SEARCHING FOR THE MEMORABLE

Tales of a Peripatetic Record Producer

The pictures on faded stamps in my mother's collection conjured my earliest notions of far away places. This, allied to a romantic, distant, and escapist disposition at a far too early age, led to my yearning for distant vistas. I would never have known that my early love for music would lead me to most of the places I wanted to visit. I ignore all the years that lead to my becoming a recording producer and to meeting the woman of my dreams and fellow traveller except by reference and begin the story with the place where I am convinced God must live or at least vacation: New Zealand.

It was music that led me there. On a hot, dusty day in Jerusalem, my friend Moshe Saperstein, a wounded Israeli war vet, crazy like me for unusual repertoire and particularly fond of the English romantic composers played a record of New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn's music. It evoked the magic of a place that I thought I would never see. Skip a few years and I am the General Manager of a very small and obscure record label in New Jersey called Stradivari Classics. It was the boom time of the classical record business. The compact disc was still fairly new: it had saved the business of classical music on records from near extinction creating a stampede to record everything and anything for the new medium. What's more, the cost of production was declining and there were orchestras from eastern Europe to the South Pacific offering reasonable quality at very reasonable prices . Little Stradivari had carved out a small niche with the first very low priced all digital recordings of standard and not so standard repertoire mainly recorded in the then Yugoslavia with a very good orchestra we renamed the Ljubljana Symphony Orchestra and a talented conductor with the unusual name of Nanut. The LSO - with apologies to that better known institution in London - got good reviews, created expectations, and enough of a name that I received a call from a reputable agent with an very interesting project. Would I be interested in the first modern recording of Samuel Barber's 2nd Symphony? My knowledge of the work consisted of two facts: it had been deemed a failure and that although a score existed, all the parts had been destroyed at the composer's request. I was a Barber fan finding his particularly aching romanticism irresistible and took the bait. Who was the conductor and where did he find parts. Also, how were the legal impediments from the Barber estate being handled. It turned out that Andrew Schenck, a conductor of great talent and little luck, had not only found a set of parts that had escaped the publisher's destructive order but had an agreement for one year's exclusivity to record the piece. After meeting Andrew for breakfast in my wrong side of the tracks New Rochelle town house and talking music for hours, my answer was an easy yes. Stradivari operated on a limited budget and my concern was where could we find a credible orchestra at a reasonable cost and schedule sessions within the time limit of Schenck's exclusivity. When Andrew told me his next engagement would take him to New Zealand, the main theme of the Lilburn Aotearoa Overture came immediately to mind.

I still don't know how I convinced the two businessmen who ran Stradivari Classics to allow a trip to New Zealand. The price was certainly right and the orchestra, now much improved, remains one of the best bargains in recording. I left Newark with two battered cloth suitcases on route to Los Angeles. After a brief, alluring stop in Tahiti, I arrived in Aukland in the early morning hours on a packed Continental 747. (Continental ceased service to New Zealand not long after a flight landed in Aukland out of fuel. They managed to coast in but could not taxi to the gate under their own power. ) How to describe one's first views of the green land of New Zealand in the moments just past dawn? A few twinkling lights from the nation's largest city (and the only place in New Zealand that I have more or less consciously avoided) make little impression compared to the water and hills. Walking the short mile in the dawn light from the international to domestic terminal, a practice I followed for the next ten years, rewarded me with my first sense of the peculiarly beautiful light and colour of the southern skies. Living now in northern Europe not far from the Elbe and the Dutch lowlands, one immediately recognises the quality of light and colour from years of gazing at Dutch landscapes in museums and on record jackets (my own introduction to art.) There were no paintings then known to me that would prepare my senses for New Zealand and its strange combination of nostalgic rural England and south Pacific paradise. There is a place on the drive - now almost a pilgrimage - from Wellington to isolated Cape Palliser on the far southern coast of the North Island - where the pattern of mountain, sea, sky and occasionally the glimmering distant snow caps of the South Island are in perfect harmony and not to be seen elsewhere. When I began to travel, I spent rolls of film on snow capped mountains, now unable to distinguish the Alps from the Rockies as depicted in snapshot. New Zealand was always recognisable. The Air New Zealand flight from Aukland to Wellington featured a full hot breakfast during its short one hour duration - US airlines take note - and a spectacular view of Mount Egmont. It was also my sustained introduction to the New Zealand accent: one vowel described by a Kiwi friend as "ih" with the mouth almost closed and rarely moving. One of my first contacts in New Zealand was a gentleman named Nisbet, pronounced Nisbit. When I addressed him by name in a letter using his pronunciation as a guide to my spelling, he noted "it's not Nisbit, it's Nisbit." (He took Andrew and I out to a fabulous dinner at a fine restaurant on a hilltop overlooking the Tasman Sea. A couple of friendly cats were prowling about, offending a fellow American tourist. The manager promptly and properly answered, "if the food weren't good, the cats wouldn't stay.) I was also charmed by the flight stewardess' introduction, "Ladies and Gentlemen (read Gintlemin), Boys and Girls."

Wellington has changed a good bit since my first arrival. It still boasts a sign probably unique for world capitols - Welcome to Wellington, Nuclear Free City. It has been compared to San Francisco and I briefly thought of Haifa, but the resemblance to either city is slight: a similarity of setting. The city is spread out on hills surrounding a bay. I had expected to be met as arranged by an orchestra staff member but various signals being crossed, I received my first taste of Kiwi hospitality: two complete strangers at the baggage queue offered to give me a lift to the depressing hotel demanded by our low budget. I won't name it as it has been long demolished. It is similar to another Wellington establishment in which one of our unfortunate artists briefly resided till he threatened to hang himself from the cord attached to the bare light bulb in the room. It was only his sincere distress that forced us to damn the budget and make the acquaintance of Wellington's fabulous and welcoming Park Royal Hotel, but that was a few years and several records later. Perhaps in a friendly desire to spare me knowledge of the unnameable hotel and spoil my introduction to their capitol city, my new friends took me for a quick motor tour of Wellington. We drove along the coast, waves slashing the shore and the high winds ensuring that no clouds blocked the view of the Rimutaka and other exotically named mountain ranges.

Lunch at a small Chinese restaurant was followed by a street chase: the waiter and proprietor running after me with the change I left on the table. Tipping was not expected nor in this case accepted. That has changed somewhat over the years but I'll never forget the cab driver who not only unloaded all our recording equipment but entered the terminal in search of a luggage cart. When I gratefully handed him a New Zealand fiver, he refused my offer saying, "I can't accept that." Lunch was followed by my first visit to the old New Zealand Symphony recording studio on Willis Street. Here I encountered the phlegmatic side of the Kiwi in the person of Geoffrey Eyles, a lovely gentleman with all the graces and good nature that seem to come with being born on these blessed islands. The antique mixing desk, coffee stained with coffee grinds gumming up the ancient faders along with the less than beautiful acoustics of the room prompted Geoff's friendly greeting "You're going to hate this place, mate!" He was only being honest, another Kiwi trait, and while I had nightmares about the studio long after it was turned into something else more appropriate, we had to make the best of the situation. Radio New Zealand, provider of the recording equipment boasted one DAT machine meaning our backup had to be on analogue tape. The doubts I was silently expressing were not entirely mitigated by the first session the next day.

Andrew and his wife Lois arrived a day prior to the first recording session. It was a pleasure to spend time with such normal, down-to-earth people. Andrew, a rare gentleman in our cut throat trade, was generally regarded as talented despite the fact that his current post was music director of a tiny, now-defunct orchestra on New York's Long Island. He was the paradigm of my rubric - now applied to many others - that talent was no guarantor of a career in music. Perhaps in his somewhat reticent way, he wasn't hungry enough for the career that his talents warranted. His wife slaved away in the real estate trade while Andrew waited and hoped for the call that would never come. They were both committed Episcopalians, though not in an obtrusive way. Lois, a convert from Judaism, had her counterpart in Andrew's lookalike sister who became an ultra-Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel. When Andrew was ill with terminal cancer, the two women who had both chosen a different faith found a great deal in common. That was still a few years away and unknown to us as we planned recordings that would among other things help jump-start Andrew's career.

We began with Barber's delightful and oddly poignant Overture to the School for Scandal. Andrew and the band were in good form and I could quickly assess their strengths and weaknesses. Its willingness to work was apparent and Andrew, efficient as ever, made the most of our limited session time. After a brief rehearsal, two complete takes provided most of the material for the finished compact disc. We launched into the romantic Music for a Scene for Shelley and once again had a superb first take up to the timpani solo at the end. The banging, cacophony, and general disregard for the printed note led the mild-mannered and genteel Andrew to remind the timpanist amid uncontrolled laughter within the orchestra and in the recording booth that "if you'd look at the music, you might not have to make it up as you go along." This, as another conductor put it, was tantamount to a death sentence from Andrew. Suffice it to say that said timpanist has gone on to fool the critics as a conductor, mainly of self-funded recordings. The principal flute was wonderful. More about Alexa Still later.

Despite spending most of the daylight hours in the dingy setting of the old Symphony House, my love affair with New Zealand began during those days of recording. During the ten years in which New Zealand was an eagerly anticipated highlight, at least two or three times yearly, I saw much of the country and made enduring friendships. Ask me now after forty odd trips to New Zealand where I want to live and the unhesitating answer is New Zealand, somewhere in the Wairarapa Valley with a view of the mountains and the sea.

The orchestra's esprit somehow overcame their (legitimate) curiosity about how we were going to rehearse and record these difficult works in the short amount of time we had available. They never let me down and after five days, all the music was recorded on a small box of DAT tapes. Needless to say, I guarded these with my life. Remember, there were no backups. The recording, edited and mastered at my favourite studio, Master Sound Astoria, went on to a distinguished career, becoming the first budget recording to make the Billboard chart of best selling records in the United States and was nominated as best record and best orchestral record in the first OVATION Magazine Awards. With suitable irony, the magazine folded before the Awards were given. I received more than one letter from people who told me that this disc was their first acquaintance with the music of Samuel Barber.

I remember reading at the height of the anti-romantic sixties that "we didn't need the likes of Barber anymore." This from a writer who referred to a famous line of Tennyson's as a "text from a minor English poet" without even identifying the author. I'm happy to say that Barber has rejoined the pantheon of great composers and that the hodgepodge of 60s avant-garde is already passe. A very fine writer once wrote about the "pained-eroticism" of Barber's music. This is close to the mark and I am proud that I got to record much of Barber's music including several important premieres. Many of these records were made in New Zealand and most with Andrew Schenck though neither of us knew as we planned the next recordings and basked in the success of the first that Andrew had very few years left to live.

The last day of this first trip to Aotearoa held the only sight-seeing I did. The orchestra's leader, Isador Saslav, combined a lovely old-world violin sound with the voice of a New Jersey union electrician. He lived, not inappropriately, in Brooklyn, a suburb of Wellington with absolutely nothing in common with the eternal home of the Dodgers. He was a great Shaw devotee among other pursuits and told us that we must visit Rotorua if we had any time. Andrew, his wife, and I boarded a flight - my memory, surely wrong, is of a DC-3 or even a Dakota - for Rotorua. A young boy sitting in front of me, no more than five or six, with a an open, friendly expression, gave me a cheery, Hello Mate, and we were off. I've never been one for towns and if Rotorua was the only place in New Zealand I've never returned to, count it to a day wandering around the the city and never getting to the brilliant countryside surrounding the settlement.

Returning to the States, my head was full of plans for the next Barber recordings with a promise to myself that I would see some of New Zealand the next time. Not too many months after the release of the recording, I received a call from an Austrian gentleman who ran the new and promising Koch Import Service. I knew them as the ambitious distributor of several good independent record labels. Michael Koch asked me quite directly if I were interested in his distributing Stradivari Classics in the German speaking European territories. When I arrived at their office in a Long Island town as grimy as Stradivari's New Jersey base, the subject quickly changed: would I be interested in starting a new classical label for Koch? He was interested in creating, but more importantly in owning repertoire. Even then, the end of the compact disc's honeymoon as the new format on the block, it didn't strike me that the world needed a new classical label. I listened politely as Koch answered my incredulous "Why would you want to invest in a new classical record label?" His answer, "Because we are a music company" gave me a glimmer of hope. My positive response was made easy by a call from a good friend early in the next week.

