to downsize itself out of business in the very near future.