The recording partnership that helped put the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on the national classical music map turns 30 this year.

The ASO's enduring relationship with Telarc International, a Cleveland-based label, has produced some 90 ASO recordings, not including compilations and reissues — but has never had a formal contract.

Telarc International (ENLARGE)
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director Robert Shaw (left) and Telarc founder Robert Woods, who was also a singer, brought success to their enterprise.
AJC file photo (ENLARGE)
Robert Shaw (left) and Yoel Levi. The baton skills of Levi, who made his first ASO recording in 1989, are credited by Telarc's Elaine Martone with making the symphony play better.
Paul Hultberg (ENLARGE)
Music director Robert Spano (left) and principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles made their first ASO recordings earlier this decade.
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It began in the 1970s. The ASO, eager to spread its reputation with music director Robert Shaw and its gold-standard chorus, had cut several LPs with the Vox label. None was deemed artistically or commercially successful.

At about the same time, Telarc founder Robert Woods, who'd sung under Shaw during his years at the Cleveland Orchestra, hoped to get a jump on what promised to be the next big thing: digital recording.

Woods and his partner, Jack Renner, had the know-how to make recordings; they had hooked up with Salt Lake City's SoundStream, an innovative audio engineering firm. All they needed was the orchestra ... and, soon after, the money to buy the necessary equipment. The ASO would provide both.

With guidance from ASO chorister John Cooledge and board member Betty Fuller, the ASO cut a deal and, in June 1978, its first recording for Telarc: Stravinsky's "The Firebird" and Borodin's "Polovetsian Dances." It was billed as "the first all-digital commercial orchestral recording in the U.S." (The Boston Symphony actually got there earlier, but its digital product wasn't intended for release.)

Since then, the cost of recording a 95-member orchestra has grown to $60,000-$80,000 per CD, with opera and special projects costing much more. The ASO itself covers that full cost.

By what's called an Electronic Media Agreement, the unionized ASO musicians get no royalties but a small fixed fee for session work. But thanks to its Telarc partnership, the ASO, unlike most U.S. orchestras, has steadily put out new recordings — a savvy means of building reputation and loyalty on a national scale.

A look back over the timeline of the ASO-Telarc tale reveals artistic triumphs, mixed reviews and even a bitter Grammy Awards scandal.

1978: With a vision of the future, Telarc approaches Shaw and the ASO to make an all-digital recording. The result, "The Firebird," is a sensation among audiophiles and is used to demonstrate expensive hi-fi equipment.

1980: Orff's "Carmina Burana" is the first blockbuster ASO choral recording, and a best-seller by Telarc standards, moving over 100,000 units.

1982: Struggling against a slumping industry, Telarc approaches the ASO with a deal: If the orchestra purchases a few thousand dollars' worth of high-end digital gear and leases it to Telarc for $1, the label will make the ASO a fixture on its recording calendar.

1986: The Atlanta chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences launches a membership drive. Almost 150 local classical musicians join. (NARAS members vote in Grammy Awards.) Soon after, four of the five spots in the best classical album category, plus eight other nominations, go to the ASO's four new releases.

1986: The ASO and Chorus win their first Grammy Awards. Berlioz's Requiem brings home four statuettes, including best classical album and best choral performance; Fauré's Suite from "Pelléas et Melisande" wins best orchestral performance.

1989: Although bloc voting had been legal, NARAS creates a new procedure: An 11-member committee of broadcasters and critics will whittle down the top vote-getters to a top-five list. ASO Grammy nominations shrink.

1989: First ASO recording with Yoel Levi. "Yoel honed the orchestra," said Telarc's Elaine Martone, who produced 25 of Levi's 30 ASO CDs. "They played better because of his baton skills, even if he couldn't always get the musicians inspired."

1989: Shaw lays down Verdi's Requiem. For the first time, influential British critics take notice of the ASO. "No one in the U.S. was willing to say that an orchestra from the South could [make recordings] on a par with the best in America," Telarc founder Woods said. "The Europeans didn't have that prejudice, and they opened the door on the ASO's reputation."