Arias and Barcarolles

I mentioned my dilemma to my first-class secretary, Kathleen Karcher. Kathy's suggestion, typical of her good sense, was to ignore it for the time being. That time was very short as Marvin Schofer, an agent and friend, asked if I would be interested in producing the world premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein's new work, Arias and Barcarolles. The title, according to the official story, came from a comment made by President Dwight Eisenhower to Bernstein, about how he preferred tuneful music to "all them Arias and Barcarolles." Compactly (and inexpensively) scored for two singers and two pianists, the music was a delicious Bernstein romp about relationships, pained, strained, and and poignant. Schofer told me, everything was set up, including studio dates, cast, and most importantly, the imprimatur of Leonard Bernstein. One of the singers was Judy Kaye, a Tony Award winner for Phantom of the Opera and the other was William Sharp who remains one of the most stylish baritones around. The pianists were two of the best young talents as well: Steve Blier and Michael Barrett. The price was right and I triumphantly rang Michael Koch to ask if he was interested in the package to start the new venture. For me, it provided a raison d'etre to start a new label. I resigned as General Manager of Stradivari Classics saying good-bye to the two nicest bosses I ever had. I also made sure that Koch would fund the next trip to New Zealand for more Barber! Though these pages are strictly speaking about travels and the Bernstein was recorded in New York, it was the prelude to eight wonderful years of recordings round the world and as such deserves more than a mention here.

The recording sessions - four calls of four hours duration each - were held at Master Sound Astoria which remains my favourite place to record music. Unlike the cold stereotypical studio without a pleasing natural acoustic, Master Sound has it all - a lively acoustic, superb equipment and the priceless knowledge, experience and let me add patience of Ben Rizzi, the best recording engineer in the business. What little I know about recording engineering I owe to Ben. A larger than life man with little regard for the modern taste for healthy living, Ben was not stereotypical. A died-in-the-wool political conservative in a business where left wing sentiments were the equivalent of a uniform, there were those who didn't feel comfortable with Ben. I was in recording heaven and I knew that I would be satisfied, from a technical and sound standpoint, with any recording I made in Master Sound. There were also those countless occasions when I would bring in a master tape made in surroundings less perfect that Ben, through the deftest and patient reworking of the original material, would not only rescue the disasters I manufactured but create a gem. The rest of the studio complement included Ben's wife, Maxine, who managed the studio and the very congenial David Merrill, son of the distinguished baritone Robert Merrill. For me, Master Sound was bullet proof - an environment that let me concentrate completely on the artists and the music. Unlike many recording venues, the listening environment was ideal. I always knew that the way I heard the music was the way the recording would actually sound. There were rarely any surprises. When I get to tales of recordings in lonely churches, Lithuania, and Korea, you'll know why this is so important. Master Sound also provided important creature comforts including the best Italian mozzarella, prosciutto and sun dried tomato sandwiches imaginable supplied by a local deli. (I write this from Tuscany and even here in the land of good eating, the memory is still sweet.)

The sessions went extremely well. Complete takes, followed by a critical listening sessions, followed by retakes and minor corrections when necessary all happened with a minimum of troubles. The clock, always the nemesis of a recording session, seemed not to move. Avoiding costly overtime and ever aware of the studio's hourly rate was never far from my mind. We had a bit of a pause as we "auditioned" various individuals for a crucial bit of whistling that opens the last of Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles. The excellent piano tuner - Scott Jones - made a valiant effort but in the end, pianist Michael Barrett supplied a suitably musical whistle for the recording. (Jones met, by chance, his future wife - Koch's Vice President Elizabeth Groves - at the sessions. A happy occasion.)

Editing took a mere eighteen hours in the studio. I was more than unusually nervous as this was our first record for the label and to be perfectly honest, funds were severely limited. Editing for future projects would take place in the Koch Austrian studios where time was not a factor and finally in my own home where I could work round the clock to my heart's content. Here, we worked quickly and efficiently. David Merrill, bless him, agreed to stay all night if necessary to allow us to finish our work. I drove my assistant, Karen Chester, home at three a.m. to her flat in one of New York's less pleasant neighborhoods, marvelling that even at that hour, traffic was miserable. We had finished our first record. The next hurdle was playing it for Leonard Bernstein who asked to hear it on Saturday, three days later.

We had knowingly left a very small mistake in the edited version - a matter of an incorrect octave in the piano part - to preserve a perfectly exquisite vocal phrase. In the sessions, we corrected the error but the musical phrase cum piano error was too good and try as we did, editing in the correction only ruined the beauty of the musical line. I sat up late into the night imagining Bernstein throwing the tape out the window and refusing his sanction for the recording. The window! My fertile brain then came up with the unimaginably silly strategy of opening the window a moment before the offensive phrase was heard thereby distracting the maestro's attention and getting me out of a potentially disastrous situation.

I was ushered into Bernstein's flat along with Karen Chester and the recording's pianists, Steve Blier and Michael Barrett. Bernstein seemed pleased with what he heard, noting with surprise and delight that we had included the ballet music - beautifully played by Blier - along with Sharp's superb "Lonely Town." At one point, Bernstein asked us to stop the tape. He moved from his desk to the piano and played one of the chords he had just heard saying: I loved that chord when I wrote it, I still love it now."

I was enjoying the moment as well: I too loved that chord and was acutely aware that it in all its poignant loveliness was delaying the moment in which LB would hear the potentially fatal mistake. The tape rolled again with Bernstein making favorable comments from time to time and questioning a few minor points. His enthusiasm seemed complete when our little mishap became audible. "Stop the tape. What was that?" I launched into a feeble explanation and Bernstein, still feeling magnanimous, announced to our general relief and satisfaction that "the whole damn thing is so good, I'll let you get away with it."

Relief flowed round the room and the tape played again this time to its end without interruption. Bernstein began shaking my hand thanking me for my efforts. I couldn't even begin to thank him for what I've always considered the real beginning of my career. We spent another half-hour chatting, enjoying Lennie's dissection of a review in New York magazine and speaking about Copland, whose music he was conducting with the NY Philharmonic that week. At about five, his assistant Craig Urquardt gently reminded Lennie that it was time to get ready for the concert and we left, again vociferously thanked for our efforts.

I left in a mood best described as euphoric. We had our first record for the new label, Leonard Bernstein not only liked it but would allow himself to be photographed for the cover. I was off to New Zealand in the morning. The recording was an immediate success and earned a well deserved Grammy Award. My first Grammy nomination as Classical Producer of the Year owes everything to Arias and Barcarolles.

A brief postscript to this chapter: the last words Lennie ever spoke to me, not long before his death were: "Did you fix it?"

New Zealand Redux

While not generally known for having a balanced sense of priorities, I did insist that continued trips to New Zealand would have to be part of the package at KOCH. With the success of the Barber disc on Stradivari still fresh in my boss's memory, I planned the next recordings in Wellington: two ambitious discs including another world premiere (Fadograf of a Yestern Scene), the rarely heard complete Medea ballet, Third Essay, and the Violin Concerto (with Zina Schiff) as well as Menotti's Sebastian and Dances from Amahl. The sessions were planned in the terrifying but tameable Willis Street studios with Geoff Eyles from Radio New Zealand repeating his role as engineer. I had other plans as well: a serious driving tour of New Zealand's South Island over the weekend.

I had been a fan of Zina Schiff for some time though she was another prime example of my rubric that talent is often a hindrance to a career. She had been the youngest student in the famed Heifetz' master classes and possessed a beautiful sound and romantic temperament (at least on the violin.) When she met a young anesthesiologist and told Heifetz she intended to marry him, the great man told her that she certainly could marry but that if she did, he would never see her again. She married and Heifetz kept his word. The young couple moved to Louisiana where her husband set up a practice and she tried to create a career. The doctor was more successful than the violinist but somehow Zina came to my attention again and after making two recordings with her on Stradivari Classics, I decided to engage her for the Barber Concerto.

We met in Los Angeles Airport and in the course of small talk, she mentioned that her violin was in the shop: she had played a festival high in the mountains and the altitude damaged her very fine instrument. No worries though; she had borrowed 'something' from a student. A nagging fear gnawed at my barely conscious thoughts during the long flight in the confines of economy class to New Zealand. Her suitcases were lost by Air New Zealand, an omen I should have taken to heart.

Always the optimist, I greeted orchestra members like old friends. I imagine many of them had less gracious thoughts: Another two weeks trying to both learn and record repertoire none of them had seen. A few were openly encouraging perhaps having heard the results of the previous year's efforts or with a quixotic streak similar to mine. I then stopped by the orchestra's offices intending to plan the all important weekend trip with the orchestra's travel manager Rex. We discussed various routes and possibilities over a large detailed map of the famed South Island, glimmering that day like a siren across the waters of Cook Straight. A flight was arranged to Timaru, a little town on the eastern coast which would put us in striking distance of Mt Cook, our first important destination. Rex cautioned me over a road that he said I should avoid at all costs even though it appeared a straight shot over the mountains on the route home. I took his warning lightly and began to prepare for the first recording session.

A quick review of the scores reminded me that the first two pieces planned, the Fadograf and Third Essay, exposed the band's weakest elements. Though the timpanist of the previous sessions - see Chapter 1 - had departed to pursue other objectives in life, his replacement was a very young man with virtually no experience. The Third Essay begins with a long and dramatic timpani solo. Fadograf begins with an oboe solo. The then principal oboist, unlike the timpani player, had long experience, perhaps too long, and was past his best days. By chance, I ran into him outside a books hop on Willis Street shortly after I arrived and he mentioned he had just returned from holiday feeling rather rested and musically fit. I kept my fingers crossed. I was relieved to learn that the very fine principal horn, Ed Allen, excellent leader of the bass section, Dale Gold, and flutist Alexa Still were all in health and planning to attend the recording sessions. One of the problems I encountered in over forty trips to New Zealand was that while the orchestra with all the principal players on the official roster present and in health was very fine, an illness or holiday by a key player could hold potential disaster. I've done many sessions in London where Terry, the amiable personnel manager of the London Symphony Orchestra, has mentioned the absence of a key player minutes before the call, only to tell me that some famed soloist happened to be available to fill the vacant seat. No similar pool of players exists in New Zealand. Years later, a much improved New Zealand Symphony, strengthened by several very sound appointments, was leaving for lunch when Murray Alford, the artistic manager who always reminded me of an imaginary functionary from a long defunct colonial office, glided in to announce "The second clarinet player has gone home ill. I'll leave it to you then" and glided out the door to his meal. We were fortunate that a member of the orchestra enjoying a solitary sandwich in the studio had the telephone number of the retired principal clarinet player, a nice fellow who lived just up the hill and might be willing to help out in a pinch.

The sessions began well though my joy was short lived. Our rested principal oboe played the three or four best phrases I ever heard from him and then fell back into his more usual routine. The english horn player, an Italian New Zealander just short of retirement, played with a will that was significantly prettier than his sound. (He had been 'remaindered' into the NZSO when the old opera orchestra went belly-up years before.) We finished the Fadograf later than planned, my score full of scribbled notes and decorated with about a thousand post-it notes of things that could be improved providing there was a bit of extra time at the end. We were running seriously late however and time management is an essential part of the record production trade. The Third Essay began and we got further behind schedule trying to coax the timpani player into a bit of confidence and a few of the right notes and rhythms. Very late now and time to start the Violin Concerto. From her very first note, I knew something was wrong. Zina's sound was recognizable but only just. She was struggling with the borrowed instrument. The orchestra picked up on her distress and took part in it, some too eagerly. The session ended with very little result and Andrew and I raced for the airport discussing strategies to make up lost time in the remaining sessions. We considered dropping the Concerto. I felt terribly guilty: I had roped poor Andrew into my travel scheme. While he feigned enthusiasm, I imagine he would have preferred long hours studying his scores.

We were the only passengers on the short flight to Timaru. (I always loved the juxtaposition of English and Maori place names on New Zealand's map with Greymouth just up the coast from Hokitika.) Andrew, always proper, checked his large suitcase. A very frequent traveller and usually in a hurry, I carried only a small weekend bag on board. They lost Andrew's bag - the only piece of checked luggage on our flight. Anxious to get on the road with an eye towards making significant progress before dark, I suggested that Andrew file a quick lost luggage report and deal with it when we returned to Wellington. I glanced around and saw an attractive woman holding an Avis sign and beckoned to Andrew. A few misguided efforts to drive on the correct side of the road notwithstanding, we swiftly left the environs of Timaru. Our conversation focused on the ill-fated recording but I began to reveal the extent of my plans for the weekend: Andrew was always the complete gentleman. He showed no surprise when I outlined a tour taking us from Timaru to Mt Cook, south to Queenstown and then - ignoring the advice we were earnestly given - across the Crown Range to the west coast passing the glaciers Fox and Franz Joseph somehow ending up Sunday evening on the northern tip of the South Island in time to catch some conveyance, commuter plane or ferry back to Wellington. Of course I had scientifically planned everything with absolutely no cushion for car failure, road or mountain pass closure or weather delays. I also, I confess, told a deliberate untruth: that the South Island had no speed limit.

