Off the beaten track.(Viewpoint)

The business of recording classical vocal music has been through several Golden Ages--the advent of the LP; the glory days of sumptuously packaged full-length opera recordings; the sharp, sleek convenience of the CD. It is now in a period of severe retrenchment brought on by shrinking sales, and by twenty-first-century marketing's ruthless pursuit of bottomline profits. With recording companies increasingly reluctant to spend resources on projects that won't return a fast, fat profit, the talents of many of the current generation's most important artists probably will remain unrecorded.

Cecilia Bartoli, the author of this month's cover story, has avoided the industry's downward spiral with seemingly miraculous grace, turning out a sequence of recordings in recent years that have passed the million mark in sales. The secret of her success is deceptively simple: her discs offer splendid performances of marvelous music that most record-buyers have never heard before. Let other singers do crossover albums in an attempt to build audience share; Bartoli continues to delight her fans and recharge her own artistic batteries by mining undiscovered treasures in the works of Vivaldi, Gluck and Antonio Salieri. I've noticed a ripple effect from Bartoli's hit-making magic: more singers are programming Vivaldi arias in recital, more Vivaldi vocal music is being recorded, and a friend of mine, a voice teacher, reports that Vivaldi arias have been spotted in student aria anthologies. Will we be enjoying a comparable rise in Salieri performances five years hence?

One of the biggest sources of competition for the classical-music industry is its own ever-present past. With so many wonderful versions of standard-repertory items available in the back catalogues, opportunities for new projects get squeezed out. The future of the industry belongs to artists such as Bartoli, ...