One word that you won’t have been taught during French at school – because it hadn’t crawled from the etymological soup – is “télécharger”. It means to download and it’s a useful word to know for the site I’ve been watching for some time (and have mentioned before in this column), and which seems to me to do a lot of things right in this cyber age. The site is www.qobuz.com – I’m not sure that means any more to a Frenchman, but it’s reasonably easy to remember – and it is well worth a visit and even a bookmark. Qobuz is the brainchild of Yves Riesel whose past experience as one of Paris’s more dynamic distributors (via his company Abeille Musique he racked up staggering sales of many of the Brilliant Classics mega-sets) has given him a valuable insight into what people want from their retailer. Where the site scores highly – and here a little more than schoolboy French does greatly help – is in the editorial that surrounds the business of selling music. There are articles that tie in with contemporary events such as exhibitions, there are profiles of artists (both of the present and the past), and there are special features/promotions about particular labels (today, for example, there’s a very Anglophile piece about the British symphony as offered in the Chandos catalogue – and on the same turf there’s an affectionate essay on Vernon Handley, not the sort of thing you’d immediately expect from a French website). I can’t think of another website that offers a comparable wealth of material, though eMusic comes close. Qobuz also scores highly on the number of labels and the range of music it offers (for the record, it is not just a classical site – it seems to cover pretty well every genre). Among the major companies on offer are EMI, the Universal labels (DG, Decca and Philips) and Sony (including RCA/BMG); the only notable absentee is the Warner labels, though as the company has recently announced a renewed commitment to digital distribution it can only be a matter of time (and a label like Erato presumably would do very well in its home country). There’s also a vast amount of music from the independents, from Naxos via ECM, Chandos and Hyperion (some 875 Hyperion titles on offer – probably the biggest offering in cyber-retail) to smaller but equally splendid labels including Signum, Onyx, Winter & Winter and Delphian. Qobuz offers a variety of bit-rates from the “standard”, which is 320kbps, via various lossless formats (WMA and ALAC, Apple’s own format) to, in some instances, a studio-master offering. The FAQs provides a neat little grid that explains which format will work with your chosen player (iTunes for sake of argument). The pricing is pretty straightforward though the strength of the pound against the euro doesn’t make it currently a particularly good-value site. The standard price for a single CD download is €9.99 (at today’s rate of exchange that’s £8.90) so iTunes’ £7.90 is quite a lot cheaper but it isn’t at such a high bit-rate (Passionato, which also offers at 320kbps, charges £7.99). But the experience of browsing on Qobuz beats either of those sites for ease, and the meta-data, plus supporting material is very impressive, with downloadable PDFs as well as related articles and suggestions for further listening (based on artist and label). You don’t have to download from the site and if you’re not bothered about physically owning the music you listen to then you can sign up for Qobuz’s streaming subscription – either annual (€129) or monthly (€13 – the latter is currently available as a “buy two months and get a third free” offer). The quality is easily comparable to FM radio and gives you access to a wealth of music (and, again, across all genres, so if you’ve the eclectic tastes of the so-called iPod generation, feast on). A new site has been launched under the auspices of White Label Productions, the company responsible for the booklets and production of an increasing number of CDs (EMI, Decca and Warner among them). It has one of those URLs that says exactly what it is: www.newclassicalreleases.co.uk. It is, surprise surprise, a site that lists all the new releases (CD and DVD) as soon as they are made available, complete with sleeve images and information about the disc (though track listings aren’t included, and probably aren’t that important anyway in this context). You can sort releases in a number of different ways: by genre (the same sections as we use in Gramophone) or by label. There are also useful links to online and “bricks-and-mortar” retailers. Given White Label’s relationship with the record industry it’s not surprising to find that many of the microsites and video features made (often by White Label) to support major releases are included under the Features heading – and they’re usually worth viewing, though I’m way too squeamish to look at Cecilia Bartoli’s castrato feature that accompanies her latest album. Leif Ove Andnes’s latest project is a fascinating collaboration with South African artist Robin Rhode that focuses on Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. By combining the music with contemporary imagery, these two talented artists really bring this already vivid work to new life. Check out various clips on YouTube (search under “picturesreframed”) and you’ll find not only a fascinating little film about the project, but if you’re a budding pianist, you can enter a competition and pit your version of the Pictures’ Promenade against Andsnes’s. You’ll need to film your performance, post it on YouTube – the closing date is the last day of the year – and as the Promenade is really quite short you’ve plenty of time to practise. The prizes, to quote the site, are: “tickets to a Leif Ove Andsnes concert of your choice, a signed copy of our deluxe edition CD/DVD (including a 156-page hardback book showing a wide selection of images from the creation and final performance artwork of Pictures Reframed), Leif Ove Andsnes’s entire discography on EMI Classics and a digital camera!” So well worth a little practice. If you want to back your Mussorgsky up with a little more information, check out Donald McLeod’s postcast of his Composer of the Week on the great Russian – you can find it on iTunes, though it’s probably easier to go via the Radio 3 website (www.bbc.co.uk/radio3). The recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award in the Classic FM Gramophone Awards was Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He celebrates his 80th birthday on December 6 and to mark the occasion Warner Classics has created a special micro-site for Harnoncourt at www.warnerclassicsandjazz.com. As well as details of Harnoncourt’s vast discography (mainly for Teldec) which charts his career from the founder of Concentus Musicus Wien to the man who has made so many terrific recordings with the great orchestras of the world, you can also watch videos of Harnoncourt talking about music (and as someone who has interviewed him a number times, he’s one of the most fascinating people when it comes to talking about music). I thought I’d devote my Essential Download list to his art, and remember that next month sees one of the most intriguing of all his recordings – Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and he’ll be appearing on our front cover to mark the occasion.

The Essential Download Playlists No 28 - Nikolaus Harnoncourt Bach St Matthew Passion Concentus Musicus Wien (Teldec) iTunes Beethoven Symphonies Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Teldec) iTunes Beethoven Piano Concertos Aimard; Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Warner) iTunes Brahms Symphonies Berlin Philharmonic (Teldec) iTunes Haydn “Paris” Symphonies Concentus Musicus Wien (DHM) iTunes Haydn Die Jahreszeiten Soloists; Concentus Musicus Wien (DHM) iTunes Mozart Symphonies Nos 39-41 Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Teldec) iTunes Schubert Symphonies Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Teldec) iTunes Smetana Má vlast Vienna Philharmonic (DHM) iTunes Schumann Das Paradies und die Peri Soloists; Bavarian Radio SO (DHM) iTunes

James Jolly