About five years ago Alain Coblence, a French lawyer with a practice in New York, had an idea for a business that would draw on his lifelong passion for classical recordings. It began as a comparatively simple idea: He was going to start a record label, called Andante.
But by the time Andante's first discs went to press -- its first group of six multidisc sets is to be released this month -- Coblence had transformed his business into something grander, a Web site (www.andante.com) where classical music fans would be able to hear both recent and archival concert performances by some of the world's great orchestras and opera companies and where visitors could satisfy a broad range of musical needs, from finding interesting concerts to reading treatises on contemporary music theory.
Andante.com has been online only since April, but it has already become the gold standard among classical music Web sites, a chaotic jumble that includes everything from fan sites devoted, with varying degrees of sophistication, to performers and composers, to Web magazines focused on particular corners of the field (particularly opera, where partisan debates flourish) and commercial sites meant to move concert tickets and recordings but dressed up as sources of news and information.
Most of the world's orchestras, opera companies, concert halls and festivals have Web sites, and some are used creatively. Offering excerpts of programmed works, as well as full program notes, is becoming increasingly common. At the moment these sites are intended primarily as electronic ticket windows and souvenir shops. But that is likely to change as orchestras begin to exploit the possibilities open to them since last September, when they reached an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians about Web broadcasts.
Some go it alone
Among American ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra recently committed itself (and its performances) to Andante. But others, like the New York Philharmonic, plan to offer concerts on their home sites.
Part of Coblence's goal for Andante is to establish some order among the Web's classical music resources, and he has made considerable headway. But the genesis of his high-tech classical music playground was, oddly enough, in the analog mists of the 78 rpm era.
Coblence's original plan was to license mostly prewar recordings, and although he subsequently expanded his purview to modern times, historical recordings remain the label's specialty. After having them transferred to compact disc with attention to the details of pitch and instrumental color, he hoped to assemble three or four-CD packages that in some cases bring together contrasting performances of great works.
His dream compilation of the Brahms Symphonies, for example, would include two traversals of the cycle, with each work led by a different conductor. Willem Mengelberg's freewheeling 1932 recording of the Third Symphony would sit beside Bruno Walter's more patrician reading from 1936; Toscanini's driven 1941 account of the First would counter the subjective lushness of the 1935 Stokowski recording. And instead of offering these discs in the record industry's standard packaging -- plastic jewel boxes with flimsy booklets -- Coblence wanted the discs to be bound into hardcover books that include expansive essays on the composers and the works.
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