The classical music recording industry is collapsing. Right? That’s what we’ve heard.

But hold on. Even with the virtual disappearance of retail chain stores, CDs keep being produced and bought, and I’m speaking of physical compact discs, not downloaded recordings, a phenomenon long popular in other genres of music and an increasing factor in the classical field.

Smaller classical labels are noticeably active, presenting emerging or overlooked artists in performances of unusual repertory, including the works of living composers.

The catch is that recordings do not generate the amounts of money, either for artists or producers, common in earlier eras. Most artists, eager for exposure, are willing to make recordings for little compensation, or even as self-produced projects.

Despite this, the financial challenges in the industry are very real, as companies grapple with how to make online accessing profitable.

So, how do you explain the burst of special boxed-set collections of CDs that keep getting produced? A boxed set of the complete Haydn string quartets, or all the works of Ligeti, or the collected recordings of Heifetz might seem a prestige product for a limited consumer base.

Lately, the major labels have issued what seems a plethora of deluxe and bargain-priced boxed sets. In June, to honor the centennial of the birth of Benjamin Britten, Decca issued Britten: The Complete Works, a comprehensive 65-disc set offering essentially every work he wrote, including some juvenilia.

In the last year alone, focusing just on boxed sets of historic recordings made by some major pianists, Sony, which controls the storied RCA Red Seal catalog, has released: Leon Fleisher: The Complete Album Collection (23 CDs); Gary Graffman: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection (24 CDs); and Byron Janis: The Complete RCA Album Collection (11 CDs and a DVD). As it happens, all three of these great American artists turned 85 this year. Also, they all suffered debilitating hand injuries that impeded their careers.

Then there is Legendary Van Cliburn: The Complete Album Collection (28 CDs), which Sony/RCA issued in February around the time that Cliburn died at 78 at his home in Fort Worth, Texas.

Recently, an ambitious archival project was released by Sony. Vladimir Horowitz: Live at Carnegie Hall is a deluxe 41-CD boxed set with a bonus DVD and an extensive booklet. It presents remastered recordings of the Horowitz concerts at Carnegie Hall by Columbia and RCA, 21 in all, as well as the 1968 Horowitz on Television performance and the historic 1943 radio performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

Even though some of these recordings have long been available, eight recitals were previously unreleased. And there are recordings of three recitals Horowitz gave in 1949 and 1950 taken from his private archive, now housed at the Yale Collection of Historic Sound Recordings. The suggested retail price is $149.98.

Still, who is the target buyer? What is Sony up to? To try to find out, I went to Bogdan Roscic, the president of Sony Classical, who discussed the classical-music industry.

Roscic fully concedes that “the classical music market has been shrinking,” in part because of the marginalization of classical music “in society, in certain countries.” In addition, classical music may finally be buckling “under the weight of its own magnificent tradition,” he says. “How many sets of Mahler symphonies can the market handle?”

Still, “physical carriers,” as Roscic calls CDs, remain “a very good and popular format for classical-music buyers, with good sound and convenience in terms of pricing.” And classical music is catching up with other fields, he pointed out, in “migrating to digital.”

Given this overall picture, boxed sets may seem an anomaly, a counter-cycle to the decline of the CD market and the growth of digital.

“It’s true that these are not a volume product,” Roscic says. “But a certain audience wants them.”

Some boxed sets are expensive prestige products. He cited Yo-Yo Ma: 30 Years Outside the Box, a collection of 90 CDs featuring this revered American cellist, including all of his ventures outside the classical “box,” as the title suggests, into collaborations with Appalachian folk musicians, jazz artists and the Silk Road Project, which explores crosscurrents in world music.

Roscic spoke of having “curated” this Sony set, “not to use too grand a word.” The collection, which includes an extensive book and deluxe presentation, was a limited run (how limited he will not say) that retailed for $850.

“It was really over the top,” he admits, an homage to an artist by his label of 30 years. “But I stand by it, I love it,” Roscic says.

Other recent boxed sets, however, have been packaged as inexpensive collector’s items. For example, the Byron Janis collection will be of keen interest to admirers of this important American pianist, a student of Horowitz (a very select group) who emerged in the 1960s as an artist of stunning virtuosity and deep sensitivity.

It is good to have this collection available. Many of these recordings are classics. Still, the set is a humble product. The discs are enclosed in cardboard sleeves that reprint the original jackets, reducing the design costs. A helpful but small booklet is included. You can find it for sale online for less than $50, which makes the cost of each disc about $4.50, not including the bonus DVD documentary.

Companies are loath to specify how many copies of a boxed set like this one are produced and how many are sold. Roscic says production could be just hundreds, or thousands, depending on the following of the artist. Some projects have been issued in runs of up to 20,000, he said, but this is not common.

For now, lovers of the piano certainly have a trove of new collections to enjoy. Just those featuring the pianists I have mentioned here contain a total of 127 CDs. So far, I have only been able to sample these recent releases.Some of the included recordings, of course, are deservedly renowned and very familiar to me, like Fleisher’s distinguished accounts of the five Beethoven concertos, recorded with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra between 1959 and 1961; or Graffman’s brilliant 1966 recordings of Prokofiev’s first and third piano concertos, also with Szell and the Clevelanders.

But it has been fascinating to go back to recordings that either were dropped from the catalogs or have been overlooked, like Fleisher’s 1956 Brahms album, with a bracing account of the “Handel” Variations and a whole batch of charmingly played waltzes. Then there is Graffman’s Schumann album from the mid-1950s, with a rhapsodic account of the Second Piano Sonata and a noble, exciting Symphonic Etudes.

Those who think of Janis from the 1960s as a virtuoso’s virtuoso might be surprised by his recording, made in the mid-1950s, of two Beethoven sonatas: an Apollonian “Waldstein” and an insightful, poetic reading of the late Piano Sonata No. 30.

The Horowitz collection is a major contribution to the piano discography, deserving of a full review after I have done more than dip into it. I am already excited by several of the recordings from the private collection, particularly a searching, brilliant account of Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata from a 1950 recital, just three months after Horowitz gave the premiere.

For me, the Cliburn collection has been especially meaningful. Talk about eerie timing. The set arrived in my mailbox Feb. 27, the day Cliburn died. (I had just returned from the office, having written an obituary for Cliburn, when I opened the package.)

The set, which sells for $83.98, contains all the recordings Cliburn made for RCA, starting with his first, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with the Russian maestro Kiril Kondrashin conducting the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra. It was recorded in May 1958, shortly after Cliburn returned to America triumphant, having won the gold medal in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition. That recording would sell 1 million copies, becoming the highest-selling classical recording ever at the time. It sounds as magnificent today as it did to me when, as a boy studying the piano, I bought it and listened to it over and over.

The second CD is the performance from Carnegie Hall, on May 19, 1958, of Cliburn in his other signature piece, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with Kondrashin conducting the “Symphony of the Air.” Cliburn is in his glory, playing with a scintillating technique and a wondrous balance of Romantic fervor and lyrical elegance.

There are other fine early Cliburn recordings: sensitive and exciting recordings of concertos by Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann; lots of solo repertory. But already in the late 1960s and early ’70s, in albums like My Favorite Brahms, Cliburn comes across as a pianist who is still searching for a maturity and depth that he never quite developed, as his career sadly declined.

Maybe there will continue to be a small but solid market for these boxed sets. It is hard to say. Even Roscic may not know. But Cliburn must have been so pleased to know that this collection was in the works when his health deteriorated. And I’m glad to have it.

Our Town, Pages 37 on 11/28/2013