Talk of our pressing problem with the recording faded as the landscape immediately outside of Timaru became idyllic, pastoral and delightfully uncrowded. The secret of New Zealand, according to Peter Nisbet, was that it is mainly uninhabited. Much of the population is clustered in a few cities with a full million of New Zealand's three in the far northern city of Auckland. It is entirely scenic, nature crowding in on the towns rather than being contained in conveniently accessible parks. Paradise. Darkness began to fall and the lights of dwellings became fewer, dwindling to none. We were making for Twizell, a small town and the gateway to Mt Cook. It's existence had to do with providing a home for workers building the power lines. We both found the town's name enormously silly for no good reason and began to sing songs about Twizell, dear Twizell that I cannot remember. Twizell fortunately had a hotel, full of Japanese tourists, but with two rooms to spare for weary travellers. There was literally nothing to do outside visit the hotel pub and join the lads in a few rounds of Lion Brown - "Measure of a Man's Thirst." We did. The weather was gloriously clear next morning as we set out for Mt Cook or Aorangi, the Cloud Piercer of the Maori. Many New Zealanders I know claim never to have seen the mountain as it is perpetually hidden in cloud. We were rewarded with a glorious view from afar which became more and impressive as we neared the mountain. I'm happy that it was miraculously clear when I revisited Mt Cook on my honeymoon and once again when Tammy and I did another madcap drive years later through the South Island lured by the promise of clear skies.

This time, Andrew and I were on a tight schedule, and our visit was brief though the mountain was impressive and moving in its solitary dignity. A sole parrot perched on the rental car reminded us we were in the South Pacific. As we left Mount Cook, the skies darkened and sadly the rest of the trip consisted of high speed driving in the pouring rain. Not entirely. We drove across the wonderfully bleak Mackenzie Country, a sort of badlands that could easily be confused with the set for an American western. I turned on the radio looking for a bit of musical companionship to find the FM band devoid of content. No one lived here and I suppose there was no need for entertainment on the radio. We reached Queenstown, Victorian and charming, with a range of snow bound mountains - the Remarkables - defining the distant horizon. A city tolerated by nature with indistinct boundaries and not nature, confined and fenced, shamed into bounded park. Feeling somehow ennobled by the distant peaks and the fjord reaching out to them, I decided to turn up the path leading to the road crossing the Crown Range. There was no more direct way to the west coast and time was still a concern. The rain had stopped, the gate was open indicating that the mountain was passable and as I pointed out to Andrew, it was a direct line - the only one to the west coast and we had to be back early this evening. No speed limit, remember. As we climbed over what was not better than a dirt track at times, despite signs cautioning us to reduce speed to 80 km/hr, we plodded along passing ghost towns from New Zealand's gold rush. Coming into a town called Cardrona, I remember checking my guide book which advised us to stop in for a lovely lunch. The inn in question appeared to have been closed for at least a century and we carried on, Andrew starting to become somewhat concerned. We passed a couple with a young baby nursing a dilapidated and disabled vehicle into some semblance of life. I stopped and asked if we could provide assistance. Not necessary, they cheerfully called back despite my warning that we hadn't seen a single other vehicle since turning our car on to this blighted highway. They waved us on cheerily and we left, reluctantly, both admiring their fortitude and wondering if they were totally sane. (Years later, I was driving through the Canadian Rockies only days after the road had re-opened following winter hoping to hike on the Athabascan Glacier. Shortly after passing the recently opened gates, I saw a hiker walking down the road with a small day pack on his back. As he heard the sound of my engine, he put out his thumb for a lift, with none of the urgency one often encounters. I stopped, remembering the Crown Range couple, and asked where he was going. "North." Obviously. I told him I was only going as far as the glacier area and he seemed content to travel in relative comfort that far. We drove in silence for over an hour passing a single other car in either direction. When I reached the glacier, I stopped the car apologising that I wasn't driving further and expressing my concern that I didn't think he was likely to find another ride. It was already cold and would soon be dark. He thanked me and walked off down the highway.) Back in New Zealand, sections of sealed highway began to appear, reverting to dirt too soon to fulfil their promise of speed and an end to this scenic destroyer of my plans. We eventually reached the west coast, renowned for its spectacular scenery and intense, perpetual rains.

My guide book was not particularly helpful as we began to look for a place to retire on Saturday night. It did mention the little town of Haast, a village of white bait fishermen and possessor of a bankrupt hotel which remained open more out of necessity than the government's generosity. We stopped, booked two nondescript rooms enjoying the lilting Irish accent of the receptionist. The hotel had two slot machines which I experimented with, winning about twenty NZ dollars, an an omen of how my luck was to continue that evening. There was an ancient ping pong table and Andrew and I immediately began to play, telling the curious few we were a touring table tennis team from the United States. As evening fell, the hotel - focal point for community social life - began to fill with locals. That evening, the mens' club was holding a charitable "horse race" with toy horses proceeding on a course determined by a roll of the dice. Andrew and I eagerly joined in betting somewhat extravagantly. To to my great surprise, I was the major winner of the evening proceeds and embarrassedly handed over my winnings to the local charity. I began to chat up a pleasant woman named Hillary, an Englishwoman married to the town's sole policeman. It probably wouldn't have been a wise policy but he was abroad for a considerable time on a course dealing with rescuing unfortunates lost in the mountains. We began a very pleasant conversation with nothing more in mind till Andrew, mindful of my virtue, reminded me we had an early start next morning. Hillary and I corresponded a few times over the next year. My first letter was addressed to Hillary (Policeman's wife), Haast, New Zealand.

We continued North next morning along the impressively wild Tasman coast. Rain poured down without pause giving us little opportunity to enjoy the sight of glaciers, mountains, or anything else. We did stop to refuel the car where the taciturn man behind the counter observed that perhaps I was the stranger who was chatting with the policeman's wife the previous evening. We quickly turned north again, me catching a short look of disapproval from Andrew which quickly turned into a grin.

Despite the ceaseless rain, I fancied that I wanted to return to this coast with few towns. Even the occasional hints of mountain scenery were intoxicating. We reached Hokitika in the late afternoon and the weather being what it was headed directly to the airfield to see if there was anything heading across the Straits. No scheduled flights to Wellington and the fog had shut down Christ Church. New Zealand, like Alaska, is fortunately a land of pilots. There was a light on at the flying club's office and a very down to earth fellow said he would be happy to fly us to Wellington in his single engine Cessna. Heaven. I love small planes and would later take a few lessons with one of the NZSO's cellists who had a passion for flight. Andrew, an avid sailor with a passing interest in aviation, was simply happy that we would reach Wellington in an hour.

The skies were clearer in Wellington and the recording sessions finished with no particular noteworthy events. We recorded the Concerto and later made the decision, sadly, not to release it. I was never happy with these recordings: the mastering work I did only made the now happily gone Willis Street acoustics even muddier. Andrew and I made many more recordings but he only enters this story again once. If I had to select the best of our recordings, I would choose the the Appalachian Spring ballet recorded complete in its original chamber orchestra version. Two sessions with a wonderful group of New York freelancers and for me, very satisfying results. My only other recording experience with Zina, this time in Israel, had similar results though not her fault.

A PROLONGED NEGOTIATION

How to start a record label

When not travelling to exotic locales, the busy record executive whether his company be large or small receives hundreds of submissions each week. They pile up on desks, tables, and the floor until one's normally tolerant assistant gently suggests that either we go through them or throw them out. I've always been fascinated by the unsolicited tape and agree to listen. Learning how to prepare and submit a tape is crucially important for a young artist without significant financial backing or powerful friends. Letters that begin "As you are undoubtedly aware, I am the world's greatest artist" tend not to be helpful. Tapes made by grandmother in the back of the hall on her portable cassette machine are usually jettisoned after a few seconds. Someone once sent me a tape at Deutsche Grammophon accompanied by a letter apologizing that he didn't have any means of performing his symphony, so I would hopefully enjoy hearing him hum the work. Thirty minutes. This was likely a joke but you never know.

When a tape of excerpts from a ready to go master tape by the San Diego Chamber Orchestra with interesting and not too commonly recorded Russian literature appeared on my desk. I asked my assistant to give it a careful listen. Her immediate response was positive and suggested I call them. I listened and agreed. Their conductor passed my along to the orchestra's manager Tamra Saylor. I called and called again every day for about six months. There is a long and storied history of love at first sight. The telephone brings its own rewards. We had a mutual friend who both encouraged and discouraged us. After I had exhausted every possible reason to call further, I announced that it was important for me to come to San Diego to meet her, the conductor, board and anyone else she could think of to finalize the details. I remember walking around JFK in something approaching a trance and almost missing my Pan Am flight to the coast.

I'm not sure anything particularly magical happened at our first meeting, cordial and businesslike, at San Diego's Lindburgh Field, but we found ourselves staring deeply into each other's eyes during a longish car ride while the conductor babbled away. My main concern was how to arrange another meeting and quickly. Fortunately, there were still contractual details to be mulled over and re-explained: I thought some sort of promotional event in California might provide the right opportunity to discuss them in detail and in person.

Tammy had asked me how we ever got any records made if it took so long to complete a simple contract for an existing master tape. Her case was of course different but the question remains: When Michael Koch and I first began to sketch plans for the label on a paper table cloth at New York's Trattoria del Arte, I realized quickly that the only hope for a new classical record label with a limited budget and artists who were not household names was to build a large catalogue quickly. This would allow for income to be generated and most importantly allow in a few short years for compilations and repackaging of existing catalogue - The Best of Obscure American Classical Music performed by Unknown Artists - that provide cash flow for new recordings. I went home that evening prepared to create a business plan calling for sixty new releases per year. As the sole employee of the nascent label, I would have to make almost all the recordings: organize, produce, engineer, and edit. Of course, we could license the odd tape or purchase an existing master but I made the decision that at least ninety percent of our releases would be home-grown. I also decided that we would not be an audiophile label: this came from my personal doubts about my engineering credentials. And yes, Michael agreed with me that we would pursue a very specific niche - American music performed by young artists.

The practical result of this heady conversation was a life-style consisting of three weeks of non-stop recordings followed by an overnight flight to Munich and a long, scenic drive to Elbigenalp, the Tyrolean headquarters of Koch, where I could spend about twenty hours a day for one week editing the crop of recently made recordings. Each finished tape was then walked by me to the nearly adjacent factory to be pressed into compact discs. (I used to fax Tammy daily; she told me they became less coherent as the week wore on. She was right: she had saved a number of the faxes.) There was no opportunity for such niceties as artist review and approval. I was barely functional after a week spent in the basement studio and am still amazed that no disasters ensued. Although I had edited Arias and Barcarolles in the luxurious and nearby Master Sound, the budget for all future releases could not allow for similar largesse. It was cheaper for me to fly to Austria, stay at the company's guest flat, and work around the clock.

ELBIGENALP

Don't pretend you've been there!

Despite being located in one of the world's beauty spots, my first few trips were spent entirely on the job. One reached this isolated part of the Tirol by driving through some of Bavaria's loveliest scenery including the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain. Cross the border into Austria and the scenery becomes enchanted. Even though I faced a gruelling schedule, I always cheered up when the road from Reutte turned down the Lech Valley, with towering mountains on either side of the road. Elbigenalp straddled both sides of the highway with the KOCH facility and church on one side, pubs, guest houses and residences on the other. Our long drives now from Hamburg to Italy and Salzburg in the summer become pleasant when we cross the first set of mountains and enter the Tirol. I begin to wax rhapsodic and nostalgic as we near Reutte and the Fernpass.

One of my first trips to Elbigenalp involved editing the Barber-Menotti project and as I was already in Europe, I planned a few other stops mainly of a business nature. I had been in contact with the very fine Bratislava Orchestra and Chorus and was curious to visit Czechoslovakia now that it was beginning to break loose from the Soviet bloc. A stop in Vienna, not far from Bratislava, was not entirely necessary but I always enjoyed the city finding it a more persuasive version of the German speaking lands than that offered in Berlin. One of the KOCH staff kindly drove me to Munich where I arrived in time to take a second class "liegwagen" overnight to Vienna. The "liegwagon" consists of a number of bunks where one could stretch out under a blanket. In the company of strangers, no one undressed and this being pre-Schengen Accords, there was the pre-dawn wake up call for passports. Michael Koch was aghast that one of his executives travelled this way (although was very unhappy that I stayed at the famed and expensive Sacher Hotel!) Later trips to Vienna were more interesting and this one doesn't deserve mention save for a quick drive to Ljubljana to see Dubravka Tomsic, the marvellous Slovenian pianist, and two unmemorable evenings at the Staatsoper. My Bratislava contact, a young man from the Ministry of Culture, rang and we agreed to meet at the Czech Embassy to arrange my visa.

