slightly OT -- NYTimes on Andante.com

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 — Mr.
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
Webzines 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
Webcasts.

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 Mr. 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 analogue mists of the 78
r.p.m. era.

Mr. 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 — Mr. Coblence wanted the discs to be bound into
hardcover books that include expansive essays on the composers and
the works.

The Web site was born of Mr. Coblence's desire to set Andante
apart from other labels. Hoping at first to bypass record stores,
where he was afraid his recordings would be lost in the mass of
conventional releases, he decided that the best way to reach music
lovers was through the Internet.

As it turned out, he has arranged to have his discs segregated
into special Andante sections of stores and sold in concert hall
and museum gift shops. And his musings on the Internet led him to
develop the Andante Web site, in which he and two partners — Pierre
Bergé, a founder of the Yves Saint-Laurent couture house, and
Jean-Francis Bretelle, the president of Oléron Finance, a Paris
banking concern — have invested $5 million.

"We did not want it to be simply an e-commerce site," Mr. Coblence
said of the Web site. "Our mission is to provide access to
knowledge about music, both for music lovers who are not well
versed and who need basic references, and for sophisticated
listeners, musicians, professionals, musicologists and
universities. We wanted to compile exclusive resources that were
deep and complex."

So although visitors to the Web site can read about, hear excerpts
from and order Andante's recordings, they are more likely to be
attracted to its other bells and whistles. They can access reports
from newspapers around the world, as well as reviews, interviews
and essays, some from other publications, some commissioned by the
site. They can also search for performances by date, location,
performer or work, or consult the Concise Grove Dictionary of
Music, discographies, composers' works lists (still in progress)
and biographical information.

The main draw, though, is the "Musicroom," where performances are
available as streaming audio and video (formats that can be played
but not easily downloaded). Among the current offerings is a recent
performance of the Bruckner Ninth by Pierre Boulez and the Vienna
Philharmonic. There are also works by Mr. Boulez from the Salzburg
Easter Festival. The performance sites are linked to program notes
and even to translated song texts. And for more serendipitous
listening, there is Andante Radio, which streams a combination of
historical and contemporary recordings.

In recent months Mr. Coblence has reached agreements for live
opera from La Scala, and has established working relationships with
Mr. Boulez and with Maurizio Pollini, the pianist, who will be
undertaking expansive projects for the site. Mr. Coblence has also
arranged for a Webcast of Jessye Norman's performance of Schubert's
"Winterreise," in a Robert Wilson staging, which takes place in
Paris in September. But the heart of his programming will come from
the agreements he has reached with the Vienna Philharmonic, the
London Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The orchestras have given Andante not only the exclusive rights to
their weekly concerts during the season but also access to their
radio archives, for use both in Webcasts and for release on compact
discs. Once the performances are Webcast, they will remain
available as part of Andante's online archives, from which
listeners can retrieve them at any time.

The performances currently available on the site are, in effect,
teasers: they are available free of charge as the site's
programming falls into place, and some will remain free thereafter.
But Mr. Coblence said that Andante planned to charge subscription
fees, starting in October, with different price levels giving users
different kinds of access, ranging from professional services for
musicians and presenters to general access for more casual
classical music fans. The base rate, Mr. Coblence said, would be
$10 monthly or $100 annually and would include access to the audio
portions of the weekly orchestral performances.

As currently envisioned, access to video and to certain reference
resources — including the current edition of the New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians — would cost more. Through
subscription fees and record sales Mr. Coblence and his partners
hope to recoup their investment, and they have high hopes. They
have purchased enough bandwidth, Mr. Coblence said, "to stream
audio to tens of thousands of listeners simultaneously."
Orchestras, meanwhile, are being asked to take the value of their
involvement with Andante.com on faith.

"We are paying no money up front, or perhaps symbolic amounts" Mr.
Coblence said. "But the orchestras have a huge stake in the
revenues from the CD's we will make, which will include both
archival material and discs drawn from their current concerts. What
we are offering them is far more attractive than a commercial
recording deal. Commercial recordings pay them 10 percent of the
wholesale price of the disc. Here they will get a vast portion of
the revenues," beyond which he would not elaborate.

Not all the orchestras Mr. Coblence has approached have jumped at
the opportunity. One that has decided to pass is the New York
Philharmonic.

"They came to speak with us in the spring, and presented the
site," said Eric Latzky, a spokesman for the Philharmonic. "We
thought it was very impressive and a great thing for classical
music, and we discussed a partnership that might have included many
things. But at this stage we are in the process of doing a major
design of our own Web site, and I can tell you that streaming our
concerts and using the Web as a delivery system for music is very
much on the front burner here." In the end, he said, "we chose not
to enter an exclusive relationship, which is what they had come to
discuss."

The Philharmonic's interest in expanding its use of the Web is an
indication of some of the competition Andante may face. It also has
a well- entrenched competitor in the Global Music Network
(www.gmn.com), an all-purpose arts Web site that also offers a menu
of concert recordings and news articles. But perhaps because its
aim is broader — it has sections devoted to theater, dance, world
music and jazz — its classical music concentration is both more
limited and more lightweight than Andante's.

Another site, the electronic version of Musical America (www
.musicalamerica.com), competes with other departments and
prospective ventures at Andante, including a news section and
listings of artist managements, presenters, festivals, opera
companies and orchestras.

The aspect of Andante that seems closest to Mr. Coblence's heart
is the record label. He has drawn up extensive lists of prospective
performance couplings, placing a premium on recordings that have
never been published commercially.

Andante's Vienna Philharmonic set, for example, includes a Mahler
Ninth led by Dmitri Mitropoulos a month before his death in 1960.
Other projects include the complete works of Ravel, using
recordings made during the composer's lifetime and either overseen
or approved by him. All told, the label hopes to release 1,000
discs over the next 10 years, including new projects undertaken by
Mr. Pollini, Mr. Boulez and the orchestras with which it has
established relationships.

Andante's first release includes a set of the Beethoven Piano
Concertos (each performed twice, with Ania Dorfmann, Walter
Gieseking, Clara Haskil, William Kapell, Marguerite Long, Artur
Rubinstein, Artur Schnabel and Rudolf Serkin as the soloists), as
well as a collection of Schubert chamber music, and volumes devoted
to performances by the pianist Wilhelm Backhaus and the violinist
Joseph Szigeti, the Vienna Philharmonic under several conductors
and Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Orchestra and the
All- American Youth Orchestra. The sets are lavishly packaged, and
pricey: $59 for three-CD sets, $79 for four-CD sets.

"I see the label partly as an archaeological mission," said Mr.
Coblence, whose earlier involvements with the performance world
have included founding the European Mozart Foundation, to support
music education, particularly in Eastern Europe, and working with
the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, which supports the work of the
avant-garde director Robert Wilson. "The idea was to dig for the
treasures of interpretation in the 20th century, and clean them up
and restore them.

"But also I felt that the way music is packaged and sold today
does it a huge disservice. As a child, record collecting was my
greatest joy and obsession, and part of that joy was in the beauty
of the object, and the whole ritual involved in opening the LP,
pulling out the record and playing it. All this has wholly
disappeared with CD's and jewel boxes. My idea was to restore this
sense of love and respect to the recording as an object of
culture."

"We have such a totally different approach to recording, whether
it's for CD or for streaming, that suddenly the artists are sitting
on the same side of the table as we are," Mr. Coblence said. "We
have relationships with them that I don't think any record company
has enjoyed in a long time. And the idea that they are partners
with us, artistically and philosophically, translates into a
practical business partnership as well."