The perfect recording

Recording is a strange and very different experience from live performance. Studio recordings aim to be ‘perfect’. By this I mean that the listener will be able to hear the piece of music free of all defects - no wrong notes, no coughing fits, nothing that is out of tune, no sections too fast, too slow, even no page turns. But they also aim, particularly when working with great artists, to be a ’record’ of interpretation and style. They need to be more than perfectly accurate therefore - they need to be meaningful. And they need to be exciting! They are not a dry textbook presentation of an ideal Mozart Symphony - they have got to try and convey the thrill of the music being alive, so that it is a joy to listen to the finished product.

Imagine then, that you are on your fifth take of the opening of the symphony; you want and need it to sound like the start of a concert, not the end of a 3 hour recording session. Tempo is settled now, but the Fsharp in bar 5 hasn’t been quite in tune on any take yet, and the producer says your entry sounds a bit late in bar 20. Play it again, perfectly, but with feeling! Then there’s the time pressure - 3 minutes left to the end of the session, and you have got to get it right. (Overtime is almost never allowed in orchestral rehearsals or recordings - it costs a fortune.) At last you play the top note of the phrase as beautifully as you had hoped, but, no good, someone hit their bow on the stand while turning a page and the microphones picked up the noise so that take is no use.

It’s a tricky business....Miss Su-a Lee takes a break from it all...