The winds of change had not cooled the bureaucratic ardour of the Embassy officials. Hours later, I had the necessary stamps and we drove across the border. I booked a hotel as well, as I realized this was now an overnight trip. I planned to pick up a couple of necessaries in Bratislava. As we approached the frontier, the most extraordinary sight greeted us as thousands of Czechs, a day after the successful conclusion of the Velvet Revolution, were lined up in antique vehicles, bicycles, and on foot to cross the border into Austria. On the Austrian side, the streets were full of Czechs staring into shop windows full of merchandise and decorated for Christmas. Our crossing took some time, Communism and suspicion still to be had from the border guards.

As we drove to my hotel, I offered to let my host, his wife and baby stay in the relative luxury of the hotel while I could camp at his flat. He was concerned that the police might object as the hotel was for foreigners. I stopped at a special "dollar" shop which dealt in a peculiar scrip then common in the east - local versions of the US dollar - and bought the only pair of mens' briefs to be had. I'd worked a lot in the east and knew what to expect from the hotel's restaurant - a large menu and very little food. No matter, my first meeting was early at the Bratislava Orchestra's offices.

One was immediately struck by the number of nails in the wall designed to hold pictures that were now free of their burden: photographic portraits of the last Communist president of the Republic, Gustav Husak. I was surprised when I entered the office of the courtly man behind the desk who managed the orchestra as Husak was still in place. Oversight or an unwise gesture. Near me sat the musician's representative, the principal violist. He caught my eye leading it with a facial gesture that was unmistakable to the benign portrait of the now ex-leader: don't waste your time speaking with the man sitting in front of the portrait. He is a Communist. He will be quickly replaced. Our meeting finished with mutual statements of our earnest desire to work together in the future. We never did.
At lunch, my host confirmed my understanding of the violist's gesture. As we chatted, he asked where my next trip would take me. I told him Israel, to visit family. He was shocked: me, the executive of an Austrian company, a Jew? He then covered the potential faux-pas of his reaction by assuring me, saying it was well known that a group of seven Jews ran Czechoslovakia from a coffee bar in prague holding their furtive (yet commonly known) meetings on Saturday mornings.

The only other time I had a similar experience was waiting on a long, dismal queue for a flight re booking after my regular TWA flight from Munich was cancelled. We had several unrewarding hours on the hot aircraft waiting to see if the plan could be repaired or replaced and were then sent back to the gate where we were told a large staff of airline representatives would sort out our flights. Two such representatives, no happier than we, began the laborious process of listening to each passenger's tale of woe and why he simply had to be re booked on whatever else was heading across the Atlantic: a wedding, a funeral, the business deal of the century. The woman waiting behind me, a Czech film maker, commented that I would undoubtedly be put on a flight. Why me, I queried. You're a Jew aren't you, she responded. And? She went on to inform me that Jews always got ahead in life and that she wished she had been born Jewish. Judging by her age and knowing her country of origin, I doubt she would have been around to chat with me had her wish been realized.

Tammy and I got married in California on November 7, 1992 after adventures from Chicago Phoenix to Oregon to Moscow. We celebrated our wedding on the beach in Del Mar and left immediately for New Zealand for a combination recording trip honeymoon. The conductor this time was James Sedares making the first of many acclaimed recordings with the New Zealand Symphony. Andrew Schenck died before his fiftieth birthday of a particularly rare cancer a year earlier. With an irony that was typical of Andrew's life, he learned of his illness a day before he was due to conduct and record with the Chicago Symphony - the biggest break of his career. The recording - Samuel Barber's The Lovers - was his most celebrated and won numerous awards. I will always be haunted by the fact that it could have been better. Andrew, understandably, was somewhat preoccupied and his music making reflected the knowledge of his immediate mortality. Four months later, he would be dead.

She Accepts You

A Cultural Night Out

Tammy and I had the good fortune to travel the world making recordings, some better than others, but always interesting. Most were for the Koch label and many are recordings I still listen to with a great deal of affection. Most are by artists not well known but no less talented than those on the world circuit: pianist Gustavo Romero recorded what is still my very favorite piano disc - a Mompou recital that never fails to satisfy me. We also were hired privately to produce recordings, often by young musicians looking for an audio calling card. Some of these were extraordinary. More lucrative, often frustrating and usually challenging were the "vanity" artists - usually conductors - who hired good orchestras and required a fair degree of production and editing to make an acceptable product. There was the classic case - not my recording - of the poor sod with plenty of money and no talent waving his arms with little effect in front of one of London's better orchestras. Normally, these musicians can play anything if this sort of conductor doesn't get in the way. Unfortunately, they stumbled on a particular passage requiring a bit of help from the podium which was beyond his gentleman's ability to provide provide. The orchestra's leader, a model of suave courtesy, suggested that the putative Maestro listen to the previous take in the booth. He thought it was acceptable. When Maestro arrived in the booth, the orchestra played it through without him under the expert direction of the leader from the first violin stand. The Maestro thought he was listening to the previous take and left the booth satisfied that he had pulled it off! I was always astonished when these recordings were acclaimed by the critics who couldn't be bothered with work by truly great conductors. Couldn't they hear that there was no real interpretation happening; that there was no one on duty at the podium? Of course, the producer's job is to create a performance at the last resort but a good listener should be able to hear what is really going on. I prefer a good review of a good recording and understand a bad review of a good recording that is just not to a particular critic's taste. I simply cannot abide a good review of a bad recording. We producers need well informed critics as well as the artists.

Our usual circuit of recordings took us to New Zealand, with good luck two to three times a year including occasional stopovers in Tahiti or Fiji, Monte Carlo where work with James De Preist became a regular summer stop, London with a variety of conductors and usually the London Symphony Orchestra, to cities all over the USA. Seoul became part of our annual peregrinations through our strangest recording experience ever. As all of the participants still live, I'll have to save that story for a subsequent volume, but we were invited back by a subsidiary of Samsung to record three discs with the KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) Symphony for a local label.

I had been prompted by the Koch export manager that the local distributor would invite me out to a very special meal, boys only, he emphasized! I warned Tammy who gallantly encouraged me to accept should the invitation be proffered but "try to be back at the hotel at a reasonable hour." The invitation was made and I told the gentleman that I had to be back by eleven in order to prepare for the next day's sessions.

We fought Seoul's horrendous traffic to a tiny but elegant restaurant where we were greeted on the street by a group of at least twenty boys who rushed to attention, then took the car away while we were ushered into a waiting lounge by a woman in traditional Korean dress. She introduced us to a group of lovely young ladies, also traditionally attired, two of whom, I was told, would serve us. I let my host chose: Miss Kim and Miss Chu, the latter being appointed to look after my needs. Food and drink flowed liberally. Following the local custom, I poured for Miss Chu while she poured for me. We downed five small bottles of Scotch whiskey which managed to make up for the lack of conversation as my Korean was limited to about five phrases. She massaged my back and legs working her way provocatively up to my upper thighs as I drank, ate, and chatted with our Korean rep. Very pleasant evening. Miss Chu would take food in her chopsticks and feed me, being careful to hold her hand under the implements lest something drop. A couple of hours and about seventeen courses later, my host noted "She accepts you." I replied courteously, "That's very nice. Please tell her I accept her too." No, no, he demurred, this time more emphatic: "She accepts you." Yes, Yes, please tell her I accept her as well and it's been lovely spending an evening in her charming company. This time the meaning was unavoidably clear: "She accepts you. Take her back to your hotel. It's on me." The light dawned even in my semi-inebriated state: "Please thank her. My wife is in the hotel room." I was being illogical: he was married too, so take her to a different hotel. "Thanks awfully," I replied, "but I've got to get going. The sessions tomorrow, remember?" The chief geisha, for that is of course what these lovely ladies were, came out to insure that poor Miss Chu had somehow not offended. I protested that she was perfectly delightful and hoped my refusal would not reflect badly on her. The bill was over two thousand dollars. We left hurriedly. I arrived in my room at the stroke of eleven, spinning on my heels in a less than debonair way and fell on the bed giggling to tell Tammy all about it. My only fear was that our Korean distributor would visit New York and that I would be expected to reciprocate. I somehow couldn't imagine Michael Koch reimbursing a two thousand dollar geisha dinner.

All wasn't Scotch and roses. My dental bridge, the result of a rough and tumble game of hide and seek in the second grade, became dislodged and infected. An emergency call to our dentist in New York provided a helpful solution: "get penicillin. It might be available over the counter." Tammy created a prescription on a Seoul Garden Hotel telephone message pad and we looked for the green cross indicating a pharmacy. Doctor? the woman behind the counter inquired. We shook our heads no and before we could do the same for her next question: US military, she looked at our passports, filled the prescription and filed our paper along with the days' legitimate prescriptions. I once again felt guilty that I may have inadvertently caused problems for an innocent Korean employee.

On the musical side, we had learned from our first experience in Korea that their culture only permitted a negative answer in the most dire of circumstances. We had faxed the KBS with a long list of the equipment we required to make a recording, indicating we would bring whatever they could not provide. The answer they returned was a soothing "Pleased to provide everything according to your list." When we arrived in Korea, we were met by our smiling host who had not managed to provide a single item on our long list. We began a sad litany - Eight microphone stands - "Sorry, can not provide"; two professional DAT recorders - "Sorry, could not provide." The answer never became reassuring despite its frequent repetition.

No room in my bus for you

The lure of sponsored recordings to exotic locales occasionally clouded my judgement and I accepted an offer by a moderately well-known pianist to make a pair of recordings in Moscow. She had been married to a very prominent conductor and this perhaps clouded her judgement as well. We invited an old friend to conduct and arranged sessions in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory during the evening hours of 10 PM - 2 AM. Tammy was delighted as this would give us plenty of time to tour Moscow and even some of the surrounding areas by day. Our conductor spent some time working with the pianist beforehand and returned with a not entirely favorable report. Plans were meanwhile progressing and I have always had an inordinate faith that the recording medium could create something out of nothing, if necessary. I rang the pianist asking where she would be staying and her curt reply "Nowhere you could possibly afford" did little to warm the atmosphere. No matter, Tammy and I booked a hotel very close to Red Square and began preparing for our trip. This was in September 1992 when the barriers had fallen and there was still something approaching hope for the new reforms that would lead to a market economy. Despite this, we packed snacks as my previous experiences in Communist and recently post-Communist countries often included restaurants with nothing available that evening.

Rehearsals took place not at the Conservatory which was otherwise occupied during the day but in the Philharmonic Hall. The local facilitator we hired to walk us through the tortuous beauracracies told us we would be stopped at the door but to simply enter and continue walking, ignoring the abuse that would be hurled at us by the doorkeeper. We followed his advice to the letter and once we had got not more than a hundred feet from the entrance, the guard stopped her stream of what I can only imagine to have been invectives. We had apparently left her area of responsibility and she took no more interest in us. The rehearsal was going well and while I wasn't thrilled with the pianist either technically or interpretively, she was certainly prepared and I thought perhaps the magic of the recording session would provide a dose of inspiration.

We found out soon after our arrival that our pianist had hired a film crew to document her activities. She felt that the world was waiting for a film of her first recordings in Moscow during this significant time. I shrugged it off with the caveat that the orchestra must be informed: most require additional moneys, some do not allow filming excepting a few minutes for promotional purposes. I expressed an additional concern regarding the noise cameras and people moving about with cameras make. She shrugged off my concerns.

The sessions began with little of note. A complete take of a movement. Listening in the booth, comments. Then the detailed work on the problem sections. The conductor informed the pianist that she was dropping a bar of music in each retake. Where, she angrily demanded. He courteously noted the missing bar. Denials and accusations: it was the conductor and orchestra who were dropping the bar. The tactful producer invited the parties to the booth for a quick listen and confirmation that the pianist indeed was skipping a bar. We carried on fixing, correcting, and generally improving things till the session came to its end at 2 AM. Tammy and I waited for a while thinking that the pianist would like to hear the last sets of takes to prepare herself for the next sessions. After twenty minutes, Tammy walked down to the stage to find our star admiring herself in the rushes of the video team's work. We noted that we could only stay for a short while and that if she wanted to listen, she had better come to the booth soon as we weren't sure that the walk back to our hotel at three in the morning was entirely safe. Or, perhaps she could give us a lift. We knew she had engaged a car and driver. She announced, with no small irritation, that she would come and listen but sadly she had no room in her vehicle for us. After she heard the last takes, her only comment was she would prefer us to make her louder. We walked down the stairs into the dark Moscow night to discover she had a large bus waiting for her and her crew of three. She managed to squeeze us in.

