This Tristan has involved 14 full sessions with the orchestra and as Alward says the orchestra is always the single most expensive ingredient

This Tristan has involved 14 full sessions with the orchestra, and, as Alward says, “the orchestra is always the single most expensive ingredient. Whatever you read in the press, the stars’ fees are not the issue. But now, unless a CD gets its moment in the sun in the first year, it’s hard to get sales levels up.”Meanwhile, production costs have spiralled. When I started out, a recording had a shelf-life of five to eight years, which allowed time to recoup costs.

Falling sales would be an obvious reason, although Alward says it’s not that simple.”It’s more that the market has become short-term. There’s always something surreal about watching opera being recorded in a studio. Lined up in military formation behind rows of microphones, the singers live their roles entirely in the voice: they attack top notes, spit venom, charge every utterance with fierce emotion, but they do it standing still, with folded arms or hands in pockets.
It’s the nature of a process that confines reality to one dimension: sound. And for the past few weeks it’s been happening on a daily basis in the cavernous, gymnasium-like space of EMI’s Studio One at Abbey Road where, had you got past the security, you’d have seen an exceptional line-up of singers with their hands in their pockets gathered alongside an army of orchestral players, sound technicians, gofers, agents, interested luminaries and attendant hangers-on for what will probably be a landmark in the modern history of recording.Not that the Abbey Road studio has been short of landmarks in its 70 years.

It is a million-pound recording of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, put together partly as a now-or-never enterprise for Placido Domingo (who turns 64 this month), but equally as a last, heroic stand from a classical CD industry so crushed by economic inequality that many in the business think it’s entering terminal decline.To sit in Studio One while Antonio Pappano beams encouragement to his own Royal Opera House Orchestra and cues in Domingo (singing Tristan), Nina Stemme (Isolde), or the ne plus ultra of luxury casting, Rolando Villazon and Ian Bostridge in the cameo roles of Steersman and Shepherd, is to bask in a sense of all being right with the world. It was here, for example, that the 16-year old Yehudi Menuhin recorded Elgar’s Violin Concerto under the composer’s baton, and the Beatles made their soundtracks to the Sixties But this latest venture has a claim of its own. One song, “Unchained Melody”, has the distinction of reaching the top four times, each in a different version.But amid the fanfare, pop pundits were predicting the death of the single. “Music is everywhere now, accessible in all kinds of places and on all kinds of formats,” Gareth Grundy, the deputy editor of Q magazine, told the BBC. “The single lost its power as a cultural artefact ages ago.”. The song reached No 1 ahead of the Manic Street Preachers’ “Empty Souls”.The longest stay at the top of the charts is 16 weeks, a title shared by Bryan Adams’ (“Everything I Do) I Do It For You” and Wet Wet Wet’s “Love Is All Around”.

Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” which he recorded to mark the death of the Princess of Wales, remains the best-selling single of all time. In the same week, monitored legal downloads overtook sales of CD singles for the first time.In the years since Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart” became the first No 1 in November 1952, pop music spawned one of televisions longest-running shows, Top Of The Pops, and the weekly countdown became a ritual beloved of pop music anoraks and pub quiz compilers everywhere.”One Night” is Elvis’s 20th chart-topper, putting him ahead of the Beatles with 17 No 1 singles (although not Sir Paul MacCartney who has performed on 22) and twice as many as the most successful female artist, Madonna. Singles sales are at an all-time low – 265,000 last week – and “Jailhouse Rock” made No 1 with the fewest sales of any chart-topper in UK history – just 21,262 copies were sold. Elvis Presley reached the top of the singles chart for the 20th time last night when his song “One Night” was named the 1000th UK No 1 of all time.
The single, which first reached the top in this country in 1959, was Elvis’s second consecutive No 1 after “Jailhouse Rock” headed the charts last week, both hits coming almost 30 years after the death of The King in 1977.But far from marking a rock ‘n’ roll revival, Elvis’s reappearance in the charts – on the back of a series of 18 of his singles being re-released by Sony to commemorate his life – could herald the beginning of the end for one of pop’s most enduring institutions.A No 1 record – the holy grail of aspiring pop musicians and the pinnacle of many a career – has never been easier to achieve, in numerical terms at least. And in the developing world in general, two million people die every year because of contaminated water, and chlorination is viewed as a life-giving intervention. “Adding anything to public supplies of water causes anxiety,” they write.Safety appears to be more important in bottled water than in soft drinks.