Classical Gas

Woe be the soul looking for a good recording of MAHLER’s FIFTH in an online world designed to lead you to the oeuvre of FIFTH HARMONY.

Imagine walking into an old-school record store, hiking up to the third floor or down to the basement where the classical records are tucked away, and discovering that the titles and credits on the album covers are all wrong. And nothing’s filed where’s it’s supposed to be. And there are no employees you can go to for help. (And let’s not even talk about the sound system.) That’s sort of what it’s always been like for classical fans trying to conduct their way through SPOTIFY, APPLE and AMAZON, which have room for a thousand styles of music but only one style of metadata—and only one style of each thing that springs forth from there.

There have long been boutique alternatives, among them the much loved classical service PRIMEPHONIC, which Apple bought and shuttered 18 months ago, promising to replace it with something new, improved and Apple-y, and then, for quite some time, not doing so. But it’s finally here, a year behind schedule, and it might just prove to have been worth the wait.

APPLE MUSIC CLASSICAL is a free-standing app that requires an APPLE MUSIC subscription to use but doesn’t otherwise integrate with Apple’s main subscription music app. It has Primephonic’s innards and an almost old-school Apple design vibe: elegant and easy to understand. It allows users to search by composer, conductor, orchestra, works and more, in ways that are all but impossible in pop-leaning services. For works with dozens of recordings in print, it tells you which ones are most popular and, often, which ones it thinks are best, an invaluable tool for someone trying to find their way into MOZART or MAHLER or MESSIAEN or MUHLY.

If you type “Mahler’s Fifth” in Spotify’s desktop search box, the service will return a list of more than 100 albums in no discernible order. Do the same in Apple Music Classical and you’ll quickly be directed to an “Editor’s Choice” recording—a recent version with RAFAEL PAYARE conducting the ORCHESTRE SYMPHONIQUE DE MONTREAL—along with a list of the most popular versions, starting with a 1958 SIR RUDOLF SCHWARZ/LONDON SYMPHONY offering. (GQ's CHRIS COHEN includes a nice visual comparison of the difference in his glowing review of the launch.) You don’t have to guess which entity, between the composer, conductor and orchestra, the service considers to be the “artist” on any given recording. The service knows what everyone’s role is, and there’s room on the metadata sheets for all of them.

Almost everyone, anyway. It’s unclear if Apple Music Classical knows who W.S. GILBERT, aka the front half of GILBERT & SULLIVAN, is, never mind who KEITH RICHARDS, the back half of JAGGER & RICHARDS, is. The lone composer rules here. THE MIKADO and the rest of Gilbert & Sullivan’s operas are credited to composer SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN, and your search for librettist W.S. Gilbert anywhere on the app will come up all but empty. There’s no ROLLING STONES artist page, of course, but all those Stones songs that classical ensembles have recorded, or that show up on film soundtracks that bridge the classical and pop words, are attributed simply to JAGGER, which is weird.

Things can get trickier for composers whose entire careers bridge the classical, experimental and pop worlds. You'll find a handful of works and albums by PETER GORDON but you can’t click on his name because Apple doesn’t appear to recognize him as a classical entity. Or maybe its programmers just haven’t got around to adding him to the system yet? (In general, the offerings of artist pages and playlists seem a tad thin at launch; hopefully the service is continuing to build them out.)

These aren’t deal killers but they are problems to be solved, especially looking forward into a musical future that may not distinguish between pop, rock, hip-hop, jazz and classical quite so clearly and confidently as it used to. A bigger question will be whether, and how, to fully integrate the two services someday. Which service do you open in search of HANS ZIMMER? Will the answer depend on whether you want to listen to MAX RICHTER or SKRILLEX next? What if you want to explore both?

The Biz

WARNER MUSIC is laying off 270 staffers as part of a global reorg that CEO ROBERT KYNCL described as “not a blanket cost-cutting exercise” but a reallocation of resources. That’s about 4% of Warner’s staff. The top three execs at Warner’s Parlophone Records are all stepping down... A US rate court granted BMI a significant raise in the royalties it gets from live performances. The new rate is 0.5% of event revenues, including, for the first time, a cut of ticket service fees and income from tickets that promoters sell on the secondary market. BMI had been seeking more than 1%, but president MIKE O’NEILL called the decision “a massive victory for BMI and the songwriters, composers and publishers we represent"... There appears to be a vinyl record made out of, um, you don't have to click on this link, I promise.

Rest in Peace

KEITH REID, who wrote the lyrics for "A Whiter Shade of Pale" "and about 100 subsequent songs" by Procol Harum, a group he co-founded and helped lead even though he didn't sing or play an instrument. "I wasn't trying to be mysterious with those images," Reid once said of the prog-rock ballad that propelled the band to stardom in the late 1960s. "I was trying to be evocative." His longtime co-writer, lead singer Gary Brooker, described him as "a very deep person and a very private person. Although we work together, and we sometimes communicate in a very intimate way... at the end of the day, I don’t know who he is”... Canadian composer JOCELYN MORLOCK... Blues and soul singer PEGGY SCOTT-ADAMS.