Utopias: Odradek Records is carving out a new road for classical music and jazz inside the culture industry — a small “yes” inside a much larger sigh. Artur Pizarro has already reached the summit. The Portuguese pianist belongs to that rarefied circle of European musicians whose repertoire moves effortlessly between granite monuments and delicate miniatures. He tackles Rachmaninoff and Beethoven with the authority of a heavyweight, then turns toward Andalusian classics or the chamber music of César Franck with equal ease. His concert calendar is crowded. His discography already substantial. Yet even Pizarro chose to enter a different kind of game — one governed by rules almost unrecognizable within the traditional recording industry. That game is called Odradek Records. For the last six years, Odradek has gathered a growing community of musicians and listeners around an idea both simple and quietly radical. A musician submits a recording through the internet: at least forty minutes of music, enough material for a complete album. Thirty-three fellow musicians listen anonymously and cast their votes. A simple majority decides the outcome. If accepted, the artist joins the Odradek world — not merely a record label, but an entire ecosystem that includes a recording studio, concert agency, publicity department, and artistic network. And unlike the machinery at Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, or Decca, the artistic decisions here are made exclusively by musicians. Even more striking: the jurors have no idea whose music they are hearing. The recording could belong to a bassist like Gary Peacock, one of the elder statesmen of jazz and a former collaborator of Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett, now reimagining swing standards, Jewish folk songs, and children’s classics with Casablanca-born pianist Robert Kaddouch. It could belong to a German mezzo-soprano like Silke Gäng singing severe settings of Mascha Kaléko and Walt Whitman. Or it might come from a young Dutch jazz quartet doing startlingly audacious things with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The jury doesn’t know. Every two months a new panel is assembled through a random selection process drawn from Odradek’s existing artists, separated only into jazz and classical categories. The listeners hear the recordings stripped of biography, publicity, and image. They do not know whether the next accepted artist is a dazzling blonde twenty-one-year-old from Austria or an aging musician from Macedonia. In that sense, Odradek stands in direct opposition to the habits of a music industry increasingly trapped by its own success formulas — and increasingly unable to escape them. The classical canon has already been recorded hundreds of times in immaculate technical perfection. Why should anyone buy another version of the Goldberg Variations or Mozart string quartets when those recordings can already be streamed day and night, nearly for free? In this climate of saturation, the deciding factor is supposedly the artist’s “aura” or interpretive voice. More bluntly put: it helps to possess the angelic image of a violinist like Hilary Hahn or the elegantly eccentric wolf activism of pianist Hélène Grimaud. The industry survives by cultivating spectacle around musicians’ biographies, packaging gifted performers as cultural icons and lifestyle symbols. Motion is simulated like foam floating atop a thickening liquid. The goal is no longer simply to create art, but to capture a few precious minutes of curiosity — enough time for someone to sample a new recording of Chopin’s Préludes or Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and perhaps buy a CD. Or better yet, attend a concert. Because recordings themselves no longer generate real income. That reality hangs over the music industry like a slow-moving catastrophe, not unlike the crisis faced by print journalism. The essential thing — music, news, meaning — migrates into the digital ether, while the physical object grows heavier and less necessary. Fewer people are willing to devote money or shelf space to discs and printed matter. But they still seek experiences. Concert halls remain alive, much as literary festivals and public readings flourish while bookstores complain of declining sales. Experience, not ownership, has become the dominant currency of culture. Yet in both literature and music, the same brutal challenge remains: how does an experiment become a booking? How does talent become permanence? Everything must squeeze through the bottleneck of human attention. The founders of Odradek — pianist Pina Napolitano from Caserta in southern Italy and John Anderson from Kansas — understood this intimately.

Both had traveled partway down the traditional road of artistic ambition before stepping aside. They first met during a masterclass in Locarno, one of those exhausting gatherings where passion, calculation, and competition coexist uneasily. In such environments every participant dreams of an international career, while quietly understanding that most will fail — not because they lack ability, but because success often depends on arbitrary factors unrelated to musicianship: appearance, networking skills, stamina, luck. For many musicians, frustration becomes a permanent companion. Napolitano and Anderson refused to surrender to that fate. They also recognized how dangerously close the music industry itself had drifted toward suffocation. Even major labels now expect artists to bring money to the table. A CD has become an expensive business card over which musicians possess surprisingly little control. The standard industry formula has become predictable: first, a recognizable classical program; second, something difficult and intellectually respectable; third, a crowd-pleasing assortment with enough variety to satisfy both casual listeners and specialists alike. So Odradek built something else. Since 2012 the label has released around seventy albums. More recently, recordings have culminated in live performances at a newly established studio on Italy’s Adriatic coast. And on a winter evening in 2017, four young jazz musicians walked into that studio and transformed the room. The StarkLinnemann Quartet arrived not merely with a reinterpretation of Mussorgsky’s increasingly overfamiliar Pictures at an Exhibition — better known to many listeners today through Maurice Ravel’s orchestral adaptation — but with an entire philosophy of musical reinvention. Alongside Mussorgsky, they performed original compositions infused with pianist Paul Stark’s experimental drive, the commanding presence of horn player Iman Spaargaren, and percussionist Jonas Linnemann’s deep immersion in African and Latin rhythmic traditions. You could hear those influences everywhere: in the groove, in the audacity, in the sheer exhilaration of discovery. The concert hall itself seemed built for such moments. At its center stood a Fabbrini Steinway maintained by the same piano technician who travels with Maurizio Pollini. Wooden acoustic panels, designed according to BBC principles, gave the room a warm yet astonishingly precise sound. After three days in that environment, the StarkLinnemann Quartet entered something close to athletic trance. The recording was complete. At that point, everything suddenly felt possible. Only months earlier, the quartet had submitted its music anonymously to Odradek. Now they belonged to the label. Odradek itself mirrors the fluid nature of its name — borrowed by Pina Napolitano from Kafka’s mysterious creature “Odradek,” a strange autonomous being unconstrained by ordinary rules. As she quotes with an ironic smile, it is “senseless perhaps, yet complete in its own way.” John Anderson modeled the jury process after academic peer review. Submissions are evaluated anonymously, much like scholarly essays reviewed before publication in prestigious journals. Those rejected suffer no reputational damage because no one — not even Anderson himself — knows who submitted the recording. Interestingly, the gender balance among classical applicants roughly reflects society at large, while jazz submissions remain overwhelmingly male. Whether women have applied and been rejected is impossible to determine under Odradek’s anonymous structure. As for repertoire, Anderson admits to one lingering reservation. He has grown weary of the giant piano showpieces everybody already knows by heart. Yet Artur Pizarro, somehow, still managed to convince him — with Rachmaninoff.

