Word: dvds
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Classical-music lovers seem to agree. DVDs aren't yet as big a factor as classical CDs, which themselves represent only 3% of the overall recorded-music market; but allowing for the fact that they are a fraction of a sliver, DVDs are gaining fast and showing great potential. "They've put a jump start in the aspect of the business that needed it," says Christopher Roberts, president of Universal Classics and Jazz International...
...ahead of the previous year's, whereas classical-CD sales in the same period have been more or less flat. With DVD players now in 70 million U.S. households and more and more people hooking up high-quality speakers or surround sound to their entertainment systems, the appeal of DVDs can only grow...
...favorite artists perform." What can be seen has grown more interesting as well. Many of the video releases of 20 or 30 years ago were shot with a single, fixed camera and suffered from grainy images and muddy sound. They were also more expensive than audio recordings. Today's DVDs--often drawn from elaborate television productions and documentaries--offer multiple camera angles, crystalline images and superb sound. And they tend to cost $20 to $40, still somewhat pricier than CDs, but they are getting more competitive all the time...
...always in the music business, star power is what drives the most successful DVDs, especially if the star, like Bernstein, happens to be dead. DVDs of such departed figures as singer Maria Callas and conductor Herbert von Karajan are top draws, not only because of their charisma but also because their performances have taken on a historic importance. Callas' farewell appearance on the opera stage, in Tosca,at London's Covent Garden in 1965, is the centerpiece of Maria Callas: Living and Dying for Art and Love,which is selling briskly at $24.99 after its release on the TDK label...
With more elusive personalities like cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis in 1973, when she was 28, and Carlos Kleiber, the notoriously reclusive conductor who died last year, the interviews and documentaries that usually make up the bonus material on DVDs are scarce if not nonexistent. The producers are reduced to offering such extras as "photo galleries." No matter; the releases sell anyway. The performers' names and mystique are enough. Almost two decades after Du Pré's death in 1987, a DVD titled Jacqueline du Pré in Portraitis one of the best-selling offerings...