Next month sees the release of one of the most eagerly awaited classical recordings of modern times. Simon Rattle’s interpretation of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” rounds off his EMI cycle of all nine Mahler symphonies, an achievement matched only by a handful of conductors. The recording was made at two public concerts and a fully attended dress rehearsal last June in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. The CD will be marketed as “live”. What no one will mention is that two long patching sessions, under studio conditions, were needed to complete it.
Patching has become standard practice with so-called “live” recordings. Judicious editing enables the recording producer to cover technical slips, audience coughs and other noises that might irritate the listener and detract from the music on repeated hearing. Consumers are promised a listening experience that replicates that of the concert hall. The reality is a collection of edited highlights from different performances and back-up sessions, with all the flaws airbrushed out.
Does this matter? It depends how far you believe a recording should mirror the experience of live performance, complete with its faults, and whether you regard recording as an art form in itself, with its own rules. Most CD collectors recognise that any recording is to a greater or lesser degree a “lie” - no one listening to their CD player or iPod wants repeatedly to hear the technical flaws and audience coughs that invariably creep into public performances. What counts is the inner vitality of the music-making and its consistent impact. It doesn’t really matter how much the master tape is edited or doctored, or whether it was made “live” or in the studio, as long as the finished result mirrors the artistic viewpoint of the performers.
But the proliferation of live recordings and the sales talk around them often suggests that they are somehow artistically superior to performances taped under clinical studio conditions. “It’s that thing of capturing the excitement of the moment,” says Clive Gillinson, managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra, whose pioneering label, LSO Live, has issued 31 CDs in five years. “Perfection may be wonderful,” Gillinson adds, “but it’s not an artistic experience. Music is about performance, about the emotion of the moment, and it’s that excitement we want to grab.”
Consumers seem to agree. Thanks to sparkling performances of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony and others, LSO Live has notched up sales of 750,000 CDs, making it the envy of more established labels. But the implication that “live” automatically brings artistic gains is not borne out by LSO Live’s less attractive recordings. Other labels have experienced similarly mixed results with live recordings.
Consider David Zinman’s Beethoven on Arte Nova, or Charles Mackerras’s Janacek on Decca, or the hundreds of other great recordings of the past 50 years, all made in the studio: they do not lack electricity, spontaneity or musical integrity. And as an audio experience they offer more than any live recording can.
The force driving the “live” phenomenon is not artistic gain but economics. Musicians who 10 or 20 years ago took recording work for granted are finally coming to terms with the fact that unless they go down the “live” route, their market penetration will be minimal. Production costs for a live recording of a standard symphony can be as low as £15,000, compared to £45,000 for a studio version. For an opera recording such as EMI’s Tristan und Isolde with Placido Domingo, due out in July, the bill runs to something like £250,000. On that basis, studio-based opera recordings don’t make sense any more - and it comes as no surprise to learn that Tristan will be EMI’s last. The future for opera is DVD.
Big labels are under pressure to produce quick returns on new investment, because they already have huge back catalogues of perfectly acceptable recordings. The “live” option suits them. They don’t have to spend time or money gathering and preparing a dream team of artists, as they did in the medium’s heyday. They simply turn up to record the best live acts.
Within the music industry, opinion is sharply divided on the merits of the live format. “On a wonderful night, when it all clicks perfectly, yes, you cannot capture that in a studio, but this sort of event is very rare,” says Klaus Heymann, founder and owner of budget label Naxos. “In a studio you can risk more, because you know you have the chance to do it again. It’s the artists themselves who increasingly insist on manicured perfection.”
That is certainly true of soloists. One well-known pianist approved the stitching together of an entire sequence, one note at a time, so that his Mozartian runs could have a pearl-like evenness on the recording - an effect he could never produce live. Singers and instrumentalists are all too aware that when they get their one chance to immortalise their interpretation, it will be compared with classic versions from the past. If they begin to feel tired, the studio environment enables them to take a break and come back with their energy, commitment and motivation refreshed, something that is not possible with an audience present.
The studio is the only realistic option for recording contemporary music, which requires pinpoint balance and precision, and for period orchestras, whose intonation problems are part of live performance but would be unacceptable on a recording. The studio is also the preferred format for a surprising number of conductors - Riccardo Chailly and Paavo Jarvi among them. “I do like to listen to a recording where everything is clear, worked out and in tune, especially when it has my name on it,” says Jarvi, who is recording the Beethoven symphonies with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie for the Pentatone label. “When you do it live, you’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable position.”
It is this vulnerability that great orchestras thrive on when they play repertoire they know with conductors they respect. “We always play better, and better together, in front of an audience than we do in studio conditions,” says Fergus McWilliam, a Berlin Philharmonic horn player of 20 years’ standing. “The German word ‘Kalt-Aufnahme’ [cold recording] is a wonderful phrase: a studio performance is just not as red hot as a live performance. When I see the red light go on in the studio, I don’t react well to it. You never know if this is the real take or not. But if it’s live, you go hell-bent.”
That response is echoed by the London Symphony Orchestra. The LSO Live format has many of the virtues of a studio recording, but with an add-on quality that comes from a performance intended primarily as a public concert. LSO Live’s engineers tape the rehearsals and first concert, and encourage conductor and musicians to listen to the results before a short patch session. This replicates the effect of the traditional studio playback: everyone has a chance to analyse and learn from what they are doing. They can then go into the final concert aware of any adjustments they might want to make, but equally aware that they can really let go, because a back-up tape exists. It is invariably the second performance that provides 95 per cent of the finished recording. “Not many ensembles can achieve that,” says James Mallinson, LSO Live’s producer since its inception. “You can only do it with an orchestra of extraordinarily high quality.”
But some in the industry argue that the result would be even better in the studio, as Philips demonstrated with its recording of Prokofiev’s The Gambler. The musicians of St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre were intimately versed in the work, they happened to be performing it at Valery Gergiev’s festival in Rotterdam, and taped it in two four-hour studio sessions at nearby Hilversum - a record speed for an opera recording. The result is essentially a live recording made under studio conditions - the perfect marriage between financial expediency, technical excellence and artistic vitality.
There is no “best” solution. A live performance can be boring, just as a studio performance with committed musicians can be incredibly exciting. Half a century ago the rationale for a Beethoven recording was that you were setting it down as a statement for all time. Today it is seen instead as freezing a particular moment in time, a bit like taking a snapshot of your baby daughter for your photo album. The rapid development in recording techniques from the 1940s to the 1980s went hand-in-hand with the drive for sonic perfection, a drive encapsulated in the recorded legacy of Herbert von Karajan. Our ears have become conditioned to this cultivated perfectionism. The trend towards “live” recording suggests we are returning to a more truthful perspective.
I wince when I hear of singers’ voices being dubbed on to the orchestral soundtrack because they were not present at the main sessions: Karita Mattila’s contribution to Rattle’s Gurrelieder is one such case. On the other hand, perhaps our culture has become too preoccupied with the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the creative act. As long as we are completely taken by the performance, it shouldn’t really matter how it is put together.
No recording can properly capture the live experience; freezing a moment in time is diametrically opposed to music’s philosophy. But some get nearer than others, and they tend to be the ones where the event was “speculated on” retrospectively - thanks to a radio broadcast or private tape that validated the impact the performance made in the hall.
No back-up tape existed, no patch session took place when Sergiu Celibidache conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony on November 26 1981, or when Carlos Kleiber conducted the Bavarian State Orchestra in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony on November 7 1983. These public performances, recently issued on CD, were not given for the benefit of posterity. But listening to them, you capture a glimpse of what must have been an overwhelming “live” experience. On such rare occasions, even the microphone cannot lie.
