Hyperion Records, one of the most admired and successful of specialist classical music labels, is now available to stream. The label – family owned since its foundation by Ted Perry in 1980 – was bought by Universal Classics, home of Decca and DG, in March, and since then an extraordinary amount of preparation has gone into preparing its award-winning catalogue to become available on the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, Qobuz and others.

The label will be released for streaming in stages, with 200 albums now available – including all of the 45 Hyperion albums to have received a Gramophone Award – followed by further fortnightly themed tranches starting on September 15, until by spring next year all 2000 albums in the catalogue will be released.

For decades, Hyperion has so often set the gold-standard for brilliantly performed and intelligently programmed albums, many of which are made by a roster of artists whose loyalty to the label – and it to them – has resulted in portraits of their musical lives over many decades of repertoire and artistic development.

Among these is Sir Stephen Hough, whose recording of the complete Saint-Saëns piano concertos was not only a Gramophone Recording of the Year, but in 2009 was named our Gold Disc winner following a vote of all Recordings of the Year, an event to mark our 30th Awards. ‘I am enormously excited to be part of this moment in Hyperion’s history. I’ve made over 40 albums for the company, pouring my heart, soul and fingers into each one,’ he said. ‘It delights and touches me to be able to reach a vast new family of music lovers in this way.’ 

Pianists Angela Hewitt, Marc-André Hamelin and Steven Osborne, cellist Steven Isserlis, violinist Alina Ibragimova, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, and choirs including Trinity College Cambridge and Polyphony (both conducted by Stephen Layton) are all represented in the initial streaming releases.  

A further significant contribution to the streaming catalogue will be the addition of some major – and in one case ongoing – series by the label: the Complete Schubert Song Edition which spanned 40 albums, the world’s first Complete Liszt Piano Music series, performed by Leslie Howard and which spanned 99 discs, and the Romantic Piano Concertos series, currently standing at 200 concertos across 87 individual albums. 

Simon Perry, Hyperion’s Managing Director and son of the label’s founder Ted Perry, said of Universal’s purchase and the streaming anouncement: ‘We searched for and found a long-term home that is committed to our values, artists, recordings and editorial style and we are delighted that our entire back catalogue as well as new and future releases will be available on streaming platforms in the coming months. These first 200 albums tell our story, and we look forward to presenting all our work from the past four decades to a new global streaming audience artist-by-artist, series-by-series. Each had their challenges and now they come together to tell a narrative, hopefully a powerful one, of what can happen when you make space for musicians to thrive.’ 

Dickon Stainer, UMG’s President of Global Classics & Jazz said: ‘The arrival of Hyperion on the world’s streaming platforms offers a special moment of discovery for this precious and pioneering label.’