Editorial

~eport released this week jointly by the National usic Council and the business advisers KPMG placed a value on the UK music industry, and it made for very encouraging reading. The total domestic spending on music was valued at £3·7 billion in 1997 and provided employment for 130,300 people (full-time). Whilst a substantial amount of money is focused on the rock/pop sectors, classical music still accounts for a sizeable proportion. One interesting and rather heartening statistic to emerge among the many presented in the report was that consumer spending on the purchase of new musical instruments was valued at £450 million, a figure which shows that investment in potential professional musicians is not quite as bleak as might be thought (though it is far from ideal).

Last week, coincidentally, also saw the start of this year's Proms, an occasion guaranteed to subvert any pessimistic verdicts on classical music consumption in this country. The second concert of the season featured Cecilia Bartoli, Vienna Concentus Musicus and Nikolaus Harnoncourt - all Proms debutants - in a programme of Haydn and Mozart (and not particularly 'popular'works by either composer). The hall was packed, the musicmaking of a predictably high standard and the audience as mixed as one could wish for. I t demonstrated above all that you don't have to wheel on the war-horses of the repertoire to draw an audience today. Harnoncourt has never veered from his central musical philosophy perhaps not surprising for a musician of his generation but neither has Bartoli. We've never been offered 'The beautiful voice of .. . ' confections or discs of popular arias for mezzo that have little or no logic. Here is a musician happy to perform rare Haydn or Vivaldi operas and take her audience with her. I t is a lesson to all broadcast chiefs, concert promoters and A&R directors : get the right performer and 'dumbing down' becomes a total irrelevance.

Returning from the record industry's annual European gathering, MIDEM, I wrote in March about the future offered for dissemination of music over the Internet. I was slapped on the wrists by one reader for being over-excited and too hasty to succumb to new technologies. Reading George Cole's report on 'Music via the Internet' in this month's audio section (page 126) I don't think I was too hasty. Even in the six months since MIDEM, substantial advances have been made and the time of downloadable recordings is now upon us (though still focused on the pop/rock sector, the world of classical music is surely not far behind). With an impressive 60 per cent of Gramophone readers having access to the Internet, these developments are something we will keep abreast of and which will form part of our regular coverage. Music purchasing via the Internet is growing at an amazing speed, and though direct comsumption of music via the Internet is a little way behind, music via the Internet, as George Cole says, is not going to go away ~

James Jolly editor@gramophone.co.uk

In this issue

The French way Celebrated for her supremely sympathetic portrayals of a host of French operatic heroines Valerie

Masterson offers some of her favourites on a new collection - and Chandos restores to the catalogue her touching Violetta in the ENO

recording in English

Photo TERJ Martill

Valerie Masterson interview on page 15

Reviews on pages 102 and 104

Twentieth-century dame Anne Sofie von Otter adds two more discs to her list: Mahler's Knaben Wunderhorn songs with Thomas Quasthoff (accompanied by Claudio Abbado) and as a splendid Baba the Turk in Stravinsky's neo-classical The Rake's Progress (conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner) Photo DC Reviews on pages 82 and 98

Fond memories Dame Janet Baker receives the 'compilation' treatment with a 'best of' collection from Philips. With some performances borrowed from other companies, it offers a great souvenir of her career

PIIOI(l Pllifips

Review on page 90

Letting his hair down Baritone Thomas Hampson teams up with this month's cover artist Sir Simon Rattle for two very different projects: Karol Szymanowski's exotic , hot-house opera King Roger and Leonard Bernstein's rip-roaring picture of life in New York, Wonderful Town

Reviews on pages 101 and 106

Gramophone September 1999 1