Early last year, we decided to name BIS our Label of the Year. It was a long-overdue recognition of a great label that few would argue with. Come the ceremony in October, history had overtaken us as Apple, clearly sharing our enthusiasm, acquired the Swedish label just a few weeks earlier. Regardless of one’s views about Apple’s global dominance, even the most agnostic observer would have to admit that it was a very strong statement of the company’s commitment to classical music. BIS, still headed by its founder Robert von Bahr, now sits alongside Apple’s other label, Platoon, the focus of this month’s column. There aren’t many new kids on the classical block with quite such lavish pocket money, and I wanted to learn more …

Before meeting Platoon’s movers and shakers – and talking on the record to anyone at Apple is evidently not granted lightly – I spoke to Apple’s Global Head of Classical, Jonathan Gruber (an alumnus of, inter alia, Tower Records, Warner Bros and Universal Music, where he was in at the start of that company’s digital journey), to get a more general picture of the company’s approach to classical music.

The first question was inevitable: ‘Why classical?’ ‘The story of classical for Apple and Apple Music – and before it iTunes – has been about the search for quality and the commitment to quality,’ he explains. ‘And classical music is about just that, by definition, because of its focus on highest-quality audio, highest-quality performances and highest-quality techniques of recording. Then you have the complexity of classical metadata and understanding all of the different intricacies of classical music that aren’t just about artist, song and album. Classical music needs to be done right, and there’s a lot of effort that needs to be put into that. And it happens to be a very, very important, foundational part of music overall. It’s the history of music in so many ways. And not respecting that was something that always bothered us at Apple. So, it’s been about fixing problems – and they are difficult problems – so that we get to the highest quality that we can really achieve.’ And, one might be tempted to add of a genre that underpins so many others, if you can get classical right, the others are pretty plain sailing.

Though I don’t expect an entirely water-tight explanation for the purchase of BIS (after all, Apple now has no more access to the catalogue than, say, Spotify) and no one in the industry has come up with a plausible reason, Gruber does give an answer. ‘We have a really successful offering in Apple Music Classical. We have developed in Platoon an incredible artist services business, which is about creating opportunities for artists that maybe haven’t always existed. BIS sort of completes a picture for us, or they round things out. You can think of it as a tripartite piece here where you have Platoon operating in the digital side, BIS focused primarily on physical product – but with a lot of opportunities in digital – and then you have Apple Music Classical, which is allowing us to actually deliver all of this in the highest quality to music lovers.’

Platoon is a name you’re going to encounter more and more in the pages of Gramophone. (And it’s worth pointing out that Platoon’s recordings are by no means exclusive to Apple Music – you can find them on Spotify, Qobuz and most of the other digitial streaming and downloading services out there.) Last year’s Gramophone Young Artist of the Year – the American violinist Stella Chen – comes from the Platoon stable, Dalia Stasevska’s Mixtape project, which was introduced in March, lives on Platoon, as does Kirill Gerstein’s rewarding and beautifully conceived ‘Music in the Time of War’, juxtaposing contemporaneous piano music by Debussy and Komitas, and which very much pushes today’s need to ‘tell a story’ – ‘a significant release’ according to Peter J Rabinowitz’s June review.

Platoon didn’t start out as a label with its eye on classical music. Its co-founder Denzyl Feigelson had a long history of innovative and individual experience in recorded music. He’d been a guiding force behind Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ album, and he’d started a label called AWAL [Artists Without A Label], which offered many talented young artists the opportunity to gain a foothold in the musical ecosystem. In 2003, he received a call from Apple’s Steve Jobs, who needed someone to find and license music, and he joined the small team working on what would become iTunes. In 2004, he was asked to move to London to oversee the launch of iTunes in the UK, France and Germany. A crash course in classical music followed, when he was appointed Editor in Chief of the nascent iTunes. But classical music requires – as Gramophone readers well know – a different mindset. ‘Classical music lovers are collectors,’ Feigelson acknowledges. ‘That gave me an understanding, as I too am a collector – vinyl, CDs and cassettes. And I held on to them, and I loved reading the liner notes and the deep metadata information. That information was a real challenge to transfer into digital. We had to provide something for classical listeners that wasn’t as vital for other genres. And iTunes worked very hard to do just that.’

