An “everything” app. The coinage might be Musk’s, but the goal is one shared by every large media organisation. One app or one platform to rule them all, connecting customers and consumers with everything that a company does or makes under a single banner. You could even call it a holy grail. Especially when the company in question is Universal Music, which has given classical-music fans everywhere another good reason to sign up for a STAGE+ subscription by offering exclusive access to the Bayreuth Festival’s new staging of Parsifal.
What is STAGE+? Is it a site? Is it an app? Is it a platform? No, it’s all three. It’s a player in the same market as Medici, Marquee, Arte, Apple Music, Spotify, the Digital Concert Hall, Symphony Live and more. That’s several markets in one, in fact, and that’s the USP of STAGE+: offering access to high-definition streamed audio and video, live and recorded, from all the different companies under the Universal Music tent. Deutsche Grammophon (DG) and Decca are the classical labels with the largest footprint, but its portfolio also includes “boutique” brands, the newest such acquisition being Hyperion.
“This is so different from what we are used to doing at the label,” explains DG’s president, Clemens Trautmann. “In the past we have had one-off album launches, artist signings and partnerships. But STAGE+ is a multi-year project that we’ve embarked on. We launched it in 2022, and the new Ring from Bayreuth was one of the first programmes. Now there’s the new Parsifal, but the Bayreuth Festival is just one of many partners, festivals, venues and artists which have joined us in partnership for STAGE+.”
Alongside Trautmann is Robert Zimmermann, one of the vice-presidents at DG who joined after playing an instrumental role in the creation of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall. The rapid rise and conspicuous success of the DCH over the course of the last decade has bucked the trend of falling numbers, in CD sales at any rate. Classical-music companies and consumers are not always the dinosaurs they are portrayed as in popular media when it comes to finding and paying for the best music out there, and watching and listening to it in a way that suits them. Readers of Bachtrack know this for themselves.
The DCH has an archive of “historic” Berlin Philharmonic performances, but it’s a tiny fraction compared to the riches lying in the Universal Music vaults. STAGE+ offers three complementary channels: three streams of streaming, if you like, but they criss-cross one another. Zimmermann explains more: “STAGE+ hosts live video streams weekly from the big venues with Universal artists from all over the world. We combine this with a huge Video on Demand library of these artists. This library is growing all the time, with new films which we’re producing or licensing, and remastering older films from the archives of Universal labels. And thirdly, we are adding our audio catalogue to the platform.”
To escape from Wagner, at least for an hour or two, I search STAGE+ for Martha Argerich. Thanks to Universal’s partnership with the Verbier Festival, her gold-dust partnership with Evgeny Kissin is available in high-definition audio with a single click away from the home page. Scroll down, and there’s a film of her weaving more magic in Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Riccardo Chailly: a film otherwise only available on DVD. Roll back up and her DG catalogue from the 60s onwards is arranged by album cover. The film is divided movement by movement just as we’d expect the audio to be. In time, STAGE+ will carry the programme notes and editorial content of its “physical” releases.
Everything on STAGE+ is available in three languages, in English, German and Japanese, including subtitles for artist interviews and sung text. As Zimmermann observes: “We have everything you need to present classical music in a way a classical fan would expect it – in the back end, in the metadata. We have implemented a search function which is geared to classical music. So you can search by genre, by artist or by composer. And we have designed the front end – the interface that the consumer sees – to present pieces in a way that you as classical music lover will understand, by title and by movement title. This is a big difference between STAGE+ and some other audio streaming platforms, as we all know, all too painfully!”
It’s the combination of new technology, user-friendly interface and the potentially vast treasure trove of the Universal catalogue that makes STAGE+ an enticing proposition for the classical fan, whether newcomer or aficionado. YouTube might hold knock-off copies of classic Unitel opera films from the 60s and 70s, but the sound is compressed, the picture is wobbly and the subtitles (if there are any) could be in anything from Spanish to Chinese. As Trautmann observes: “It’s a scattered landscape out there. Yes, there are other video streaming services, but most classical films are screened by national public broadcasters. STAGE+ has a global reach, and everything is in one space.”
STAGE+ brings the European scene to the ever-avid Japanese market for classical music, but it also does the same in reverse. Language and rights barriers have long presented insurmountable difficulties for most European listeners who want to follow Japanese artists and orchestras. Someone with the global reach of John Williams we might expect to find on STAGE+, and there he is on the stage of Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, apparently ageless in guiding the Saito Kinen Orchestra through a hit-list of his film scores. The same ensemble gives a fabulously articulate live account of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth under the 83-year-old Seiji Ozawa at one of the concerts staged to mark the 125th anniversary of Deutsche Grammophon’s birth. Much more unusual, and also exclusive to the site, are the films of Tokyo orchestra principals on uninhibited form in chamber-music classics. Partnerships with the Tokyo Spring Festival and Tokyo City Philharmonic promise much more intercontinental content in future.
Trautmann and Zimmermann take pride in their roles as inheritors and curators of the DG heritage, and in fulfilling the goals of technological innovation and evolution advanced by the label’s founder, Emile Berliner. “He was the inventor and patent holder for the gramophone device,” remarks Trautmann. “So he was the inventor of the technology that prevailed over the Edison cylinder and all other kinds of technology that were around at the time. From the outset, at our label, the latest technology was linked to productions with the greatest artists of their time. This is where we're coming full circle with STAGE+. The shellac disc was a technology that enabled performances to be heard in peoples’ homes without performing on an instrument themselves. Now we bring that experience to people wherever they are, often as it’s happening. It is performance made visible.”
“Having managed the Digital Concert Hall for many years,” adds Zimmermann, “I know what the user environment is. It’s not an iPhone in a subway. STAGE+ subscribers are in their living rooms with a big screen and a good sound system. So it’s essential that the technology is not only cutting-edge in terms of audio and picture quality, it needs to be available on all the relevant platforms: Sony, Samsung, Amazon Fire, Apple TV… The target group of consumers is people who are either too far away from the venue, or cannot go to the venue anymore, or just want to enjoy performances which they can’t get anywhere else, on their TV and in their living room.”
Availability on new platforms will always be a work in progress, but STAGE+ is already available as an iOS and Apple TV app, on Android TV and Amazon Fire TV, meaning it is accessible on many brands of smart TVs. And of course, the platform can always be accessed via web browsers. What’s next, though? As a tech nerd to his fingertips, Zimmermann goes misty-eyed.
“I think it is always lovely to dream about what’s going to happen in the future in terms of immersive experiences, 3D audio and video. With their new Vision Pro glasses, Apple have laid down the gauntlet for all developers and creators. Everyone is working out what they can do with Vision Pro. How can we beam people into the Musikverein or the Metropolitan Opera, for example? This is something we are working on. It takes a lot of energy, and financial and creative resources. But sooner or later, we have to get there.” You heard it here first.
STAGE+ is available worldwide, subscriptions €149 per year.
This article was sponsored by Deutsche Grammophon.