The next night, we discovered that quite a few members of the orchestra were camping out in the hall as the sessions finished an hour after the Moscow underground stopped. I spoke with the orchestra and they agreed to work with only one brief break if we finished each evening by 12:30 AM. The pianist reluctantly agreed - she was paying for the services of musicians but I suggested that we might get better results from players who had a night's sleep in their own beds. The session commenced and as we approached our new quitting time, I gently reminded the pianist. She responded in Hebrew, a language familiar to the two of us, but she assumed to no one else in the building: "They must continue, they are rising to my great level of artistry." A murmur from the orchestra that seemed, to me at least, to imply an understanding of the conversation. I left the booth and quickly trotted to the stage to beg the musicians indulgence, calling a short break. As I reached the stage door, a couple of the players, with big smiles, greeted me in very acceptable Hebrew. They understood.

We began again and I asked the orchestra to start two bars before letter b, saying in Russian, dva do "b." When several players said they couldn't hear my instruction, I repeated it using a word to make my "b" clearer: "Dva do blatt." Wild applause and shuffling of feet broke out from the orchestra: I had said "two before the whore." During this demonstration of, shall we call it affection, our beaming pianist announced to me, in Hebrew, "You see, they love me." How much she never knew. (Her biography, published in the recording noted that she was not only a great pianist, but also a great humanitarian!) The recording was issued to desultory reviews, one in particular though caught my fancy though imperfectly remembered: the proceedings had all the enforced gaiety of an alcohol-free party. More or less a quote and jolly accurate.

Aside from the relatively unpleasant recording sessions, Tammy and I toured Moscow and the cathedral city of Zagorsk. We shopped the open air markets buying a lovely rug direct from Degastan: our entire negotiation consisted of typing in numbers in a pocket calculator to have the counter offer typed in by the seller. We danced on my birthday to a Russian band playing 1970s pop music at a night club on the river where the fantastic spread of goodies from champagne to mountains of caviar was graced by a bottle of Coca-Cola given place of honour at each setting. A gypsy leading a bear waited outside for photographs.

The river comes into our last Moscow story. It was our final evening in the city and we had read about boats that carried passengers from dock to dock throughout the river's passage through Moscow. We waited at the Red Square dock in the early evening and as the boat pulled in, I shouted the word, Skolka. How much. The answer, usually pyat dollar ($5), was quite a bit lower, about one dollar per passenger. We settled in to watch the river and its associated scenery roll by. It rolled by for over an hour and we were off the map included in our handy guide book. Tammy joked about ending up in Finland when the boat finally pulled alongside a dock deep in the forest, we knew not where. Last stop, everybody off, and we were left by ourselves on the deserted pier. There was nothing - not a phone booth, store with helpful merchant, taxi stand - nothing. Thinking about our very early flight and chastising ourselves for being foolish enough to have decided on a boat expedition, our spirits rose when after about half an hour, a dilapidated old tugboat appeared heading down the river towards Moscow proper. We shouted, hailing the boat, waving our arms like lunatics. Fortunately, the boat heeded our cry of distress and pulled in. "Krasnayu Plochad?" - Red Square, I queried. Sure, why not. How much? There was a quick conference between the two sailors running the vessel: they cagily eyed us and demanded the princely sum of 200 rubles. We were fresh out of Russian currency. Would they accept our best offer of two US dollars - one apiece and at that time more than double the 200 rubles they were asking. They were delighted, so much so that they kissed the pair of crisp greenbacks while executing what must have been the Russian version of the sailor's hornpipe. How they even purchased petrol at those rates of carriage eluded me but we were happy to be heading back to the snug safety of our hotel. As we arrived, there was a large demonstration by members of the Communist Party, somehow ominous in an environment where everyone seemed to be shedding every possible vestige of the old regime. Complete uniforms with medals of Marshall of the Soviet Union were available in street markets along with framed oils of Stalin chatting with children in the snows outside the Kremlin. At the airport, we watched the humiliating spectacle of an old man, wearing his medals from World War II, having his silverware confiscated by the border authorities. He was emigrating to the United States, Philadelphia I recall.

I never went back to Russia but end this chapter at a very posh dinner in Paris where I was seated next to the Governor of the Bank of Moscow. Being left-handed, I often make the unfortunate mistake of taking the drink to my immediate left. In this case, it belonged to this very distinguished Russian banker. He nodded sagely and noted, "You must be an admirer of our former foreign minister, Mr Gromyko." When I protested ignorance, he quoted the famed diplomat: "What is ours is ours. What is yours is open to negotiation."

Travels with my microphones

You should not think that we traveled with crews of technicians carrying our gear and setting up our equipment. With the exception of those recordings made in well-equipped facilities such as Master Sound and Abbey Road, Tammy and I generally carried all the necessary gear ourselves - microphones, cables, mixing desk - fortunately a superb and very portable one made by the Swiss company Sonosax - and the heavy shipping crates with recording machines and various special effects black boxes. The microphones were always traveled as hand luggage. This made us popular with airline crews and fellow passengers as we tried to be first on board and used up a great part of the overhead luggage space. Fragile and expensive, our complete microphone kit fit into a large camera bag. Tammy, an expert packer, found the one way that all the various microphones could be placed into this bulging bag. It always aroused the suspicions of airport security personnel and required time-consuming explanations as the bag passed through the X-ray machine. I once did my best imitation of a pop-star wailing into a microphone for a security person of singularly low intelligence who had never heard of nor seen a microphone. A security guard in Baltimore asked me to take a particularly fine microphone apart to see if I was using it to carry drugs. On another occasion, I thoughtlessly, and in earshot of a vigilant airport employee, asked Tammy if our "snake" was in a particular duffel bag. The simple explanation, that our snake was a special cable with multiple connectors, didn't satisfy this particular gentleman who despite the crates of recording equipment was convinced we were travelling with an illegal and dangerous reptile.

Not only security personnel found our equipment interesting. After over thirty trips to New Zealand without a murmur of interest at the Immigration and Customs counters, a vigilant employee of Her Majesty's Customs confiscated all our gear. She was sweet, earnest and implacable, warning us that if we sold the gear in New Zealand, it would have an adverse effect on the islands' economy. Despite having just endured a twelve hour flight in the Economy Dungeon, we were polite explaining that we carried the equipment to use and not to sell and that an examination of our passports would prove that we were regular visitors to New Zealand. This comment was probably a mistake as it strengthened her opinion that we were regulars traffickers in smuggled recording gear. Despite the early hour, I began calling friends in the orchestra and managed to catch the Chief Executive and the Chairman both at their breakfast in an Aukland hotel. (The orchestra was fortunately on tour in that city.) They must have detected a note of panic in my usually measured tones as they promised to come to the airport immediately and rescue us. By the time they arrived, I had already written and signed a statement that bound me to taking our equipment with us when we left New Zealand. Fortunately, our case had been turned over to a more senior officer who believed our strange tale that we came to New Zealand to record their national orchestra. After this trip, we purchased in international carnet that provided more-or-less smooth sailing through customs ever after.

Beyond the customs and security checkpoints, one still had to be vigiliant when traveling with expensive and highly portable gear. We had disembarked from the airport shuttle bus in Phoenix, Arizona and as we stood on the curb surrounded by crates realized the the microphone bag was not in sight. To my quizzical look, Tammy simply pointed at the departing bus. I learned that day that I had some potential as an Olympic sprinter when I ran off in hot pursuit, catching the bus at a fortunate red light a kilometre away.

These trips by air even in the confines of coach class were luxurious compared with local outings where I loaded and drove the ancient pick-up truck that KOCH has purchased. This vehicle, somehow always in poor repair, without air-condtioning, or even a functional radio, was used for the long drives to "nearby" venues such as Boston (four hours away) or Washington (six to seven hours distant.) It could not be properly locked giving me an uneasy feeling about our equipment if I dared stop along the way. Perhaps it was too shabby to excite any potential thieves' attentions. Shabby enough to make me look suspicious to the law: we were loading the truck late one evening after a recording session on a college campus. As I was about to heft a large recording machine into the truck, I found myself staring into two powerful torches wielded by two police officers convinced that I was making off with the school's property. The man responsible for renting the college facility was playing second bassoon in the New York City Ballet's production of the Nutcracker and would not be reachable for hours. We were able to get a message through to him somehow while I steamed and fumed.

I was working alone on that recording - Tammy rarely assisted on recordings that required use of the truck. Another solo effort became the last. Our superb portable mixing console had a battery pack that had never been used and hence ignored. I was near the end of a particularly difficult recording of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire when I heard a strange hissing noise. Fearful that we had a serious technical problem, I was about to call a break when I realized that 1) we were close to being out of time and under the American union rules, playing time and breaks are strictly regulated and 2) it was the mixer's battery leaking a green and unpleasant acid that was the source of the noise. As they played, I ran to the toilet for paper towels to mop up the mess, keeping an ear on the music as well. Back in under thirty seconds, I was horrified to discover that the powerful liquid was eating away at the score on my desk. I managed to dislodge the battery, clean-up the table and keep the session going only by vowing to myself that I would have an assistant on all future recordings.

Take Two

Producers tend to refer to "my recording of Beethoven's Eroica" forgetting the musicians on the other side of the glass as having something to do with the end result. Whether we like to admit it or not, the artist plays a rather important part though the extent of the producer's role varies from recording to recording. With an artist of the artistic calibre and unsurpassed professionalism of Anne-Sophie Mutter, the producer's role is to provide the best possible environment which allows her to do her finest work without hindrance. The interpretation is completely her own, the result of much thought and many performances. Yet even in her case, the producer serves as the ideal audience and a valuable second pair of ears.

I learned early on that much as we might want to, the producer cannot conduct the recording from the booth. (Neither should the conductor attempt to produce from the podium.) I used to produce numerous revenue-generating vanity recordings with the hopefully uncharacteristic hubristic belief that I could somehow make it work by directing from the booth and fix it all later in the edit. In the course of these recordings, never ultimately satisfying, I've had to show these putative maestri how to beat complex rhythmic patterns and even to identify wrong notes. We were recording a recently discovered work by a major composer with a conductor who sadly owned the score and would not let anyone else record the work. I had hired a fine London orchestra, usually capable of ignoring the least competant time beaters to turn in respectable results. At one telling moment, we discovered that a copyist's error had mistakenly placed the flute part a half-tone higher than the violins for what should have been a unison passage. I stopped the sessions telling the oblivious conductor that we needed to correct a part. During the brief moment while he made the inane comment "You'll get used to it; it's fine," the musicians sorted out the problem. They began again and he turned to me, noting aloud (and ruining the take) that there had been no mistake. In a fit of exasperation, the ever polite leader of the orchestra asked the maestro "What exactly is your usual profession." The critics loved the disc.

One of my first recordings for Koch was a disc of Ives' orchestral music conducted by James Sinclair, one of the leading Ives specialists and an expert on the complicated and confusing Ives musical texts. We had met only briefly prior to the recording at Yale. Early in the first session, I stopped Sinclair to make a balance suggestion and as he later told me, his unspoken thought was "Who the hell does this guy think he is telling me what to do?" He quickly realised that I was the fellow listening to the sound through the microphones, the balance that would be heard on the record, and that he had to trust me to make a good record.

In fact, the producer needs to be as authoritative in his understanding of the music as the artist. The artist must trust the producer's musical judgement and instincts if the record is to have a remote chance of success. This doesn't mean that the they have the same job. I learned early on that you cannot conduct or play from the booth while most of the artists I worked with knew that they shouldn't try and produce from the podium or keyboard. The producer also needs to respect the artist's interpretation even if he disagrees with it. His job is to help the artist achieve his ideal performance of the work.

The producer must trust the artist as well. The cost of studio time, not to mention musicians scale, means that all producers need to be excellent time managers. Most labels take a dim view of overtime, blaming the producer for not bringing the project in within budget. There have been many times when I have felt more than happy with the material on tape for a given piece and with an eye on the clock suggested to the artist that we move on. I learned that the plea for "one more take" usually was a sound decision by the artist who having "covered" all the problem spots was now about to give you the performance you had been waiting for.