1992: Levi interprets Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." (Fifteen years later, BBC Music magazine praises it as the best ever recorded.)

2001: Music director Robert Spano makes his first orchestral disk: Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade."

2002: Principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles makes a strong ASO recording debut with "Carmina Burana" — one of several CDs that duplicates repertoire already recorded by Shaw.

2002: Yoel Levi's final ASO recording, Mahler's Symphony No. 2.

2002: Spano leads Tchaikovsky's warhorse Symphony No. 4, but a bumpy interpretation in the recording session kills the CD project. "Robert didn't feel it was up to his standards," Martone said. "It was an unorthodox interpretation. It was painful for everyone."

2003: Spano finally moves into his comfort zone with contemporary music. "Rainbow Body" sells 12,000 units — a "hit" by today's classical standards.

2005: In a deep market slump, Telarc is sold to Concord Music Group, which is later bought by Village Roadshow Entertainment, a media conglomerate. "So long as we can justify our costs to sales," Martone said, "they'll let us continue what we're doing."

2008: The ASO releases include its first "live" recording, Puccini's opera "La Bohème." (This summer, the ASO will revisit "Bohème" live at its new Encore Park amphitheater, part of a huge CD release party.)

CONTINUED SUCCESS

The Atlanta Symphony's relationship with Telarc continues to yield artistic profits. Here are three of the latest CD releases:

• "The Garden of Cosmic Speculation" by Michael Gandolfi. 68 minutes.
Grade: A

Charles Jencks, an eccentric architect in Scotland, created a garden where modern physics (quarks, fractals, Soliton waves) informs shrubbery design, where landscaping is another branch of modern art. Boston composer Michael Gandolfi found inspiration in Jencks' garden for a 16-movement suite — restless, exuberant music from a compelling voice. "The Zeroroom" is a misty introduction, where French impressionism meets American minimalism and a flock of geese seem to chatter overhead. "Willow Twist" describes a Mobius-strip sculpture and sounds like a South of the Border dance. The score bogs down in the middle, but Gandolfi's creativity is often viscerally thrilling for the listener. Robert Spano and the ASO deliver a crack performance of the world premiere recording.

• "Britannia." 72 minutes.
Grade: B+

Scottish-born conductor Donald Runnicles programmed a survey of 20th-century British music — from the prim imperialism of Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" marches to the midcentury angst of Benjamin Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem" to three fervent composers who are masters on today's U.K. music scene. The ASO plays a little too cautiously in the modern works. Peter Maxwell Davies' "An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise" depicts the drunken nuptials on a Scottish isle, with a bagpipe proclaiming the dawn. Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Three Screaming Popes" is at turns moody and fierce, always provocative. James MacMillan is elusive and subtle yet angry. His "Britannia" parodies folk tunes but soars to a lyrical, bittersweet section that's as lovely and affecting as British music can get.

• Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 5 and other works. 71 minutes.
Grade: B-

The ASO will never match the innate "Englishness" of London's best orchestras — a certain plump, dark-wood tone — but its recording captures more than just the outlines of this serene, emotionally rich score.

Composed during wartime in Britain, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 5 trades in ambiguities and understatements. It also evokes everything from Tudor church music to the latest international symphonic styles, circa 1943. Robert Spano seems to hold most of it at arm's length. Everything's in place for the opening Preludio and closing Passacaglia movements, generating more light than heat. Yet in the slow, gripping Romanza — the heart of the symphony and capturing one of RVW's most tender moods — the conductor and his players find a warm spirituality, just right.

The disc opens on a witty idea: the ASO Chamber Chorus singing Thomas Tallis' "Why Fum'th in Fight?" an Elizabethan hymn that inspired RVW's "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" — although the ASO strings sound thinner and steelier than you'd like for the "Fantasia." The disc closes with a treat: RVW's "Serenade to Music," in an arrangement for four vocal soloists, choir and orchestra.