SACD Software Boost

It's hard enough for established record labels both big and small these days. With the high-resolution audio formats SACD and DVD-Audio still fighting each other and struggling to launch, picking sides is an even bigger gamble for a brand-new record label's first releases.

Despite the odds, SFS Media has decided to do just that. The new label is the official outlet for recordings by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), whose music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, conducts the group in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.6 for its debut release, slated for February 5.

The disc was recorded live in concerts at Davies Symphony Hall September 12–15, 2001 and will be available in all the traditional retail outlets in addition to SFS's new on-line retail store. Delos Records will distribute the recordings in North America, and Avante will market and distribute SFS Media recordings in Europe.

The SFS says that all recordings for the label will be made in the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) format, the digital foundation for SACD, with help from Sony Corporation, which is providing all necessary technology and equipment. The new SFS recordings will be "hybrid" SACD discs, formatted to play in conventional CD as well as SACD stereo and SACD surround formats. The initial releases will be produced by Andreas Neubronner, who also produced Tilson Thomas and the SFS's Grammy Award–winning RCA Red Seal recordings, including Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (Best Orchestral Performance) and the all-Stravinsky disc featuring Le Sacre du Printemps, The Firebird, and Perséphone (Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Performance).

The SFS say they have embarked on an ambitious Mahler recording project and plans to record all of the composer's nine symphonies and the Adagietto from the unfinished Symphony No.10 over the next five seasons for SFS Media. Following the recording of the Sixth Symphony, Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra recorded Mahler's Symphony No.1 and Kindertotenlieder with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung live in concerts September 19–23, 2001.

Tilson Thomas explains, "The Sixth looks unflinchingly at the obsessive, destructive nature of man, the unremitting capacity of humankind to hurt itself. In its final pages, it regards destiny and realizes there will be no mercy. But there is more than despair in these pages. There is utter honesty, humor, tenderness, and, in the third movement, homage to the power of love. Mahler said that a symphony should mirror life. His entire symphonic output is a testament to that belief, and nowhere did he realize this credo so powerfully as in his Sixth Symphony."

X