It couldn't have been more fitting to meet Paul Baxter and Will Coates-Gibson at one of Delphian's regular recording venues - St Cuthbert's Church, off Princes Street in Edinburgh. True to the company's ethos of minimum staffing, while Coates-Gibson is in the main body of the kirk filming a promotional video, Baxter stands alone in a side room, score-reading, listening, recording and directing the artists for a forthcoming release: songs by Stuart MacRae, performed by Lotte Betts-Dean (voice), Alice Rickards (violin) and Sonia Cromarty (cello). MacRae, a fellow alumnus of Baxter's old school, Charleston Academy in Inverness, is one of Britain's most successful and distinctive composers, working in opera, orchestral and choral, and chamber music - his Delphian disc Ursa Minor, with the Hebrides Ensemble, was a BBC Music magazine five-star choice; Rickards and Cromarty, making their Delphian debut, perform as the duo Sequoia, sharing with MacRae an ambition to connect music, nature and people; Australian vocalist Betts-Dean, also a Delphian debutante, is one of the world's most sought-after mezzos, particularly as an interpreter of new music. The new release being recorded at St Cuthbert's epitomises the Delphian ethos, unshakeable after 20 years in business: quality recordings; uncompromising repertoire, especially new music; showcasing new talent from Scotland and elsewhere; good design and informative booklets.

Back in 2005, the prospects for new record companies were not encouraging. Mainstream producers, including some very big names, were in retreat. Artist rosters had been slashed, recordings cut back, publicity campaigns reined in to focus on buzzword maestri, eye-candy performers, and those memorably characterised by one cultural commentator as ‘stripping fiddlers, blind tenors and cute-bottomed Welsh warblers'. Streaming barely existed: the filesharing website Napster, set up in 1999, was mired in copyright disputes, and streaming giant Spotify was yet to be founded. Record companies therefore had to tread warily in a consumer landscape which increasingly seemed to expect music to be free at the point of access. As a result, companies which were not set up with heavy historic contractual obligations, leading them to, for example, plaster leading artists’ names all over buses in Salzburg at Festival time, were able to establish new business models for both performers and consumers.

In its earlier years, Delphian was at the forefront of this, with artists retaining their own copyright and leasing’ it back to Delphian in return for a stake in sales, thus incentivising all parties on the production side to maximise the new opportunities provided by email and the internet; on the retail side, music-lovers could also benefit from subscription discounts. By ensuring that everyone on both sides of the equation was invested in the success of the enterprise, a virtuous circle was created. ‘But I need to expand into a bigger league,’ Baxter stated back then: ‘I need to get myself orchestra-ready in terms of equipment: that means the appropriate kit and a van so that I can avoid having to hire studios and record in London.’ How did that pan out?

‘We had a major breakthrough in 2008 before the crisis, because the Scottish government at the time recognised that talent in the Scottish music industry reached a certain threshold and then was enticed to leave; so they began a fund called the Scottish Music Futures Fund, whose aim was to try to keep Scottish talent in the country. The fund only ran for one year because of the financial crisis, but we were the biggest single beneficiary of that initiative - I wrote a business plan which secured us £50,000. As little as that made a radical difference in terms of our capitalisation, so that our recording quality really couldn't be better in terms of the kit that we could get; added to our organic growth, we now had the capacity to record with orchestras'

Delphian's first orchestral recording was of the Symphony no.2 by the Scottish-based composer Edward Harper (1941-2009), with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus. Since that 2008 release, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra have all featured in the catalogue, along with numerous chamber ensembles.

With artistic radar stretching from pre-medieval music to the present day, Delphian describes its reach as ‘focusing on song, choral, chamber, organ music (particularly using historically important instruments), and roots/folk projects with a Scottish accent.’ Scottish-based artists, and especially composers not just from north of the border, have good reason to be grateful for the existence of Delphian: there are simply too many to list here from an almost bewilderingly eclectic active catalogue of some 200 releases.

‘The most potent idea was that of developing relationships with artists,’ says Baxter. ‘There are artists now with whom we've made over 20 recordings. And that benefits everybody because it means that as the artists grow, they can explore areas of repertoire with us. That wouldn't be available on lots of other labels because repertoire choices have already been taken up by other performers.'

Organ and choral music are particularly well served by Delphian, and few who secured a copy will forget the monumental 4CD-and-hardback-book release Organs of Edinburgh, featuring 12 organists ranging over 22 instruments, all introduced with a foreword by none other than the popular writer and music-lover Alexander McCall Smith, adding local colour and Edinburgh pride (see Readers’ offers, p.25).

