Last month I was welcoming Hyperion’s new feature for focusing on the relevant part of a sleeve-note rather than having to read the entire thing, and now the company has taken yet another step 
in the development of its download site. 
A download manager is now offered when you reach the moment of actually acquiring your purchase. The first time you push the button to download the file you will be prompted to download the manager (an Adobe installation guide helps you through the very simple process). You simply have to decide where on your computer you want the files to live (I used my Mac and it worked perfectly, creating a Hyperion folder where the music files and sleeve art ended up). If you use iTunes for playing your music – and I suspect the vast majority of people do – you can have the manager download the file directly into the “Automatically add to iTunes” folder: the process will then be seamless (though don’t try and do this with FLAC files – iTunes will only play MP3 files this way). Hyperion offers a very straightforward guide not only to using its download manager, but also to the various file formats you can employ. There’s a link from the downloading page.

I tried out the download manager by downloading a Valse-Caprice from Danny Driver’s terrific new disc of music by Balakirev and Taneyev – I took a screen grab (left) as I did it and you can see the folder with the MP3 file and sleeve-note JPEG, the sleeve-note itself, the file playing in my iTunes media player and, with a little post-modern flourish, the word file of this article as I write it.

You don’t need me to sing Hyperion’s praises, but its elegant, carefully thought-out and stylishly presented download-site – essentially grafted on to the existing catalogue offering – should encourage anyone who loves the eclectic Hyperion mix to explore acquiring the music direct from the people who produce it (hyperion-records.co.uk).

Another British company that attracts its fair share of affection is Chandos (which also has its own download store, though offers a lot more than just Chandos’s own recordings – www.theclassicalshop.net). Chandos’s latest venture is the release of a series of USB sticks crammed full of music. The premise is simple: a substantial number of related recordings – say the orchestral music of Sir Malcolm Arnold – gathered together on a little stick, complete with all the sleeve-note/booklet material, for you to pop into your computer and load into your media player without the fuss and bother of downloading it (and I guess if your hard-drive becomes a bit full you could always remove the files knowing that you have the stick as a back-up). As with Chandos’s download offering you have the option of buying the files as WMA/MP3 or FLAC. I sampled one of each: in FLAC format Volume 1 of the London Mozart Players’ excellent “Contemporaries of Mozart” series, essentially the contents of a dozen CDs, and as WMA, a splendid selection of music by Malcolm Arnold.

The Mozart Contemporaries volume is a real gem, full of music often overshadowed by the great Wolfgang Amadeus, and therefore rarely heard, but it all has such charm: prodigious melody, lots of rhythmic interest, and harmonically often a lot more adventurous than you might expect. My volume contained symphonies by Clementi, Krommer, Michael Haydn, Stamitz, Pleyel, Rosetti, Vanhal, Kozeluch, Pichl, Baguer, Gossec and Gyrowetz, and I’d be happy to encounter any of them in a concert. Incidentally, if you buy the FLAC, you automatically get the MP3 version as well, so you can pop that on your iPod and keep the FLAC for playing through your hi-fi using your Squeezebox, or similar network media player.

The Arnold stick offers a terrific cross-section of his output: the symphonies, string quartets, ballet music, various concertos and that wonderful programme of overtures conducted by Rumon Gamba. The bulk of the orchestral music falls to the hugely capable and affectionate care of the still much-missed Richard Hickox, a true “recording conductor” capable of creating a palpable sense of 
occasion in the often seemingly sterile 
“studio” conditions of a London church.

Other USB sticks worth considering are the Goodall Ring, the Elgar oratorios, a couple of volumes in Chandos’s film music series, a Hummel series (always rewarding stuff), two volumes of music by William Walton and as much Vaughan Williams as Hickox managed to squeeze in before his untimely death. Sadly his symphony series was never completed but – and here I must declare a modest interest – Chandos has included the Gramophone “Real Great Composers” interview I did with him about the symphonies just a few months before his death. He was his typically ebullient and enthusiastic self and for his contribution alone I would commend it. I still feel very sad when I think what he could have achieved and what he still had to do for British music, something he cared about passionately.

The sticks work out at the equivalent of bargain price and of course you get a USB stick that would set you back a fair amount if you bought it empty. And they do make the transfer to your computer/hard-disk very much easier than downloading: in fact, the process couldn’t be simpler (and they even come with instructions about burning a CD). And if you opt for the FLAC versions you are getting sound as good as the CD…To think that the record industry used to get all stressed about people copying their LPs onto cassette all those years ago, and what that sounded like!

The Essential Download Playlist No 41 - Key Strauss Operas

Salome Sinopoli (DG)  iT, A, Am, DG   

Elektra Solti (Decca)  A, Am, DG, iT

Der Rosenkavalier Karajan (EMI)  Am, iT

Ariadne auf Naxos Kempe (EMI)   iT, A, Am

Die Frau ohne Schatten Solti (Decca)  H, iT

Intermezzo Sawallisch (EMI)  iT, Am

Die ägyptische Helena Keilberth (AfHO)  iT   

Arabella Keilberth (DG)  A, Am, DG, iT

Daphne Bychkov (Decca)  A, Am, DG, iT

Capriccio Böhm (DG)  iT, A, Am, DG

A = Ariama Am = Amazon DG = DG Webshop H = Hyperion iT = iTunes

James Jolly