Wrapping Up Recording Week
I honestly don't know how we managed to finish these recordings. Getting an entire symphony or concerto down on disc in usable form always seems to take longer than anyone is expecting - our 5-year Beethoven symphony project was originally only supposed to take 3 years - but this week in particular seemed awfully ambitious. In fact, going into our final day of studio sessions, most of us in the orchestra just assumed that there was no way we were going to finish the piano concerto. We had just one 3-hour session left (which works out to only about two hours of actual recording time when you subtract playback breaks,) and we hadn't even finished the first of three movements of the concerto when the day began.
Miraculously, we did get it done, although calling it "done" implies that every note that will be on the CD was complete when the orchestra left the stage. To save time, any extended passage that the piano soloist plays without the orchestra - cadenzas and so on - was skipped, to be added after the orchestra went on its way. This kind of non-linear recording bothers some audiophiles and music critics tremendously, because it seems somehow dishonest, as if a recording were really not a performance, but just a collection of notes assembled by a skillful engineer.
To a certain extent, that's undeniably true - a great CD requires not only great performers but top-notch producers and engineers, and the finished product is at least as much their achievement as it is ours. One of the reasons our recordings with BIS have garnered as much positive attention as they have is that the quality of recorded sound BIS puts out is just about the best that current technology is capable of. The discs they record are multi-layered, so that they sound amazing in both high-tech "Super-Audio" CD players and in regular decks, and the precision their crew brings to bear on our projects borders on the obsessive. (By contrast, we used to record discs for an audiophile label that catered mainly to the kind of enthusiasts who own $50,000 home audio systems, and I was repeatedly assured that the CDs we put out with that label sounded incredible on those systems, but in my $300 home stereo, they just sounded tinny.)
Earlier in the week, I mentioned our BIS producer, Rob Suff, who I believe I called "ruthless." A better description might be "mercilessly meticulous," as Rob is a perfectionist in much the same way that Osmo is. In fact, one of the side benefits of spending a week in the studio with Rob and Osmo is getting to watch Osmo react to Rob's constant orders and requests for retakes in exactly the same way that we in the orchestra frequently react to Osmo in rehearsal.
There's undeniable respect and affection in both relationships, yet it's difficult to constantly be told that you haven't gotten something right yet and maintain your composure. Osmo is famous for pushing orchestras to work ever harder, and demanding that musicians push the limits of our capabilities at all times, even while keeping our energy at a fever pitch. We musicians tend to like the results of such prodding, but the process can be hugely frustrating at times.
In the same way, when Osmo gets a recorded take that he thinks had exactly the musical/emotional qualities he wanted, only to have Rob come over the loudspeaker and announce that a) the winds were slightly flat for two beats of the second bar and b) the violas and basses were a hair off kilter rhythmically on the downbeat, our music director frequently winds up bent over at the waist, breathing hard, trying to keep himself from arguing. Allowing the frustration to take over would only result in another bad take, and we all know that, but staying on an even keel is a lot harder in a recording situation than it is in a performance.
In a concert, you're trying to create a smooth overall ensemble effect by reacting constantly to what's going on around you, and rolling with small mistakes in such a way that the audience, which hears not every little scrap of sound but an amalgam of everything happening on stage, never knows they occurred. On a recording, reacting to mistakes is useless, because the microphones hear everything. Once a mistake is made, you've got to start over. And over. And over.
Still, I admit to taking a fair amount of pride in the recordings we've been able to produce over the last several years, and while I don't exactly look forward to the weeks we spend enslaved to Rob's disembodied voice, I'm definitely looking forward to hearing the big viola solos in the second movement of Bruckner 4. Especially now that I know that Rob can't make me play them again.
Miraculously, we did get it done, although calling it "done" implies that every note that will be on the CD was complete when the orchestra left the stage. To save time, any extended passage that the piano soloist plays without the orchestra - cadenzas and so on - was skipped, to be added after the orchestra went on its way. This kind of non-linear recording bothers some audiophiles and music critics tremendously, because it seems somehow dishonest, as if a recording were really not a performance, but just a collection of notes assembled by a skillful engineer.
To a certain extent, that's undeniably true - a great CD requires not only great performers but top-notch producers and engineers, and the finished product is at least as much their achievement as it is ours. One of the reasons our recordings with BIS have garnered as much positive attention as they have is that the quality of recorded sound BIS puts out is just about the best that current technology is capable of. The discs they record are multi-layered, so that they sound amazing in both high-tech "Super-Audio" CD players and in regular decks, and the precision their crew brings to bear on our projects borders on the obsessive. (By contrast, we used to record discs for an audiophile label that catered mainly to the kind of enthusiasts who own $50,000 home audio systems, and I was repeatedly assured that the CDs we put out with that label sounded incredible on those systems, but in my $300 home stereo, they just sounded tinny.)
Earlier in the week, I mentioned our BIS producer, Rob Suff, who I believe I called "ruthless." A better description might be "mercilessly meticulous," as Rob is a perfectionist in much the same way that Osmo is. In fact, one of the side benefits of spending a week in the studio with Rob and Osmo is getting to watch Osmo react to Rob's constant orders and requests for retakes in exactly the same way that we in the orchestra frequently react to Osmo in rehearsal.