Jump forward to 2016, by which time Feigelson had sold AWAL, and with the Co-Founder and CEO of Lovefilm, Saul Klein, he launched Platoon. ‘Platoon was initially founded on great songs – Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes”, Jorja Smith’s “Blue Lights”, Yebba’s “Evergreen”. How classical came into our world was through Jonathan Gruber’s introduction to the genre – concerts, conventions like IAMA [International Artist Managers’ Association] and then meeting various managers, and that gave us a sense of the barrier to entry for classical musicians into the digital world. If you didn’t have a record deal, you couldn’t get your record made. We had a recording studio at Tileyard [London, just north of King’s Cross station] – and Platoon could absorb these costs, we could offer recording, mixing, mastering, as well as the distribution and marketing. Platoon exists to support artists – to remove these obstacles, as well as the necessary time and space to experiment and develop creative output. The guitarist Xuefei Yang was one of the first on the classical roster. She needed a place to record. We noticed that it started doing really well, and of course artists were getting paid from their own digital royalties from day one.’

As the company expanded, Feigelson needed help from someone who understood the classical world, and Katie Ferguson, who’d worked at the digital aggregator The Orchard and then as Director of Digital Strategy for Classical at PIAS, the company that had recently acquired Harmonia Mundi, came aboard. ‘What really attracted me to Platoon,’ she explains, ‘was the sort of closeness that I was going to be able to have with artists and the ability to talk to them about their projects from inception – all the way through to the commercial release. What I had done prior to joining was all about marketing, whereas at Platoon we have the opportunity to talk to the artists very early on about the project. We craft the project to really take into consideration digital and all of the things that we want to do once it’s out. It’s having the view from beginning to end, which is probably quite different to a more traditional approach where the recording team is separate to the marketing team and they don’t really get involved with what happens once the album is out. Of course, I’m not a producer, so I’m not making the recording myself, but with the team, we talk about everything from day one with the artists.’

Dalia’s Mixtape, a gradually evolving ‘album’ of orchestral works by (mainly) living composers, has a very different way of being offered to the public. Ferguson agrees: ‘Dalia’s Mixtape is definitely unusual because she really wanted to make sure that each of the 10 individual works that she’d chosen were highlighted throughout the campaign, instead of just two or three of them. When we started talking about it, we had a lot of conversations about whether that made sense in the context of releasing an album. We plotted everything so that over the course of this year, starting in March all the way through to the Proms, there were moments that made sense to release these tracks. For example, the Julius Eastman piece [Symphony No 2, The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved] that comes out on August 23 coincides with the Prom, where Dalia’s conducting the piece. It just means that we have some really important moments in which to promote that recording, and to promote the entire project as a whole. It allows us the opportunity to give each composer their moment. The podcast interviews that are being done with Dalia and the composers whose works appear on Mixtape, are great pieces of content that help give a lot more context to the music.’

Casting around to think of labels that have a similar feel, I alight on Nonesuch in its Bob Hurwitz-led prime, with its wonderfully rich and eclectic offering that is very hard to define yet has a particular aesthetic, best summed up by ‘That’s so Nonesuch!’. Feigelson is delighted with the analogy, saying it’s one of his favourite labels, and he’d be thrilled if one day people might say, ‘Yeah, that’s so Platoon’. As Nonesuch proved, magic can happen when artist and project fuse so effortlessly. Katie Ferguson cites one of their violinists. ‘Take somebody like Daniel Pioro. We’re recording Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which we will release next year. That’s a piece that’s been recorded hundreds, probably thousands, of times, but he has a different take on it. It will be really interesting to hear him talk about his version of that recording. And that really excites me.’

Ambitions for the future? Feigelson: ‘I think we’d love to keep growing into new spaces. I say this a lot but there’s a world of what we know, and there’s a world of what we don’t know. And the most exciting place to get involved in is the world of what we don’t know. Together with Apple Music, I’m really proud of the work we’re doing to nurture young artists in the classical space too, like Stella Chen, and [the pianist] George Xiaoyuan Fu. These are young artists that get a leg up because we’re good at recognising young talent. We want to keep doing that. I’m super excited to watch the classical side of our business growing – it’s so humbling. We didn’t initially plan for it but I think it follows Apple’s ethos. Look at what Apple Music Classical is doing with classical music, and the commitment they’ve made, their ongoing approach to development, the history of innovation and the love of music. It feels like we’re ushering in the next era of classical.’

It’s always good to welcome new players into what could easily become a slightly stagnant and inward-looking industry. Innovation and imagination count for a lot in my book. Now, I’m just off to give the latest in Dalia’s Mixtape – Judith Weir’s haunting Still, Glowing – another play …

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Gramophone. Whether you want to enjoy Gramophone online, explore our unique Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues stretching back to April 1923, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com