Elsewhere the big news is that Deutsche Grammophon are moving offices from Hamburg to Berlin. Well, that's the future of classical music sorted. Any questions? More on DG/Polydor and geography here.
The Smith Quartet's recording of Steve Reich's Different Trains featured here. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk. Also on Facebook and Twitter.
2 comments:
Just remind me ... Which companies does Rattle, chief conductor of the Berlin Phil records, for ? Same for Barenboim and the Staatsoper, Janowski and the Rundfunk Sinfonie, Jacobs and the academie of Alte Musik... to name a few ?
Antoine
The key here is reducing costs and getting subsidies. It sounds like DG expects to get the same kind of subsidized office space that book publisher Suhrkamp got when it recently moved from Frankfurt to practically rent-free quarters in Berlin. The bitter business there was that Frankfurt is in the state of Hessen, a relatively rich state, which pays money into a pool of transfers (Länderfinanzausgleich) to less-well off federal states, so in effect Hessen was pay Berlin to subsidize the move! Although DG says that almost all their employees will move to Berlin, in the case of Suhrkamp, the move was clearly an opportunity to downsize, which they did. Like Hessen, Hamburg pays into the Länderfinanzausgleich, so any subsidies for the move to Berlin will, in effect, be paid by Hamburg!
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