There's undeniable respect and affection in both relationships, yet it's difficult to constantly be told that you haven't gotten something right yet and maintain your composure. Osmo is famous for pushing orchestras to work ever harder, and demanding that musicians push the limits of our capabilities at all times, even while keeping our energy at a fever pitch. We musicians tend to like the results of such prodding, but the process can be hugely frustrating at times.
In the same way, when Osmo gets a recorded take that he thinks had exactly the musical/emotional qualities he wanted, only to have Rob come over the loudspeaker and announce that a) the winds were slightly flat for two beats of the second bar and b) the violas and basses were a hair off kilter rhythmically on the downbeat, our music director frequently winds up bent over at the waist, breathing hard, trying to keep himself from arguing. Allowing the frustration to take over would only result in another bad take, and we all know that, but staying on an even keel is a lot harder in a recording situation than it is in a performance.
In a concert, you're trying to create a smooth overall ensemble effect by reacting constantly to what's going on around you, and rolling with small mistakes in such a way that the audience, which hears not every little scrap of sound but an amalgam of everything happening on stage, never knows they occurred. On a recording, reacting to mistakes is useless, because the microphones hear everything. Once a mistake is made, you've got to start over. And over. And over.
Still, I admit to taking a fair amount of pride in the recordings we've been able to produce over the last several years, and while I don't exactly look forward to the weeks we spend enslaved to Rob's disembodied voice, I'm definitely looking forward to hearing the big viola solos in the second movement of Bruckner 4. Especially now that I know that Rob can't make me play them again.
posted by Sam at
11:26 AM
6 Comments:
Awesome. Thanks again for this glimpse into the sessions. I can't wait until these come out!
While I can appreciate the effort, time, and expense of creating audiophile-level engineered classical musical recordings (in fact I own most of the Beethoven cycle you have released), I wonder if it is the ideal way to go. Classical music labels are folding or going 'classical crossover', the Compact Disc is regarded by most people my age as 'dead petroleum media', large, inconvenient, wasteful, overly packaged. That orchestras such as this have gone to lengths to support recording for Sony's Super Audio CD format, which virtually no one has heard of, fewer use, and most people could not tell the difference, is an interesting choice. Clearly, the movement in audio distribution has not been about higher quality so much as portability - the MP3 format, and a few others (FLAC for lossless, etc.) are clearly the way things have gone. MP3 is a lossy format, and I'll be the first to indicate that classical music, with its layers of sound and great dynamics demand a better quality of recording. Still, most people I know would regard the CD as the temporary plastic wrap that came with your ability to rip the audio into small files that will run off a laptop or an iPod, if only to get around digital rights management (DRM) encumbrance that often comes alongside pure digital download services.
With complex engineered music, there is also a fairly unconsidered aspect that most of the people I know listen to music with headphones, and the sense of fatigue that comes on with recordings optimized for speakers and the perceived sound stage that it creates. Would not binaural recordings make more sense, or be a decent supplement? If you are essentially recording live, then adding a binaural mic in the 'audience' is cheap (given the costs of having 90+ highly trained musicians as well as recording engineers and the like working in closed session). That also brings up the consideration of cost, as your recordings are $20 each, a hard sell when the single killed the album and most people I know don't think any album is really worth more than about $4 or $5.
I'm certainly not the first to bring these issues up. Some have suggested that the future of classical music recording is fast and dirty live recordings at performances. I can appreciate the potential issues that brings with artistic integrity and soloists not wanting recordings of an 'off night' forever available.
I'm curious as to what some of the fine musicians at the Minnesota Orchestra would have to say regarding some of these considerations.
Actually, ATS, we'll be making some of those quick-and-dirty live-to-tape recordings later this season, with pianist Stephen Hough. It's basically a different economic model which a lot of orchestras use these days, and you can still get some pretty decent recordings out of it.
But it's notable that BIS won't be producing those CDs - they just don't work that way. You can say all you want about how few people have SACD players, but the fact is that some people do, and it doesn't take any extra time to record in that format. Since no one actually makes buckets of money on recordings anymore in any genre but pop or country, why not make the best recordings possible?
As for pricing, I agree that $20 is pretty steep - part of the problem is that since BIS is a Swedish label, our CDs are technically imports, and therefore cost more. Of course, you can download our BIS albums on iTunes for the same $9.99 that you pay for any other album, so if you don't care about getting every last bit of recorded sound, by all means, go the download route.
Sam, I forgot to ask, how much rehearsal do you guys get in before you start recording?
Believe it or not, Steve, we don't get any. I've been told this is a union regulation from some national recording agreement or other, but I don't know why musicians would want such a rule, and I've never seen it written down, myself, so I can't say for certain that this is correct.
Basically, the way things usually work is that we'll perform the music we're about to record on a concert, hopefully no more than a few weeks before we hit the recording studio, and that way, we know going in the basic interpretation the conductor will be using. In recent years, we've started doing our recording in early January, which means that because of all the Christmas music in December, we're usually months removed from having played the works we're recording, but since everything we've recorded recently has been very standard rep, that hasn't presented much of a problem.
Here is one of my favorite Rob Suff quotes. "Can we hear that again? It was subito..hectic." It summed up the moment perfectly.
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