Sidelined for years, with a market share tumbling from marginal to microscopic, classical music is enjoying a widespread renaissance. The Savoy is just the latest sign. In Britain, sales of classical CDs were up 8 percent last year, against a global downturn of more than 7 percent for all musical genres. Best-selling albums like Hayley Westenra’s “Pure,” and “Bryn” by opera heavyweight Bryn Terfel, made it onto the pop top-10 lists. The BBC more than tripled its classical-music programming, from 98 hours in 2000 to 368 this year. Even reality TV got a dose of high culture: in France, “Orpheus: Behind the Scenes in the Underworld” filmed 21 music graduates for 12 weeks while they rehearsed Monteverdi’s 17th-century masterpiece; Britain’s “Operatunity” saw would-be stars compete to sing with the English National Opera.
The surge is not just confined to Europe. New concert halls are springing up across Asia–including the glitzy $340 million Esplanade in Singapore. In the United States, the $274 million Frank Gehry- designed Walt Disney concert hall opened in L.A. last October, and earlier this month New York announced plans for a $575 million refurbishment of Lincoln Center–the first phase of an ambitious redevelopment.
What’s driving this new vogue? Pianist Susan Tomes, who recently published “Beyond the Notes,” reflections on 20 years of concerts with the Florestan Trio, says it stems from a growing desire for something more substantive. “I get the impression that people are looking for something that makes sense of their feelings and thoughts, and they’re not finding it in pop,” she says. It helps that classical music is more accessible than ever–in commercials, on TV and at the movies. Classic FM, which now claims 75 percent of Britain’s commercial radio audience, draws in listeners through a magazine, Web site, TV channel and partnerships with other orchestras , as well as through their radio shows, books and CDs.
With the sales of other genres tumbling, classical is a potential gold mine. Record-industry execs are busy dreaming up creative new ways to woo wealthy baby boomers who don’t download and are unsatisfied by pop. One popular method involves dotting light, accessible songs among more traditional works to entice listeners into less familiar classical territory. On one of his albums, Bryn Terfel included “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” among works by Bizet and Schubert. Labels are also playing up their singers’ personalities, promoting pretty, charismatic stars like Westenra and cultivating accomplished soprano Anna Netrebko as an opera siren. And they’re helping singers develop their own vision, luring listeners with highbrow “concept albums.” Pianist Helene Grimaud won plaudits for her recent compilation “Credo,” an eclectic mix of pieces from Beethoven to 20th-century Estonian composer Arvo Prt. “It sold far beyond any of her other recordings,” says Christopher Roberts, Chairman of Universal Classics. “Her personality made it very intriguing–it had color, a philosophy, it was very introspective.”
Producers are raising the profiles of established, global stars in the same carefully planned way. Cecilia Bartoli widened her popular appeal with a series of albums focused on different composers–including, most recently, the neglected arias of Antonio Salieri. “It’s why [her] career exploded in Europe over the past few years,” says Roberts. “She embraced the media and appeared in concert, and she had very strong concept records.”
Good marketing clearly helps. Roberts attributes the secret of “Bryn’s” success to a very well-targeted media campaign. But even the best marketing strategies can only accomplish so much. Most listeners “put their toe in the water but find it difficult to go further,” says Peter Maniura, head of classical music at the BBC. “And the further is our concern.” While millions worldwide tune in to big events like the Last Night of the Proms on the BBC, only a few hundred thousand watch a complete concert. “These are intellectually curious people, with a broad range of interests, but right now classical music is not something they do much more than sample,” Maniura says.
That’s a scenario he and other industry execs are bent on changing, largely through an education campaign. In “The Genius of Mozart,” which recently aired on the BBC, conductor Charles Hazelwood combined an in-depth history of the piano and analysis of some of Mozart’s most potent concerto passages with “first-person interviews” of actors playing members of Mozart’s family. It sounds cheesy, but it succeeded in bringing the composer’s turbulent personality vividly to life. “We’re not trying to make classical music something it isn’t,” Maniura maintains. “We’re saying: let’s try and re-create the sense of freshness it had when it was new. Then, we schedule it in prime time and the audience doubles.”
Traditional concert halls are updating their shows to attract a broader audience. At the Berlin Philharmonic, charismatic conductor Simon Rattle has drawn full houses with an adventurous repertoire of modern works, including those by jazz-influenced German composer Heiner Goebbels. Gubbay built a $32 million production company on hugely popular shows like his “Classical Spectacular” at London’s Royal Albert Hall, which uses lasers, lights and fireworks.
Critics worry that such pyrotechnics only make the genre seem frivolous. “To pretend this kind of music is fun, light-hearted and informal is doing it a disservice,” says Tomes. When friends thank her for a lovely evening’s “entertainment,” she gets riled. Classical music “is more than entertaining,” she says. “It’s never going to work to pretend that this is something people are going to grasp instantly.”
Still, as classical music expands its following, it is becoming less shy about showing its serious side. The Savoy Opera will try out Offenbach’s “La Belle Helene” in the autumn, while the BBC is filming Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” for broadcast in June. “This is music which tries to express how the composer feels about the world and about human relationships,” says Tomes. “You hope it’s a link between the composer’s soul and the soul of the person listening.” As the record industry is finding, that strikes just the right chord with today’s crowd.