My first recording with Christoph Eschenbach, a wonderful musician and superb pianist and conductor, was a disc of demanding Second Viennese School chamber music. The first work to be taped was the Berg ultra-romantic Sonata. Take one was flawless technically and interpretively all one could hope for. Silence from the booth. For once, I was speechless. After about half a minute, Christoph asked "So how was it?" We listened together in the booth talking through several spots and he proceeded to make two complete and equally beautiful, though different, takes of the Sonata. We then recorded small sections to have further choices. I told Christoph that I had enough material for at least three profoundly beautiful performances of the work. As I edited the piece, I had to make the most difficult decisions as all the material was good. I have had the same "problem" editing Gustavo Romero's recordings in which the unused material is as beautiful though subtly different from that ultimately used for the recording.

This is what I refer to as good editing. "Bad editing" is much easier though less satisfying: you have several takes of a section of music and the last one is a more or less correct rendition of the notes. With intensive editing, you can put together a performance and perhaps even an interpretation. The famous story of pianist and conductor listening to the final results after a particularly difficult set of sessions and endless hours of editing is probably true: Pianist: "It sounds wonderful!" Conductor: "Don't you wish you could play it like that?"

The early days of the period instrument movement were the golden days of editing paid for by the hour. Cumbersome instruments had yet to be mastered and some of the recordings were made quite literally bar-by-bar, stopping at each cracked horn note or for imprecise intonation and ensemble. The producer would then back the musicians up a couple of bars to cover the error and carry on, often not very far, to the next mistake. Those days are mainly past, as the extraordinary players who work regularly for Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt demonstrate in their live performances.

In general, the level of preparation for recordings is superb though there are those sessions where busy musicians simply haven't had the time to properly rehearse their material. They usually know what a good producer with good equipment can do but the results are never quite the same as great performance enhanced by good production. I have even worked with conductors who told the orchestra, "We'll let Michael fix that." While I don't mind, the great artists start at a very high level and through the process of recording and with good production take their performance to an even higher level. Some find the whole idea of editing offensive and even dishonest. I was giving a talk to a class at Juilliard describing the recording process when I could see that one of the students, a young singer, was very unhappy about my remarks. She objected to editing as a way of perpetuating performances that never really happened. I reminded her that all the actual notes on the record came from the artist but that we helped put some of them together in the most attractive way. She was still unhappy. I then took a different approach: had she a publicity photograph? Of course. Did the photographer shoot more than one roll of film to create this one photo. Yes. Did he do any touch up work. Yes. Is the photograph still your picture? An imperfect analogy but with a grain of truth.

Editing shouldn't be about perfection but about performance. With diligent editing and enough studio time, one can achieve a reasonable approximation of perfection but this is sometimes at the cost of the performance. While nobody wants to hear an incorrect second violin note or horn splat that could be easily corrected, note-by-note editing can sometimes take the life out of the musical phrase: perfection at great cost. I have great admiration for artists who stand by their work. Early in my career, I recorded a distinguished pianist at the end of his long career. While he couldn't play the most difficult passages perfectly any longer, he still had much to give in performances of great wisdom, maturity, and insight. I suggested we isolate the most difficult sections and that he play them as many times as he liked. With luck and editing, we might be able to create those moments. He demurred and said "I can't play those passages the way I used to but I still stand by my performance." The great Heifetz was once ordered to repeat a passage again and again by his producer. The Maestro finally stopped and asked: "How many times have I played it incorrectly?" "Fourteen times," responded the producer. "Then, that is how I play it."

Searching for the Memorable

There is a great deal of musical talent around: very talented composers, instrumentalists, conductors, and singers with active careers most of whom have no appreciable discography. (I won't write here about the talent that is unable to fashion any sort of career.) I'm convinced the only reason to record an artist is if there is something memorable about their performance. Think of the great voices and how, in your mind's ear, you can recreate their unforgettable sound from a concert you attended or imagine how they would perform a role you've never heard them sing or which perhaps they will never attempt. The quality of their sound is unique, unmistakable, and unforgettable: you instinctively know how they turn a phrase, how they deliver a text. I remember once imagining Luciano Pavarotti "singing" the soprano aria "Ernani, Involami." Though it will never happen on a concert stage, this impossible performance was perfectly credible. One thinks of singers such as Renata Tebaldi, Carlo Bergonzi, Franco Corelli or today's Cecilia Bartoli, Rene Fleming, and Bryn Terfel. Memorable.

Not only singers have distinctive sounds. My grandfather, a fiddle fanatic, could immediately identify Heifetz, Milstein, Szigetti, and Kreisler to name but a few. Conductors like Toscanini, Karajan, Klemperer and Abbado have an indelible stamp in sound and phrasing that makes them immediately identifiable regardless of differences from performance to performance. Their voice is as distinct as a composer's. I began these tales with a reference to New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn: like all great composers, his voice is recognisable from a single phrase, whether chamber music or symphony.

Years ago, during a Metropolitan Opera broadcast intermission feature, a panel of experts was played the opening 'oom-pahs' to a series of Verdi arias and asked to identify the excerpt from those few notes. With few exceptions, the answers were easy to anyone who knew the Verdi canon and panel scored impressively. Each 'oom-pah' was so distinctive and so obviously the introduction to its aria. Try it yourself.

The Music of Hollywood

The great scorers of film had the same ability to imprint a watermark in the memory, clarifying and even identifying the emotions incompletely portrayed on screen. Imagine the scene in 'Psycho' with the woman frantically driving after committing her robbery. With all respect to fine acting and direction, it is Bernard Herrmann's chilling music that adds a frightening dimension of self-induced guilt to the flickering images and for me, it is the music that lingers in the memory. I wonder if I would have been such a fan of the classic swashbucklers if they hadn't been framed with the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklos Rozsa, for it was they along with Franz Waxman, Victor Young, and Alfred Newman that put the lump in my throat long before I ever heard their names.

I don't recall how it was that I became actively involved in recording and in some cases restoring the works of these composers to print and record but it is an important part of this story. These composers, forgotten by many and scorned by the anti-romantic establishment of the recent past, were the true inheritors of the romantic symphonic tradition that ended in Europe with the rise of Nazism. How it landed in Hollywood bringing symphonic music to its widest audience ever is a tale better told by scholar. Nonetheles, one could argue that the great symphonic tradition lost in the wreck of Europe and the rise of the modern avant-garde transferred its allegiance to the big screen.

I suppose it began with friends: John Waxman, son of Franz Waxman was one of the first people to contact me a KOCH, full of projects and ideas for recordings. Conductor James Sedares was also a film and film music enthusiast with great knowledge. Through John Waxman, I met the late Christopher Palmer, a great writer, musician, and expert in the field of the film composers, and the families of Korngold and Jerome Moross and eventually the great Miklos Rozsa himself.

My first recording of Rozsa remains one of my favorites. It was immediately following our honeymoon in New Zealand that Tammy and I returned to Wellington for James Sedares' first recordings with the New Zealand Symphony. We planned two discs: Morton Gould's Fall River Legend coupled with Randall Thompson's 1st Symphony and a disc of Rozsa's symphonic works. I had no idea that the latter disc would be prelude to a series that would eventually encompass all the composer's concert music and several film scores as well.

There were many sceptical musicians in the studio when we turned up with music by a composer most had never heard of or only knew of from his film scores. Rozsa's film works were so successful that they obscured his very significant canon of works for the concert stage. Even though Leonard Bernstein's celebrated surprise debut with the New York Philharmonic included Rozsa's Theme, Variations and Finale, his music never earned the place in the concert repertoire it deserved. Those of us who loved him were disappointed when his obituary in the New York Times was headlined "Miklos Rozsa, Film Composer." I'd like to believe that the New Zealand musicians were won over by soaring beauty, craft and distinctive voice of Rozsa in this and the other works we recorded. Years later, I was setting up for another recording in Wellington and caught the principal oboist warming up with the theme of Theme, Variations and Finale. The recording turned out well and there are not a few nights after midnight in Hamburg when I hear the Hungarian Nocturne broadcast on the local classical station. (I imagine the rules are less strict in the wee hours when only a few diehards and insomniacs are listening.)

The recording was sent by Waxman to Miklos Rozsa who still lived in Los Angeles though wheel-chair bound as the result of a stroke. His comments, quoted on the compact disc, still fill me with pride: 

It is many years since I last heard the four works on this disc performed by anyone else: their give these new versions a warm welcome. The performances are broadly conceived and colorful; the orchestral playing combines passion with discipline in exactly the way my music demands. James Sedares has the measure of my style in his interpretations of my works. I have a particular fondness for your youthful Opus 13: I was in my early-to-mid 20s when I wrote it and it made my international reputation. It is delightful to hear it so vigorously brought back to life. 
Miklos Rozsa, January 12, 1993

Along with these nice comments came an invitation to visit should I be in Los Angeles. California was in my plans thanks to a Grammy nomination as Classical Producer of the Year. As the competition for the award were the producers of major, international artists, I had little expectation of picking up a statue. I did plan to attend the ceremony and party as I had two years previously in New York when I received a similar nomination. In addition, Andrew Schenck's recording of Barber's The Lovers had two nominations and was listed as one of the five recordings given as examples of my work. Andrew had passed away a year ago but I wanted to be there for his sake. Barber had a much better chance of winning than I. We had a good year: in one category, the Barber was competing against another recording I had produced: Ellen Zwilich's very beautiful Flute Concerto with Doriot Dwyer and James Sedares conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

I drove the rental car through the lovely hills surrounding Los Angeles to Rozsa's home on the morning of the Grammy Awards and was admitted by his nurse, Clara. Rozsa met me in his study, his speech somewhat difficult to understand due to the effects of stroke. His mental energy and inner youthfulness were immediately apparent as he suggested a particularly glamorous violinist to record his concerto with hopes of a private meeting to go through the piece. He asked me to wander through the house and enjoy the art and framed musical manuscripts and autographs, apologising that he couldn't accompany me. The room housing his Academy Awards had a large Breughel canvas; Rozsa delighted in telling me that his previous nurse was going to "throw the picture in the trash" as the frame was broken. He commented "you had to live with art to properly appreciate it."
We began to discuss his music in some detail when he stopped and said the word Symphony in a mysterious way. As a student, he had composed a large scale symphony and sent it to Bruno Walter, Pierre Monteux, and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Monteux wrote back and said he would perform the Scherzo movement. When I asked Rozsa to see the score, it was then that I learned that he had all the music except the Scherzo which Monteux never returned. A casual glance at the unpublished sheets in front of me revealed the indelible Rozsa voice, Hungarian, powerful and richly orchestrated. I made a promise to record the work as soon as the score could be made ready, parts prepared and the Scherzo located. I also promised to record all of Rozsa's concert music.

We never found the Scherzo after a futile search through libraries around the world but did record the rest of the Symphony and almost all the concert music in New Zealand. Jim Sedares did another brilliant job of creating an interpretation on the spot in limited time with a score and parts riddled with errors. He had never conducted the work in public and it had no tradition of performance. It seemed as though every bar required a correction in someone's part, slowing down the process and irritating the players who generally prefer to get on with it. I must admit that I had some doubts early in the sessions: it was Tammy, whose quick and enthusiastic reaction "this is a great score" provided the momentum in the booth. One of the violists in the band dared a positive comment and things turned decidedly better.

Rozsa loved the recording but this was one that I would love to do again, after a series of performances for conductor and orchestra to settle in to an interpretation. This is not a criticism of Sedares, a fine and greatly under-rated conductor or the New Zealand musicians who always gave their best regardless of the unusual bits of music I placed before them. Both have my undying gratitude. The rehearse-record method of recording simply has its limitations.

As I was making my farewells, Rozsa asked Clara to bring him a copy of his autobiography, A Double Life, which he wished to inscribe to me. He could barely hold the pen and with help signed the book in a barely legible script.

GRAMMY Night

The Grammy Awards have never been about classical music. We are an occasional afterthought with a couple of token appearances on the televised show. Classical music, along with spoken word and a host of other categories, receive their due in what the organisers call the pre-telecast. A number of colleagues have called for a boycott of the Grammys and the creation of our own awards. I'm not sure what classical music has to do with awards but the Grammy adds a little lustre to our world with a larger public and immediate credibility to its winners.

Tammy and I joined the throng heading to the Shrine Auditorium, the area already lined with people in search of the famous. We greeted friends, including veteran Chicago Symphony Orchestra recording engineer Mitch Heller who had a long-overdue nomination for his engineering on our Barber "The Lovers" recording. One of the few genuine stars at the pre-telecast event was Patrick Stewart, Star Trek's Captain Picard, who was nominated for his extraordinary reading of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol." Tammy summoned up the courage I lacked and introduced us saying I was a big fan. He turned out a classical music lover and we managed to stay in touch for a number of years.
As we reached the auditorium, Tammy insisted I sit on the aisle. Why? So I would be able to move quickly to the stage to accept my award. We sat on the aisle as the long list of categories and their happy winners were announced. The gentleman handing out the classical awards was a very distinguished American conductor with excellent Barber credentials of his own. When I first thought about recording the Second Symphony and The Lovers, I asked him if either of those works were in his own recording plans thinking there would be little point in doing them if he was. He replied, "No, only the good works." He was now about to open an envelope and announce that Samuel Barber's The Lovers had won a Grammy Award. The final category was Classical Producer of the Year and I still remember time standing still between hearing my name read and walking on stage to say "Thank you maestro" and then saying a very few words in which I thanked my wife and the wonderful artists I worked with.