Delphian founder Paul Baxter (r) and manager Will Coates-Gibson work with a team of designers, editors and technicians as well as a global network of 21 sales teams © FOXBRUSH.CO.UK

On the choral front, new artistic partnerships continue to be forged, the latest with Patrick Allies and Siglo de Oro, Benjamin Nicholas with the choirs of Merton College, Oxford, and the Choir of King's College London, with Joseph Fort. On the latter, Baxter says, ‘An established label doesn't need another recording of the Rachmaninov Vespers, whereas we have just done that with Joe and his choir, because he assured me he would put together the very best choir in the country for that recording. We could therefore offer him that hole in our catalogue. I think associations with artists are something I've been really excited about since the start.’

(from top) Paul Baxter producing at Queen's Hall, Edinburgh; the Choir of King's College London, under the baton of Joseph Fort, records Rachmaninov's Vespers (forthcoming release); Patrick Allies prepares for a Siglo de Oro take for The Mysterious Motet Book of 1539; violinist Bojan Čičić records with the Illyria Consort for La Notte: Concertos & Pastorales for Christmas Night © SDVISUALS

Technology has also moved on, not least the miniaturisation of so many pieces of kit in the recording chain. ‘That little box sitting to my right-hand side by the PC is basically a fully functioning recording studio on a very grand scale. I've got 32 channels between me and the church next door, going through that tiny fibre optic cable, and every one of them can go in any direction in any combination. So tomorrow morning, Lotte, the singer, will get a feed of a backing track that Stuart's made - she will just hear that, whereas Stuart and I will be hearing different combinations of the mix. The technology is completely mind-blowing and - whisper it - studios are redundant!’ While Baxter's production recordings make their way to Delphian's editors electronically, his marked-up scores still go by courier: ‘I still enjoy the capacity to be able to scribble on bits of paper because I find it quicker. The editor will see all my markings and put the jigsaw together.’

In 2018 Will Coates-Gibson assumed the management of Delphian, co-ordinating the label's team of designers, editors, and technicians - in addition to a network of21 sales teams across the globe. ‘We are issuing around 30 recordings a year,’ he says, ‘with a hardcore of only eight staff, which is quite a low number for that number of releases, given that every one is heavily PRed. Distributors ask what our priority releases are - they all are!'

In a sense, the artistic side of the operation - choosing repertoire, fixing artists, making and editing the recordings - is the easy part: bringing it to market is the hard part, given the debate about streaming and whether or not physical product such as CDs is on its last legs (recent increasing sales of vinyl - of all things - seems to give the lie to that). The arguments are complex and unresolved. Delphian came late to streaming and much of the pressure to stream is artist-led. If artists are funding their own recordings, they want to be on streaming playlists, even if the returns are negligible, because they can't afford not to be - the same is true of participation in social media. Baxter and Coates-Gibson are also of the opinion that downloads are dead. Initially an attractive proposition for companies wishing to monetise recordings without the expense of making a physical CD, these too have become casualties of those customers in pursuit of free music who find full- or even budget-price CDs too much of a strain on the wallet.

(from top) Richard Gowers records on the organ of St James, Bermondsey Samuel Sebastian Wesley: Sacred Choral Music (forthcoming); Benjamin Nicholas conducts the Choir of Merton College, Oxford, and (below) the Britten Sinfonia for Orchestral Anthems (forthcoming); Lotte Betts-Dean, the Sequoia Duo and Stuart MacRae recording the composer's works at St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh (for release in September 2023) © FOXBRUSH.CO.UK

So, is the CD - Delphian's enduring pearl of a product - finished? ‘It's been dying for 15 years’ says Baxter, ‘but life-support has been more successful than we envisaged.’ ‘Remember that choirs on tour in the US can sell 100 CDs per concert,’ adds Coates-Gibson. Clearly, physical CDs are unlikely to be replaced by accessing a stream of electrons, or even a USB stick, as an artist's calling-card. To say nothing of - in Delphian's case - a carefully curated CD cover image and liner note.

Whatever the future may hold, Delphian's ability to move nimbly with the times, honed over two decades, leaves grounds for optimism. While the pandemic was a disaster for music-making generally, the company enterprisingly took over the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh in order to make a series of socially distanced and covid-compliant recordings behind closed doors. Among them was a recording of songs by the Scottish composer and conductor Eric Chisholm (1904-65) nicknamed by some as ‘MacBartók', and whose distinctions included conducting the British premieres of Mozart's Idomeneo, and Berlioz's Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict in the 1930s. At Queen's Hall, when the contracted singer found herself stuck abroad because of lockdown travel restrictions, Scottish soprano Mhairi Lawson stepped in and learned the songs with pianist Iain Burnside in just three days. In this way, working with Delphian becomes almost a family affair. A really nice thing that I enjoy about Delphian,’ says Coates-Gibson, ‘is that friends who work in different industries but similar-sized companies say the only goal is to scale up and scale up. I think here I'm able to give each of our artists proper time, proper space. For the future, I'd like more of the same.’ ‘Agreed,’ concludes Baxter. ‘Delphian is a close family and everybody gets the same love. If they don't fit in, something's not quite right.’