Introducing the Virtuoso classical music series

Just got great news for classical music lovers and so right in time for the holidays. The Virtuoso series of albums is now available locally. Virtuoso is Serious Classical Music Made Easy featuring the greatest classical masterpieces by great classical performers. And when I say classical masterpieces, I mean works by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach down to Tchaikovsky and Holst performed by world-renowned artists like Herbert Von Karajan, Vladimir Askenanzy Zubin Mehta, James Galway and others. 

And when I say Made Easy, that also means easy on the pocket because each CD only costs P225. That is so much less than what you would pay for an album by a hip-hop artist, whose words you cannot understand and whose music you will only enjoy hearing for a month or two. I remember a time when classical albums cost an arm and a leg. Not only that. Being mostly imports, those LPs were difficult to come by and copies are given the utmost care. To find out that quality CDs from Virtuoso had been released is a boon for everybody who enjoy listening to beautiful music.

The Virtuoso albums come from masters in the vault of the legendary Decca Classics and Deutsche Grammophon labels, which recorded the biggest names in classical music for many years. I guess this also means that these are analog recordings with a warmth and intimacy that the new digital machines are still unable to duplicate. Those masterpieces had all been re-mastered for superior sound quality for the Virtuoso series.

Among those available are Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachmusik with the Serenata Notturna and the Posthorn Serenade; the Tchaikovsky Ballet Suites with the wonderful music from Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty; Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1 to 6, the finest works in the realm of Baroque orchestral music; also from Tchaikovsky, the Piano Concerto No. 1 with the most famous opening bars in classical music together with the Symphony No. 4.

Handel’s airy Water Music, from the early 18th century; the Blue Danube and other waltzes by the Waltz King Strauss; the great choral piece Carmina Burana by Orff; Holst’s The Planets coupled with John Williams’ Star Wars Suite; Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, An American in Paris and Piano Concerto In F; Debussy’s La Mer, Nocturnes and Prelude To An Afternoon Of A Faun and other albums.

These CDs come in informative packages with booklets that contain liner notes about the works and the composers. Like did you know that Mozart wrote his Eine kleine Nachtmusik on a break from his opera Don Giovanni to restore his creative energies? What about Handel? Did you know that he dedicated his Water Music to the river Thames in London? You can learn all those and more while listening to these classic recordings.

I look at this fantastic harvest of masterpieces and I think that there must be some truth to what is being talked about by music industry insiders nowadays. They all agree that sales of physical CDs are way, way down. An album is deemed lucky if it sells 3,000 pieces. Then it is a fact that digital sales is increasing. This means buying music online, song by song or by entire albums. Not yet in huge numbers that can revive the industry but it is showing that people are getting into the habit of shopping online.

What is noticeable though is that these changes seem to be affecting only the pop big sellers like One Direction or Sarah Geronimo or Gloc 9 and a few others. The rest just trail behind them, are kept in the available list for a few months and then the albums just disappear. If the music is any good or if the album is by a big-name artist, it might resurface under the catalogue category where it might keep selling for a long, long time.

This catalog listing is what is now said to be waging war against digital sales. The music here is mostly familiar and performed by big-name artists. The buyers are mostly those interested in the oldies or those who recall the albums from their younger days. It follows that they want to own the physical CD and not something stored in a cloud they cannot even see. And because they are mostly in that age of leisure, they can afford to indulge their tastes. That means selling a lot of albums.

I say that this must be true because of the number of reissues and new recordings by big-name artists available in the stores. Gloria Estefan, Richard Clayderman, even Depeche Mode have new CDs in the shelves. What about The Essential series or the boxed set Pure…, which is always in the hit lists. A record label might be reluctant to release something by a big R&B star out here that might sell 500 copies and then nothing after three months. That same label though will stock Tony Bennett eternally.

And now, here is the Virtuoso classical music series. I want to collect every CD in the collection. This revenge of the physical CD is indeed happening in a big way.