MSR Classics:

Big Label In A Little Town

 

By Nancy K. Crevier

When it comes to music labels, it is cities like London or New York or Los Angeles that come to mind, not Newtown. But Newtown is home to a well-received music label that focuses on classical and jazz music. Housed in a Colonial home tucked into the Newtown woods, MSR Classics is the five-year-old business owned and directed by Robert LaPorta.

Mr LaPorta is MSR Classics, an independent classical music label known for its visual and audio production, scholarliness, and for the performance of the label for the musicians that utilize his expertise. It is a company that he bought in 2006, a decade after he took his label experience working with companies like EMI Classics and applied it to the small “nuts and bolts” Musicians Showcase Recordings in New York “to build it up and give it an identity,” he said.

The new MSR Classics company is based out of his home in Newtown, and is a major industry distributor with accounts both in brick and mortar stores and on-line.

How a record label company ended up in Newtown can be blamed somewhat on the iconic flagpole.

“We lived in Larchmont, N.Y., and someone that I had worked with at EMI Classics had moved to Newtown and said she loved it. We wanted to move out of Westchester County, but needed to be close to New York City and close to Boston.

“We were visiting the area,” said Mr LaPorta, “and saw this flagpole in the middle of the road, and thought ‘What is this place?!” Then we met people from here and just loved it. Newtown is the best place. My business really could have been anywhere, but Newtown is perfect for what I do,” he said. “And it really was the flagpole that sealed the deal,” he laughed.

Mr LaPorta has also been impressed with the wealth of talent in the Newtown area that he has stumbled upon. He was already friends with Eileen Preston, he said, who has done graphics for MSR Classics, and since moving here has connected with other graphics and audio people in town, including David Wheeler and Marco Perugini.

Richard Wyton and John Solum, both flutists, are from Westport. “Richard has nine discs with MSR Classics,” Mr LaPorta said. Pianist Ann Schein of Wilton is also a client of MSR Classics, and will be featured as part of the  Newtown Friends of Music 2011-12 concert series when she performs at Edmond Town Hall in March.

“It is incredible. There’s all of this talent around here,” said Mr LaPorta, who is pleased to represent some of it, and to be able to utilize his talents to create a detail oriented package.

What MSR Classics does is put together a whole package for musicians that expresses in the best way who they are, and what their music is about, he said.

“I’m a consultant who knows how to put the pieces together,” said Mr LaPorta, sitting in his worn and comfortable chair of his Newtown living room, a wall of CDs facing him, and stacks of LPs leaning against the bookcase. “It’s me. It’s the support, guidance, and expertise given to the product, and I’m full of information,” he said. “MSR has a high culture of excellence. It’s all the values you want to see in something.”

Always interested in music, growing up he was part of the band program at New Rochelle High School, he said, where the band director ran a very hands-on program. “He had us writing lots of music and we were doing active directing,” he recalled.

A guitarist as well as a trombonist and euphonium player, Mr LaPorta is a graduate of Colgate University, where he earned his BA in music, and studied graphics and advertising. He has been in the music industry since 1987. He has worked as studio engineer and on-air host at WRCU Radio in Hamilton, N.Y., and is the former manager of Squires Music Production in Elmsford, N.Y. He was director of classics at the Angel-EMI-Virgin Classics-Blue Note label group, and has served in production positions with other notable classical music labels.

He was director of classics for the best-selling Gregorian chant album, Chant, released by Angel-EMI in 1994, and marketing director at Polygram Classics when the best-selling Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti: The Three Tenors in Concert went platinum.

Among the many orchestra and community concert bands with which he has been associated, he also founded, served as personnel director, and performed with Hudson Valley Wind Symphony and was president of Westchester Symphonic Winds, playing principal euphonium.

Not surprisingly, he is a composer and arranger, as well.

MSR works, he said, because it is a combination of his skills.

“I grew up with my dad who is an audiophile. He always had the top equipment. I was surrounded by music.  So it was almost inevitable that I ended up in this industry,” he said.

MSR Classics provides serious musicians with a way to produce a top quality disc, as well as providing distribution and promotion. “To people who know the business, or are heavily into music, a label is a way to recognize the quality or what the music would be to you, whether it is the audio production or the musician performance,” explained Mr LaPorta.

More than 250 solo performers and ensembles from around the world record under the MSR Classics label, including Jeanne Baxtresser, John Browning, Leonard Pennario, Joshua Pierce, Borealis Wind Quintet, The American Horn Quartet, The English Chamber Orchestra, and The London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Further evidence of his company’s success can be found in the hundreds of boxes that fill his downstairs office space, where 375 titles boast the MSR label. It is from here that Mr LaPorta sends out CDs ordered from his online store, or from Amazon.

He certainly does not count on CD sales as the force behind his company, though, said Mr LaPorta. The company is artistically — not commercially — driven.

“MSR sells thousands of CDs a year, but a few years ago, we were selling tens of thousands of CDs. CD sales in the retail environment are terrible these days,” he admitted. “CD sales from people under the age of 50 have dropped off breathtakingly. It’s a very generational thing, and even people in their 40s and 50s have completed a lot of their collections,” he said.

Where CDs still sell, though, is at the concert venue and that is why it is crucial for a recording artist to have a top notch CD cut.

“Most classical artists sell their CDs at their gigs. It is the most successful way to sell a CD,” Mr LaPorta said. And a classical music enthusiast longs for the full experience offered by a CD, as opposed to purchasing music from online stores.

“If you’re an enthusiast,” Mr LaPorta said, “you will seek out information. What you can get in CD packaging is the detail that does not come with an online purchase easily. You get liner notes and you get biographies. It’s an experience that includes the details that music enthusiasts need,” he said.

A CD remains a premium item with information that “nourishes and fosters the experience of listening and interest,” Mr LaPorta continued.

The problem with the digital domain, he believes, is that it does not help people explore. “Online, the music is just sound. It is superficial in how you access it, and is only convenient,” Mr LaPorta said. “I think it erodes the interest in the music, the significance of the musician, and the history of the music. These are all the comparisons that come from reading line notes. As a listener, I learned so much from looking at the back of the record and the record sleeve. The context in the information helps it all make sense,” he noted.

Classical music purchased online through iTunes does not provide that fullness, he said, without the buyer having to go through several layers to find the information, print it out “and then put it somewhere, where you will remember to look at it. [iTunes] is a much more passive experience.”

 His work begins when a musician seeks out the MSR Classics label and presents him with a master copy to assess, Mr LaPorta said. “I sit down in my comfy chair, put on my head phones, and close my eyes. Then I start to listen very carefully to everything about the recording,” he said.

If he believes that what he hears is an artist who matches the quality of the other artists represented on MSR Classics, his work begins, matching up the musician with the right recording studio for optimum audio performance, the right graphics artist for cover art, and offering annotation services utilizing a staff of highly qualified music professionals. Mr LaPorta prides himself on using the highest quality technical services to produce, manufacture, and promote each artist who records under the MSR Classics label.

He has been in the music business for nearly a quarter of a century, but he still delights in each new musician that selects MSR Classics as his or her label. He counts on the reputation of his company to continue to attract new clients.

 “I work hard for my clients and I’m lucky. I believe in the detail of things,” declared Mr LaPorta. “I love the satisfaction when an artist has moved to the next step, or when I’ve helped someone advance.”