The recording industry deems a record gold if it sells 500,000 copies and platinum if it sells 1 million. So what do you call a free classical download that was accessed 1.4 million times over a brief period? Shocking, that's what. Yet that's what happened when live recordings of Gianandrea Noseda's conducting of Beethoven's complete symphonies with the BBC Philharmonic were made available for free over the Internet for three weeks in 2005.
Young Milanese maestro (and BBC Philharmonic Chief Conductor) Gianandrea Noseda, who looks like the cute shy lawyer who lives down the hall and, sadly, maybe for his good manners and his lack of arrogance and bravado gets more often than not forgotten whenever people discuss really, really talented conductors -- the wonderful Roberto Abbado is another victim of the same phenomenon -- is currently getting the ovations he deserves: nowadays he's burning the PSO's Heinz Hall down with a series of concerts with program of rare elegance and refinement: Respighi's "Metamorphoseon Modi XII" and his "Burlesque" (Noseda is recording some bada$$ Respighi here), Bruno Maderna's "Music of Gaiety" -- in which the super-avantgarde BM orchestrated pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a manuscript of keyboard works from the 16th and 17th centuries -- and much more.
Noseda is -- very smartly -- proceeding with small, if elegant, steps in his opera conducting career: but OC is ready to bet that, in a few years, we'll have in him one of our most interesting opera conductors.