Winners were then escorted off stage for a photo with the Grammy and then led off to meet the few journalists stuck with greeting winners in non-glamorous categories. The Grammy handed to you at that particular moment is returned after the photo. Quite a few winners were understandably reluctant to part with their prize. (Copies engraved with your name and category are shipped off later.) My only thought was to get back to Tammy and call a few friends. Security would not let me back into the hall but fortunately, some newly award winning rappers were not to be stopped. I left in their midst perhaps somewhat incongruous in a tuxedo but swaggered back into the auditorium to find Tammy already in the lobby on queue for the phone. We reached friends who promised to tape the telecast show for us and headed out to the party on the Paramount set. That evening, Tony Bennett and Natalie Cole announced my category; my picture with what my wife calls "the deer-in the-headlights" look accepting the Award flashed across the screen.

The Grammy has been a gift that keeps on giving. My pride in the award has more to do with the recognition of my peers than any certainly unjustified belief that my work is better than anyone else's Particularly pleasing was the list of recordings supporting my nomination: all were artists of great talent virtually unknown on the world scene. It was our mutual triumph. I received scores of letters, telegrams, and faxes from friends and colleagues and my mother was genuinely tickled. It gave her points with her friends and for her legitimized my career.

I returned to a champagne reception thrown by KOCH and would remain there for another three years. The company had grown and classical music was becoming a less important element in the mix. Michael Koch, while always personally supportive, had the gleam of gold in his eyes and he wasn't going to get it with recordings of Bloch and Barber. He purchased a sumptuous new building adjacent, unfortunately, to a landfill and needed hits to pay for it. At the same time, recognising the long-term value of owning a quality catalogue of classical music, he promised to install a first class editing suite, if I made a commitment to remain with the company. I signed a sweetheart of a long-term contract and settled back in to work wondering what my real future was to be .

The editing suite turned out to be a disaster. Despite being designed by a distinguished architect who had worked on the famed Radio Nederlands studios in Hilversum, he made every conceivable mistake. Worst of all, the room was above the warehouse and far from soundproof. It had inadequate electrical grounding and every time the conveyor belt came on to move another shipment of records, aside from nearly jolting me from my seat and making a screeching noise, it added an unwanted click on to our recording track. Acoustically, the room was useless, made in the forbidden square shape. Nothing we could do helped and I took to editing at home with headphones. While very pleasant for me, it further isolated me from KOCH and and weakened classical music's precarious position in the company. Those with physical proximity tended to be more persuasive.

We still had our successes, many of which continue to sell to this day: a fascinating recording by the talented JoAnn Falletta and the Womens Philharmonic, a San Francisco orchestra - all woman - dedicated to repertoire by women. The disc included an overture by Fanny Mendelssohn, the Clara Schumann Concerto, and two lovely pieces by Lili Boulanger. I actually saw a copy of this record in a cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska which we visited in order to borrow a portable CD-player during a dog mushing holiday. Conductor Gisele Ben-Dor's pulsating Ginastera and Emmanuel Music's intense and intensely lyrical Schuetz are first class recordings that only could have happened in an environment where an A&R Director had virtual carte-blanche (provided he didn't lose money!)

James Sedares' recording of the complete score for Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven broke all our sales records. I sent a copy to Bernstein with some trepidation: he was also a conductor and was somewhat dubious when I proposed the project. His response was more than generous: he proclaimed it definitive.

The recording was made in two sessions of three hours each. For the uninitiated, this translates to two hours of recording time per "call" as the American musicians union's national recording contract requires twenty minutes of break time per hour. In this case, the Phoenix Symphony had the luxury of a read-through at a Pops Concert but I knew that Jim would deliver results in the very limited time we had. It was a tense week for the orchestra as well: they narrowly defeated a strike vote the evening before our recording. They were the worst paid major orchestra in America at that time. The concert that evening, conducted by a guest maestro, was far from successful.

There was an atmosphere of contrived jollity as we set our equipment and ran through the final sound and microphone checks. Jim, one of the finest exponents of gallows humour I have ever met, walked in with a cheery "We're for it lads" doing his best imitation of a stiff-upper-lip British Colonel noticing about a million armed savages on the nearby hill.

As the orchestra filed in, I chatted with players about our last sessions, the very successful Bernard Herrmann Symphony, but wasn't able to lighten the mood. Their playing surpassed their mood as we worked on the opening theme, the best known music in the piece thanks to the Marlboro Man. Although time was short, I knew we had to get something special out of that theme and not just bravado. Jim and I talked about a more lyrical view with strings more prevalent than customary. There would be plenty of action later in the long score. We probably spent more time than was absolutely necessary on the opening. leaving some material, dangerously, with only one take, but I left the session confident that we had more than a film score on tape: Sedares created a symphonically conceived work of breadth and occasional depth, a cowboy Alpensinfonie.

Tammy and I went horseback riding in the Arizona desert following the sessions. Once again a sad postscript: Christopher Palmer who had brilliantly recreated the score by watching the film - the original musical parts and scores had long vanished - died in a London hospital the day we heard the disc had won the German Echo Award. We had just been to visit Christopher a couple of days before and raced to call him when we received the news. When I rang his number, the nurses station picked up and told me it was too late. He had just passed away.

Possibilities Abound

Life had settled into a regular, often satisfying routine. Tammy and I continued to travel and make recordings. I would come home and edit them. We enjoyed our lovely home on Long Island's north shore not far from Long Island Sound and even closer to the Nissiquogue River where we could play Ratty and Moley as we canoed through the tall grass to the open waters of the Sound with nary a building in sight save the occasional cottage. We surprised real river rats and otters paddling through the tall grass. Days not spent on the river always included a walk along the high bluffs that ran along the shore, an island of tranquillity that took one's imagination far away from brutally ugly strip malls that defined Long Island for most of its residents. We found a large lake close to home surrounded by horse trails and woods. The winters brought snow which didn't stop our outdoors activities but added to the joys of coming home to sit in front of the glow in the coal-burning stove.

We began to get calls asking if we could produce recordings for private individuals and even other labels and I began to think about working less, perhaps just doing free-lance work. We both felt a relationship with KOCH still made sense provided Michael Koch would allow the occasional outside recording. I told Koch that I need to double my salary watching his look of terror subside when I added it needn't cost him anything. He agreed to let me do recordings on the side provided they didn't compete with KOCH products. Fine Sound Productions was born and while it hasn't made us rich, I found enormous joy in pretending to be self-employed.

It wasn't long after that I spoke with Koch again: I was prepared to renegotiate my contract to a half-time position under which I would still run KOCH International Classics but spend the rest of my time growing Fine Sound Productions. I came home that day after our first talks when Tammy asked me what I really wanted to do short of retirement and a life of ease which unfortunately wasn't financially feasible at that moment. It didn't take me long to respond, "Of course I'd like to be head of music at Deutsche Grammophon but I doubt they have heard of me and I can't imagine they would take an American and an Israeli-American at that!"

The next day, I wandered over to KOCH to pick up some materials I needed for the edit was engaged with. The phone rang and while I usually let my assistant or the voice-mail system answer, I picked up the receiver to be greeted by a caller from a London executive placement firm asking if I would be interested in the position of Vice President of A&R at Deutsche Grammophon.

The famed German label was my musical accompaniment from an early age. I lived with my Russian grandparents as a young boy and my earliest recollections are my grandfather sitting in a large red chair conducting along with the recordings that filled the shelves of his living room. Certain pieces of music bring back the smell of that old building on Mansion Street. Today, Rachmaninoff 's Second Symphony with Maris Janssons conducting brings it all back: the huge speakers in both corners and the Van Gogh print of fishing boats not to mention the smell of Russian-Jewish cooking and the fascinating mixture he used in his hair to keep it stiffly in place. It was my grandfather who told me to listen "inside the music" for the inner voices and encouraged me to sing along with counter-melodies. Complex harmony fascinated him more than melody, a predisposition I shared. Despite his understandable post-war aversion to things German, he always made an exception for Deutsche Grammophon recordings. His logic was simple: they make the best records. Grandma wasn't moved: DGG, Volkswagon, Hitler and the concentration camps were all one for her and we had to create a diversion to bring the newest DGG treasures into their apartment. When DGG issued a recording with Rozhdestvensky and the Leningrad Philharmonic, my grandfather tried to use the disc as a lever to allow the forbidden product into the home. "You see, my dearest," he said in Russian or Yiddish, I don't remember, "this is good Russian music with good Russian musicians." Grandma remained unmoved: Nyet. Still German as far as she was concerned. When my grandfather died, I knew where the closet was stacked high with hundreds of records with the famous yellow label.

There was one small problem. I did not know a single DGG artist and a strong relationship with the artist is a key component to the job. Labouring under a bad early winter cold, I met the headhunter in New York . As I answered his questions and explained my generally optimistic view of classical music on records - a distinctly minority opinion - my voice began to fail. Feeling that I had completely botched it and quickly running out of voice, I croaked "I can't imagine that anything I am saying could be of the slightest interest to Deutsche Grammophon." "On the contrary," he replied, "it is exactly what I wanted to hear. Can you meet Chris Roberts, the President of Polygram Classics and Jazz next week?"

I met the man who would fire me two and half years later in spacious offices on Eight Avenue with a spectacular view of the Hudson River. Back when I was salesman as well for the recordings I produced, I had encountered Roberts as the manager of a small store in Portland, Oregon and I had also made a series of recordings with the very fine choir of Lewis and Clark College, also in Portland, where Roberts had been a student. The conversation was amiable and while I sensed no burning intensity to preserve the legacy of DGG or classical music in particular, I sensed no particular hostility to continue the label's almost century-old tradition of recording great literature with the important artists of the day.

You might think this an obvious and even required stance for one running a classical record label. Yet new managers often think they need to reinvent successful products. Many executives in the classical recording field, envious of the commercial success of their colleagues on the pop side, denigrate the music that at one time inspired them. The day's notion of politically correct thinking is wary of any expression that appeals to the few, especially if those few are perceived to be well-off and Western.

I can assure you that the love of music does not stem from one's financial status. Many years ago, when I was doing a stint of army reserve duty "somewhere in Israel," I pulled late evening guard duty on the night that the BBC World Service was going to broadcast a program about the late German conductor Otto Klemperer. I looked at the duty roster and saw that my companion at the explosives bunker was a nice guy of Iraqi descent, a mechanic at the Dan Bus Company garage in Tel-Aviv. Listening to music on guard duty was forbidden but not unheard of. I had an earphone and planned on telling my colleague that I would be unavailable for one hour that evening and that I would cover for him for an hour before or after the broadcast. It never occurred to me that a bus mechanic whose family came to Israel in 1947 from Baghdad would have any interest in Otto Klemperer or music in particular. My prejudices had got the better of me as he turned up at the bunker armed with rifle and radio with the very same plan.

The story of that radio, confiscated by my sergeants on many occasions but always returned, had a tragic ending. All Israeli combat soldiers wear a belt designed to hold such necessaries as cartridges loaded with bullets, water bottles, and of course, close to the front and immediately accessible, a pouch which carries two grenades. The pouch had a thin cloth divider which when removed created the perfect vehicle for my transistor radio. This was still a few years before the ubiquitous miniature radios and cassette decks which were later joined by baseball caps as required apparel and finding a small radio with a decent FM band was not easy. The radio, along with a large portable library, was my salvation during long months of military duty and not to be replaced in Israel. The grenade pouch's position on the belt, directly below the shoulder strap provided perfect placement for the earphone which I taped along the strap's backside. All was well and I could often hear the sergeant's commands dimly over the music courtesy of Kol Israel's First Program.

Until grenade exercises: We were meant to run from a bunker high on hill to a position immediately overlooking a large crater with a giant metal trash can strategically placed in the center. The idea, simple enough, was to run down the hill, pull a grenade out of its receptacle, shout "rimon" - grenade, or literally pomegranate - and throw the grenade into the large specially constructed can where it would explode. There was an officer at the edge of the crater to make sure you didn't blow yourself up.

