Stream of culture

For the first time in nearly a decade, the music industry saw its revenues rise in 2016.

The reason had nothing to do with the sales of hard-copy or digital music. Those numbers continued to drop. What changed was the number of people subscribing to online music-streaming services that allow them to listen to their favorite music without paying for individual albums or songs. For the first time, streaming accounted for the majority of music consumption (51 percent). And there’s no indication of a change in direction anytime soon.

Reading the writing on the wall, the venerable classical-music label Deutsche Grammophon has made a bid to engage the streaming generation with a new 10-album series called The Essentials.

Each 25-track collection focuses on a single composer, emphasizing his most popular melodies in a bid to hook the curious and eventually reel them in. The composers, in chronological order, are Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Ravel. Never has a more gifted lineup baited a mercenary hook.

And mercenary the hook certainly is. For example, what besides the instant recognizability of The Four Seasons explains Vivaldi’s finding his way onto Deutsche Grammophon’s Mount Rushmore when Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, to name just three, surely deserve pride of place? (The “compromise” of including Vivaldi among The Essentials is mitigated somewhat by his playlist’s sticking to the cream of his crop, particularly the brisk first movements of two of his worthier compositions: Stabat Mater, featuring the sublime singing of the countertenor Michael Chance, and Gloria in D.)

There’s no compromise where the performers are concerned. Drawing upon Deutsche Grammophon’s vast archive of exemplary recordings, the curators have fielded the musical equivalent of all-star teams, matching the melodies with those instrumentalists and singers most, or at least reasonably, capable of making sure the bloom stays on the rose.

And as with literal all-star teams, fun can be had with the statistics. The great Argentine pianist Martha Argerich, for example, appears on six of the collections for a total 13 times. The more famous Vladimir Horowitz appears only five. Ensembles conducted by the early-music specialist Trevor Pinnock make 12 appearances, 11 of those performing Vivaldi. Plácido Domingo makes six, all of them singing Puccini.

The significance of such observations is less that they can give rise to interesting musings (whether, say, the cosmopolitanism of Argerich’s source material, which exceeds that of Pinnock, Horowitz, and Domingo, yields dividends in terms of audibly benefiting everything that she assays). Their significance is that a project as ambitious as The Essentials can inspire them.

And because it can, the listener can not only enjoy the project but also learn from it—learn whether he prefers glistening Baroque perfection to Beethoven’s Classical vigor or Tchaikovsky’s lush Romantic melodies to the more subjective beauties crafted by Debussy and Ravel, and why.

For some novices, simply realizing that one can detect the stylistic differences among the different periods without serious training (or that there were Hungarian Rhapsodies before Queen’s “Bohemian” one) will come as a revelation.

“Culture,” wrote Albert Jay Nock, “is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world.” It is also knowing the best that has been composed and captured on tape or any other storage medium. In making such knowledge possible, the 250 selections contained in The Essentials guarantee that, although battered and bruised, culture is not yet ready to go down without a fight.