At the beginning of the 1980s a former ice-cream salesman called Ted Perry drove a London minicab to raise money for his dream project: the world’s most smartly curated classical record label.
For the first time these magnificent recordings are arriving on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms
He called it Hyperion, after the Greek sun god, and by the time he died in 2003 it had acquired its own mythology. The Hyperion catalogue contained all of Schubert’s songs, sung by legendary artists accompanied by the scholar-pianist Graham Johnson; all Bach’s organ music, played with bouncy precision by Christopher Herrick; the complete sacred music of Monteverdi, Purcell and Vivaldi, directed by Robert King; and Leslie Howard’s consistently fine 99-CD survey of the complete Liszt piano music.
Under Ted’s son Simon Perry, Hyperion rose even higher in the firmament. Stephen Hough gave us a whole shelf of reference recordings that included the Rachmaninov piano concertos, Brahms’s late pieces and the Chopin Nocturnes. The Canadian super-virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin danced through the thickets of Medtner and Scriabin with a dexterity that made his competitors weep. The soprano Carolyn Sampson and the cellist Steven Isserlis were caught in full bloom; a revivified Takacs Quartet stunned us with every release.
But there was a catch. Many Hyperion CDs, including those in boxed sets with luxury packaging and notes, went out of print ridiculously fast. And Simon Perry wouldn’t allow streaming, denouncing it as a lousy business model for an independent label – which it was. But now he’s sold Hyperion to Universal, which can afford to take the hit. For the first time these magnificent recordings are arriving on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms; there was a big instalment this week and soon they should all be available.
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