The business of distributing beauty

Edgardo Vertanessian was a 15-year-old high school student in Argentina when he first glimpsed what went on behind the scenes of his favorite music. “One of my school’s subjects was electronics applied to audio,” he recalls. “So I built a small mixing console and some guitar distortion pedals. Then I realized that it was a whole universe.”

His favorite “planets” in that universe included Metallica, Megadeth, Guns N’ Roses, Helloween, and Rage—titans of volume all. Then he discovered they were less like planets and more like satellites. “Heavy metal is kind of downstream from Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann, and all that,” he says. “I liked really fast guitar playing, and all those guys practice with Vivaldi and with Bach.”

Putting his electronics-applied-to-audio training to use, the adult Vertanessian hooked up with the Cleveland-based live-audio giant Eighth Day Sound and set about becoming one of the most in-demand designers, deployers, calibrators, and tuners of large-scale live sound systems in the world. With satisfied clients such as Taylor Swift (the Red and 1989 tours), One Direction, the Who, Madonna, Jay-Z, Drake, Lollapalooza, and SXSW, he could’ve continued on that path indefinitely.

Then opera batted its eyelashes in his direction, and he underwent a conversion. “I was touring all over the world and paying the bills with live sound,” he explains, “but every time I had a day off, whatever city I was in, I would go to the opera. And on my days off, I would listen to opera. My heart moved on.”

In 2023, he began devoting himself full time to Prima Classic, the classical-­music label that he’d started in 2018 with his wife, the Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka. And in contrast to what has become the classical-music-label norm—shouldering the relatively inexpensive responsibilities of manufacturing CDs, distribution, marketing, and streaming placement while shifting the more burdensome recording costs onto the performers—Prima Classic finances most of its recordings itself. “We try not to charge the artist,” Vertanessian says. “All our deals are 50-50. And we want artists to make money, not to spend money.”

With over 100 releases under his belt so far, the bestselling of which is Rebeka’s 2022 recording of sacred music, Credo, he has no regrets.

“Our identity,” he says, “is beauty. We distribute beauty in the form of music. We believe in beauty—beauty in the traditional sense of rhythm, harmony, and melody. And although we do some contemporary, more abstract things, we don’t do music for the ­connoisseur, the rarefied few.

“I’m a big fan of people who commute,” he continues, “who go to a playlist and just play some classical music because they’re going to sit in traffic for the next hour. But our audience is anyone who is open to receive something beautiful. The world needs beauty and harmony, and we want to provide that.”