Russian Treasure Trove Yields Catalog for New Classical Label
By DARRELL SATZMAN
Staff Reporter
During his three decades as a record producer, Denny Diante has worked with everyone from Barbra Streisand to the Grateful Dead. None of that experience, however, could have prepared him for his latest venture cataloging, digitizing and marketing a 400,000-hour archive of Russian classical music that was designated a national treasure in 1996 by former Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin.
After three years of research and sometimes strained negotiations with the Russian government, Diante’s Los Angeles record company, Pipeline Music, will launch an infomercial next week to sell the first 20 CDs from its massive collection. A retail distribution deal is pending and the albums are slated to hit store shelves in the fall.
“I’m a rock n roll producer and classical has never been my thing,” said Diante, who began his career in the 1960s as a drummer with surf bands. “But when I heard of this archive I saw the value.”
Made up of thousands of live orchestral performances from artists like Rachmaninoff, Richter and Rostopovich, as well as extensive film footage, the Russian archive holds an enormous wealth of musical material, said Daniel Pollack, a concert pianist and professor of keyboard studies at USC.
“This is one of the most valuable collections in the world. Not only in volume, but level of artistry,” Pollack said in an e-mail from Amsterdam, where he is on sabbatical.
Diante points out that the tapes were stored for years in a climate-controlled building and that most all of the recordings were never released. “So far we’ve gone through 18,000 hours, and that’s just the pimple on the cheek,” said Diante, who predicted that the company would reach profitability this year. “It’s literally the who’s who of the classical world that’s never seen the light of day.”
Russian wrangling
He first heard about the collection in 1995 while working as a vice president for MCA Records. USSU Arts Group, a company led by Tristan Del, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, had secured the rights from the Russian government in the mid-1990s and approached MCA looking for a distribution deal. After months of negotiations, the deal fell apart over control issues, Diante said.
In 1999, after leaving MCA, Diante struck a deal with USSU for the distribution rights. But after years of inaction, the Russians were dissatisfied with the arrangement and demanded that the deal be reworked.
For three years, Diante said he’s been shuttling to Russia to work with the archivists and to meet with Russian officials, including several high-level government ministers. “The new Russians, as we call them, are modern businessmen. They are nobody’s fools,” Diante said. “We bettered the contract so it was a more modern deal.”
The Russian government lacked the resources to market the music worldwide so was willing to let an American company do it.
As it stands, Pipeline has rights to all markets outside the former Soviet Union. The company put up no cash for those rights, but Del got a piece of the company and the Russian government will share in the profits. Pipeline also is paying for archiving and digitization of the recordings, which will be shared with the Russians for distribution in that country.
Diante said Pipeline has spent $2.5 million on the venture, including $500,000 put up by himself and a partner. Because the recordings were made by the Soviets, the artists were considered “state employees” and had no rights to royalties, Diante said. Nevertheless, Diante said Pipeline is working out deals with the estates of many of the artists. “We don’t want to be the ‘greedy Americans,'” he said.
Selling the ‘big names’
Moved from its long-time storage place, the Russian Archive now resides behind barbed wire and under armed guard in a three-story building in a rural area about 30 miles outside of Moscow.
Pipeline, which recently moved to a new office near Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, is still culling the archive for the “big names,” Diante said, and has thus far has digitized 13,000 hours of music and transferred hundreds of hours of film.
Because the company doesn’t have to pay royalties or musicians, for that matter Pipeline intends to sell its CDs for about $9, or a little more than half the cost of top-line CDs on the major labels.
“As long as it’s not at full price I think they will do OK,” said Jim McDaniels, manager of Tower Records Classical Annex on Sunset Boulevard. “There is a market for this kind of music.”
Besides the infomercial, Pipeline will promote its Russian classics as a co-sponsor of the Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition & Festival starting this Friday (March 22) and running through April 6 at the Norton Simon Museum and Pasadena Civic.
There is no putting a price on the archive, but Diante estimated its commercial value well into the billions. Of course, that means little when it comes to going out and selling albums. “We’ve been going slow because we want to do it right,” he said.
