CD importer has finest classical music the world can offer

Roger Marbeck is an enthusiast for local labels as well as his range of specialist imports. Photo / Dean Purcell

Music has always been in Roger Marbeck's life. Back in the 1930s, some decades before he was born, his grandfather Alfie enlivened his Queen St shop by plugging songs on the piano to coax customers into buying the sheet music.

By the 1950s, his father Murray had established the Queens Arcade Marbecks store that is still a sanctuary for those who prefer to be wooed by the strains of Mozart rather than Metallica.

Now, as owner-manager of Ode Records, Roger Marbeck is the man who brings us the finest classical music the world can offer, on labels such as Hyperion, BIS, Chandos and Naive. As well, Ode is an energetic distributor for local releases on the Atoll and Rattle labels. "Atoll and Rattle are premium labels," Marbeck enthuses. "Atoll's Wayne Laird is a master engineer, as is Steve Garden at Rattle, and they take each project from its very inception right through to the final package."

Marbeck will not be persuaded that the classical recording industry is in a sorry state. "It's almost an assembly line," he says. "With 25 to 30 releases a week, there's so much arriving on the scene it's hard to find the time to sit down and listen through one album."

In terms of guidance, like many classical music lovers, he looks to Gramophone. "There are about 10 classical CD magazines in Britain at the moment, but many are hobbyist and don't have Gramophone's range."

While new recordings of the familiar Rachmaninov concertos and Beethoven symphonies continue to be released in high and predictable rotate, there has also been a swell in the amount of obscure repertoire that makes it to CD.

For Marbeck, this is the salvation of the industry. Even though he is keen on Baroque composers in general and choral music in particular, he draws on Bach's B minor Mass to make his point: "Every year, a number of new recordings of this and other well-known works appear," he explains. "Yet most people already have a CD they are satisfied with. There's only really a point in duplicating these pieces if there's something radically different in the interpretation."

As far as the Bach Mass is concerned, Marbeck is eager to hear Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's performance of the work in October and sees a symbiotic relationship between the worlds of the concert hall and the CD.

"When the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra or Chamber Music New Zealand tour an artist, he or she might play to perhaps 10,000 people, which increases the demand for their CDs."

As for the so-called digital revolution, which has many downloading their music from iTunes and other online servers, Marbeck has no doubts that CDs offer a superior product.

"Classical music enthusiasts still prefer the actual CD over a computer file," he says. "Young people have become used to compressed sound and hearing so much through computer speakers. But once you've heard full spectrum stereo, the effect is like dawn coming up."

For just a moment we catch a taste of Whirimako Black's version of Miles Davis' Run the Voodoo Down with Kim Paterson's moody trumpet simmering in the ambience. It's a track from The Late Night Plays on Marbeck's own Ode label and it seems as if dawn has indeed broken on the sultriest of days.