The cable music channel Mezzo celebrates its 25 years of existence with great fanfare from Tuesday until 1er May, with a steady stream of prestigious concerts surrounded by 25 archives that have marked the history of the career of this leader of a market in constant evolution.
In the world of retransmission of filmed music, Mezzo is celebrating its 25th anniversary when, in a world devoid of images, Apple is preparing, on March 28, to launch its on-demand listening service devoted to classic.
As for the world of filmed concerts, since the fall of 2022 there has been a new actor, the Symphony.live platform, which, for the moment, juxtaposes in a very impressive way collaborations with prestigious orchestras (including the OSM) and an apparently frenzied desire not to communicate to this effect.
The more quality initiatives, which is the case with Symphony, the better.
A classic brew
It was Hervé Boissière, president and CEO of Mezzo, who brought Apple and Symphony closer, when we asked him if the emergence of a competitor that deals with the OSM and the Concertgebouw orchestras, of Cleveland, the London Symphony , the Czech and Stockholm Philharmonics and the Budapest Festival Orchestra inspire some fear in him.
“The more quality initiatives there are, which is the case with Symphony, the better it is. This creates a use different from the one we are able to consider, so it widens the market, and the bigger the market, the better it will be for the benchmark players that we are. This is the case with Apple and this is the case with Symphony, two very different players; Apple, who has millions of subscribers with Apple Music and Symphony, a start-up independent. In fact, they are interested in the classic, and that is an opportunity for the whole industry. Let’s wish them the best”, concludes the man who thinks that the arrival of new players “forces us to be even more demanding and active”.
So, even if Apple does not plan to get into video, Hervé Boissière sees the coming weeks as a great springboard for the cause of classical music: “The communication they do on the subject is important. I have rarely seen so many articles on classical music for a few weeks, since Apple came out, because they have this firepower and this media influence. As a result, we talk a lot about classics, and that’s very good. There is a good link between what they do and what we offer. »
Post-COVID
We conducted an interview with Hervé Boissière, whom we then dubbed the “Image Superman”, in May 2020, when the music video had become a refuge in times of a pandemic. The director of the Medici.tv portal was then called upon to also and jointly direct Mezzo. At that time, however, there was hardly any talk of business plans, because everything had become free.
“The impact of free admission during COVID is to have forced us to rethink the presence of the Salzburg Festival, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic on Mezzo”, analyzes Hervé Boissière with hindsight. Between the Mezzo of 2023 and that of 2019, Hervé Boissière thus sees a very clear difference: “We have bet even more on excellence and quality: very large institutions, large orchestras, large opera houses; those which are less free than the others by definition. This motivated us to offer even more exceptional things with Berlin, Vienna or the Paris Opera. Basically, it’s very good because it forced us to look for even more presence of very great artists and, in the long term, it will be a winning bet, because it is always the quality that wins. »
The other scourge that we did not see coming was the war in Ukraine. Hervé Boissière was one of those who, notably with Medici, whose audience had taken off at the time of competitionTchaikovsky, had forged close ties with Russia. “We came out of a period of cancellations of infinite sadness to fall into the invasion of Ukraine which marked a very important change in our activity, since we canceled all the recordings in Russia – and God knows that they were many. »
Hervé Boissière estimates that this Russian component represented 15% of his activity. He evokes not only artistic complications (chef Valery Gergiev was a pillar of the chain), but also human ones with the technical teams to which he was very close. “We have been working there with them forever. It is infinitely sad. It happened overnight and unfortunately it will last for years. Nobody knows how it will turn out and we hope it will be as short as possible for the Ukrainian people. But even if the bombs stop falling, it will take several years for relations with Russia and its institutions to resume. »
Stability
In any case, the pandemic period had no commercial impact on the channel. “The pandemic hasn’t resulted in a loss of subscribers, but we haven’t had any gains, while on internet platforms like Medici, we’ve seen an influx of new audiences. That, we had less on Mezzo, even if we had larger audiences during confinement. What’s great about Mezzo, and that we observe with other thematic channels which are the benchmark in their respective fields, it is both great stability and great resilience. The public is very loyal, it likes the proposal, it is reassured by fixed appointments (concerts, ballets, operas, jazz) and has confidence in a guarantee of quality. »
Mezzo is present today in 97 countries and has 65 million subscribers, according to figures put forward by its director, who sees in territorial development a prospect of expansion. “There are still territories to conquer. In Latin America, we are in Brazil, but there is Argentina, Mexico, Colombia. In Asia, we need to strengthen our position in Japan, and especially in Korea. »
Added to this are consumption patterns: “There is a global approach between linear channels, video on demand and FAST channels [pour « free ad-supported television », des services de télévision en direct, financés par la publicité]. How, from what we have, can we go further? There are two growths: the countries where we are not and the expansion of the proposal in the countries where we are. Take the United States: through the first initiatives of FAST, we see that there is potential. But it’s another sector, another niche, you have to work differently, rethink a lot of things about how to set up products. So, we see that there are plenty of opportunities, but we have to get out of the usual playing field. What made the success of Mezzo during these 25 years, it must be consolidated, while developing new experiences in parallel. »
For the next six weeks, it’s an anthology of events with a real “25th anniversary festival” and the nectar of the archives that will be offered. We will watch the replays of the concert to launch the festivities, given last Tuesday. “We left the stage to young talents under 25, who were therefore not born when Mezzo was created and who could become the stars of the next 25 years”, summarizes Hervé Boissière. Tsotne Zedginidze, a 13-year-old Georgian pianist and composer, dubbed by Daniel Barenboim; Roni Kaspi, 22-year-old Israeli drummer; Tsukino Tanaka, 18-year-old Japanese dancer and Anthony León, 25-year-old Cuban-American tenor winner of the last Operalia competition.
Saturday evening, Nikolaus Harnoncourt will conduct Fidelio in Jürgen Flimm’s production in 2004 and on Sunday we can see Mitsuko Uchida and Bernard Haitink sharing the stage in Amsterdam in 2018. The OSM is part of the festivities with a live performance from Montreal on April 19: the concert by Bruce Liu and Dalia Stasevska with the 2e Concerto of Chopin and the 6e Symphony by Sibelius. A very rich operatic program includes the broadcast of Nixon in China by John Adams from the Paris Opera on April 14 and the rebroadcast ofEinstein on the Beach by Philip Glass (2014) on April 27. It will all end on the 1er May with a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic at the Sagrada Familia.