Professional musicians in the Netherlands can apply for financial support for album productions through the Sena Music Production Fund. But who are these artists, and what exactly are they creating? We spoke with pianist Paul Stark and drummer Jonas Linnemann of the group StarkLinnemann. An impressive album on your own label is one thing. But once your work begins drawing attention from names like Chopin, Mussorgsky, Beethoven and Franz Liszt, the next question naturally follows: what exactly is happening here? According to pianist Paul Stark and drummer Jonas Linnemann, the answer lies in their much-discussed concept of “transcending.” Classical masterworks are translated into the present day while preserving the soul of the original music. The result is not imitation, but recomposition — modern jazz shaped through new harmonies, fresh rhythmic layers and improvisation. “People often ask us: what are you really playing?” Stark says with a smile. “That’s because we’re not simply arranging those works.

We’re creating something entirely new from them. That’s exactly what it is. Our own label UCM even stands for Universal Crossover Music.” Still, before the name finally settled into place, there was uncertainty. The literal meaning of “transcending” can sound almost arrogant. Linnemann laughs: “People think we mean we’re surpassing the composers. Of course that’s not what we mean. We try to understand how those composers might have written if they were alive today. The improvisation, the rhythms, the influences of our own time — that’s where we begin.” The duo never enters the studio casually. Every project starts with the same doubt. “Each time I begin working on a new piece,” Stark says, “I ask myself: can this actually be done?” But once the process begins, the music starts breathing on its own. “At a certain point,” Linnemann adds, “you stop thinking and just follow the moment.”

The “transcending” idea emerged almost accidentally. Stark explains that it became impossible to distinguish where one composition ended and the next began. “I was playing Chopin,” he says, “but at the same time I heard all these other musical possibilities opening up.” The breakthrough came with Liszt. That project revealed a working method that would define the group’s identity. “It felt immediately right,” Stark recalls. “As if the music itself was telling us where to go.” What followed was a string of ambitious reinterpretations — Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Chopin — each one less interested in nostalgia than transformation.

The classical repertoire became raw material for something alive, rhythmic and contemporary. And perhaps that explains why StarkLinnemann never sounds like a crossover gimmick. Their music does not borrow prestige from classical music, nor does it use jazz as decoration. Instead, the two traditions collide and merge until they become inseparable. Every new album begins with uncertainty. But somewhere inside that uncertainty, Stark and Linnemann keep finding new worlds.

Paul Stark and Jonas Linnemann make jazz from classical music. Not by taking the easy route—laying a swing groove beneath the familiar lines of Bach—but by reimagining something like Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony for a jazz quintet. To them, this feels perfectly natural. After all, everything is in motion; the only constant is change.Pianist Paul Stark and drummer-percussionist Jonas Linnemann have worked closely together for some fifteen years. They began by organizing concerts with a jazz trio, regularly inviting prominent figures from the Dutch jazz scene as guest soloists—artists such as Denise Jannah, Deborah Carter, and Hermine Deurloo. Later they turned their attention to crossover projects: classical music viewed through a contemporary lens.Over the years they have built a catalog of more than seven albums of recompositions based on the works of Liszt, Beethoven, Mussorgsky, and Chopin.

In 2024 they released their third Beethoven-inspired project, Eroica, a complete reimagining of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. The music is performed by the StarkLinnemann Quintet, which, alongside its two founders, includes saxophonist and clarinetist Iman Spaargaren, trombonist Anton Boairskikh, and bassist Maciej Domaradzki. The quintet is currently touring with this new interpretation of Beethoven’s Third.At the beginning of autumn, I meet Stark and Linnemann for Jazz Bulletin at Café Pavlov in The Hague, directly across from the cultural center Amare. Though the two musicians do not always agree with one another, there is one point on which they are united: after a quieter period, bookings are finally picking up again.