As the army rarely gave one time to prepare, I had no time to stow the radio and find my two grenade, safely in my pack back at the barracks. I had no choice but to run down the hill, shout "rimon" as loudly as I could, hopefully a diversionary tactic, and throw my precious radio into a large tin can. Of course it didn't explode and the officer assumed it to be a dud.

NACH HAMBURG

I received the formal offer to join Deutsche Grammophon as Vice President for Artists and Repertoire while sitting in the tiny living room of my daughter Debby's house in the tiny and isolated West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. The headhunter asked if there was a bottle of champagne around as he had good news. Nothing could be further from the world of fine bubbly than Yitzhar but I was both exhilarated and terrified to receive the news. As I had said to several friends, I would be devastated either way. Most colleagues had counselled me not to take the job, one warning me that DGG was "a snake pit." I have a bad history of not accepting good advice but I had already made the emotional break with KOCH and had already at least in my mind started at DGG. Many friends were concerned that I would miss producing but I assured myself that I wouldn't let too much time pass before I had my hands on the mixing desk.

I received the formal offer to join Deutsche Grammophon as Vice President for Artists and Repertoire while sitting in the tiny living room of my daughter Debby's house in the tiny and isolated West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. The headhunter asked if there was a bottle of champagne around as he had good news. Nothing could be further from the world of fine bubbly than Yitzhar but I was both exhilarated and terrified to receive the news. As I had said to several friends, I would be devastated either way. Most colleagues had counselled me not to take the job, one warning me that DGG was "a snake pit." I have a bad history of not accepting good advice but I had already made the emotional break with KOCH and had already at least in my mind started at DGG. Many friends were concerned that I would miss producing but I assured myself that I wouldn't let too much time pass before I had my hands on the mixing desk.

BRAHMS IN NEW YORK

The first crisis was brought on by the impending recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Kurt Masur conducting the New York Philharmonic. Aside from the high costs of hiring the Philharmonic and its expensive hall, we had to get Masur released from his exclusive Teldec contract. This is usually done by offering the other record company the services of an exclusive artist on your label. Because of these issues, DGG's management was reluctant to honor its contractual commitment to Mutter. My colleagues preferred to either cancel or to insist that she record the Brahms with a less expensive European orchestra. Postponement to an indefinite date was a common solution to these pressing issues. The other way out was to fail to reach agreement with the Philharmonic, Avery Fischer Hall, or Teldec. While the management was deliberating, we were receiving frantic calls from our distribution companies fearful that we would lose the recording: Mutter is the company's best selling artist and a household name in Germany.

Two weeks before the recording was scheduled (and seven days before we could cancel without having to pay the New York Philharmonic), our attorney and President - Mutter's nominal producer at that time - both went on scheduled holidays. A call then came from the production center in Hannover: should the crew and crates of recording equipment leave for New York? I made my first executive decision at DGG: Send the crew and gear. This recording will happen.

With the help of the excellent attorney from our sister label Philips, we were able to conclude negotiations with the New York Philharmonic and the hall with a day to spare. It was only because of DGG's sterling reputation for paying its bills that Avery Fischer Hall allowed our crew to set up its equipment before having a check in hand. Little issues - union teamsters to unload equipment - sorted themselves out more easily. I told our crew head in New York to do whatever was necessary.

I didn't know Anne-Sophie Mutter though we had met briefly and by chance in London's Savoy Hotel several weeks before. I did know and respect Douglas Sheldon, her highly experienced US based manager, as we had done business on several recordings in the recent past. I called Doug to assure him that we were making the recording. He in turn overcame his agent's natural and necessary skepticism to give me the benefit of the doubt. There was a last minute flurry of activity over an insurance certificate required by the hall: our Hamburg based comptroller was of the most conservative disposition and probably would have been delighted if this missing piece of paper could have torpedoed the recording to make his figures look better. He told me it would take days. I bit the bullet and called his boss in London who had the matter in hand in two hours.

As I put together a few last things before heading to the airport to catch the flight to New York, a fax came that I had been awaiting for two weeks: I had been working on a gala recording of popular sacred works with the wonderful Cecilia Bartoli and the blind singing sensation Andrea Bocelli. This was a major contractual endeavor as both of these artists worked exclusively for other labels, though part of the Polygram group. The recording, like the Mutter Brahms, had enormous commercial potential. After much wrangling with my colleagues at Philips, they had agreed to allow Bocelli to sing one track on our record. The fax I was awaiting would tell me the cost. I had already settled on a fee with Bartoli: high but perfectly reasonable considering her extraordinary talent and appeal. It was also a chance to get reacquainted with Jack Mastroianni, her agent, with whom I had briefly worked at Columbia Artists Management many years ago. I expected the Bocelli fee to be similar. As I was about to jump into the cab, my secretary called out that the fax had come. I quickly scanned the long letter, full of contractual details, searching for the all important number: there were far too many zeros! As I exercised my little used mental arithmetic, my first thought was it couldn't be that much in German Marks till a quick mental calculation provided a more sobering reality: about DM350,000 for one track. There was no time to panic as the plane wouldn't wait. I shoved the fax in my briefcase and knew it would be a long flight.

It wasn't only the Bocelli contract that occupied me during the flight: These would be the first recording sessions I would attend that I would not be producing. I was there as an executive to help, encourage, and provide what assistance I could but I had no official role in the process of making the record. My job was to stay out of the way and let the producer and engineer do their work. Nonetheless, the team was aware that I was the first A&R chief at DGG who came from their field and I would be evaluating their work.

After quickly checking in at the Parker-Meridian Hotel on 57th Street, I hailed a cab for the short ride to Lincoln Center, contracts in hand. Mutter was already rehearsing for the concerts that were to be the basis for the recording. As I stood in the wings listening to the most lyrical and heart-breakingly beautiful account of the Brahms I could ever imagine, I knew that I had made the right decision. As she played the long trill that leads out from the first movement cadenza into the work's coda, I had that rare feeling of time standing still, waiting for one of us, in this case an extraordinary violinist, to allow it to move forward. Listening now to the compact disc as I write these words, I'm struck that this is one of those few that captures the transient magic of a concert.

A HYMN FOR THE WORLD

I met Maestro Myung-Whun Chung at the Savoy Hotel moments after my chance first encounter with Anne-Sophie Mutter. I had only heard Chung conduct once, a memorable and musical Simone Boccanegra at the Metropolitan Opera in the early eighties. While I enjoyed several of his recordings, most notably some recent Messiaen discs, I was not well acquainted with his work. As he sat back in an easy chair in the Savoy's lounge expansively discoursing about music and his concern for reaching larger audiences for classical music, I took an immediate liking to him. He told us - DGG President Karsten Witt was with me - that he planned a special concert for the Pope's visit to Paris: they expected over one million young people from around the globe to great His Holiness. Chung felt a recording commemorating this event would have immediate as well as long term appeal. We agreed to record a collection of sacred favorites with his Roman orchestra, the Santa Cecilia, as well as a new piece commissioned especially for the event by a young and highly successful pop-composer, Eric Levy. Who should sing the new piece? Chung pointed me in the direction of the DGG Paris office where he suggested I discuss all the details with Annick Nogues, the director of publicity. The idea of the Papal concert was hers and she was organizing all details. (She also masterminded the press campaign supporting Chung after his untimely departure as director of Paris' Opera Bastille.) In addition to this potential hit recording, we also planned a series with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of sacred masterpieces, the first being the Faure and Durufle Requiems.

I required no excuse to visit Paris and in any case, needed an opportunity to introduce myself to the team who would be marketing our recordings in France. An affable and effective group lead by Jean-Phillipe Allard, they distributed DGG in what is probably still the best 'culture-market' in the world. For them, the Chung project was vitally important. Chung is one of Paris' musical heroes: I have rarely seem an audience respond to anyone they way the Parisians react to Chung. The Pope's visit was an ideal opportunity to promote the sacred collection and the new hymn would be the event's musical theme, heavily promoted on television and radio. As far as Annick and her colleagues were concerned, there was only one person to sing Levy's "I Believe:" Andrea Bocelli.

Still new in Europe, I had only the dimmest idea who this man was. I didn't realize that the pleasant tenor voice coming from the radio in virtually every Hamburg eatery I frequented was the blind singing sensation. Chung already had his agreement to perform the piece on the concert for the Pope and couldn't imagine there would be any difficulty in obtaining a release from his record label, Philips, as they were part of the same group of labels that included DGG. I concurred as I had been told when hired that all the artistic resources of the three labels run by Chris Roberts - DGG, Decca, and Philips - were to be shared. My job, so I thought, was to provide income for my company at a high artistic standard.

Little did I imagine that my request for Bocelli would set off the classical music equivalent of World War III. Under no circumstances would Bocelli be made available for this recording whether he wanted to or not. To be fair, I understand the proprietary nature of exclusive artists. Record labels make major investments and assume a fair degree of risk when they sign an artist to an exclusive contract. Despite the fact that the three labels were loosely linked under the rubric Polygram Classics, we all felt a strong interest in maintaining the labels' identities and most importantly the identity of our most important artists with our label particular label. The President of Philips, Costa Pilavachi, had taken a risk in signing a tenor with no classical music credentials to his classical music label. He viewed my request as a dangerous attempt to poach his artist. I quickly pointed out that we were speaking only of one track and a light composition at that. The battle went round and round till we eventually received permission to record Bocelli in one "classical" track. I suggested Bizet's Agnus Dei, a setting of the familiar text to a movement from the L'Arlesianne Suites which I knew from a recording with Beniamino Gigli that I loved as a young child. Bocelli was, I was told, thrilled to be recording something with the world's premiere classical label and with Chung for whom he had an immense admiration.

Enter Bocelli's main label, Sugar Insieme, based in Milan. They "discovered" and at that time essentially owned him. They owned all the repertoire he recorded and licensed it to other companies: Philips for classics and Polydor for everything else (and outside Italy.) They viewed DGG as a dangerous development as they wanted to keep Bocelli on the profitable straight-and-narrow of popular music. They too eventually agreed to one classical track on the record. Neither Chung nor I, gave up on finding a way to get Bocelli to sing "I Believe." My colleagues at DGG were also anxious to secure a deal with Bocelli as the financial return would not only help us but help our distribution companies meet their budget targets.

To add real luster to the recording, I approached Jack Mastroianni about Cecilia Bartoli singing several tracks on the recording. I am a great admirer of extraordinary Italian mezzo and didn't imagine there would be any difficulty in organizing a release from our "sister" label, Decca. I reached Jack on the mobile phone from somewhere near the Baltic Sea where Witt, his wife, and three sons were spending a lovely Sunday with Tammy and me. The boys were getting frustrated by my poor soccer playing - I'm only an American - and the ring of my portable phone was undoubtedly a relief to them as well as me. (They were also convinced that I was waiting for a call from Marcello Mastroianni.} Jack, whose enthusiasm for music and large personality were immediately captivating, agreed to approach Cecilia if I cleared the details with Decca. The fee was quickly discussed and agreed to: with an artist like Bartoli, one doesn't quibble about a few thousand dollars. Either you want her for the project and can afford the fee or you can't. I raised the thorny issue of Levi's Hymn. Thorny because Cecilia Bartoli had obvious concerns about recording a "pop" tune with an artist, who despite his desire to be an opera star was considered a pop singer. I left it to Bartoli's judgement, a good decision as I learned when I knew her better. Like Anne-Sophie Mutter and few other artists, her instincts about herself, her voice, audience, and repertoire were close to infallible.

We settled on repertoire quickly and it wasn't long afterwards that I was on a plane to Rome. I had also planned a meeting with Cecilia Bartoli who happened to be in her home town. In a typically mad and delightfully dangerous taxi ride from Fiumicino to town, the mobile phone rang. Our publicity director, Lucy Maxwell-Stewart, already in Rome to keep an eye on the proceedings and create the video to accompany the disc, had a message from Chung: the maestro planned to ask Bocelli to read "I Believe" that evening along with Cecilia Bartoli. The orchestra had recorded the music sans singers and he hoped to intrigue the two artists. Chung knew, of course, that without contractual permission, anything he recorded could not be released. Lucy was warning me that an explosive situation might be in the making.

After quickly checking in at the Cardinale, a pleasant hotel a short walk away from the Santa Cecilia, I went to the hall where I met Cecilia Bartoli. She had already recorded her tracks for the recording, meltingly beautiful performances of the Domine, Deus from Vivaldi's Gloria. We joined her brother Gabriele and sister Federica around the corner for coffee and panini. Her charm is legendary and not overestimated. I thanked her for agreeing to take part in our program and learned with delight that she would be singing her first Susanna in Nozze di Figaro, my favorite opera. We walked back to the hall, I somewhat guiltily knowing that she was about to be asked to read I Believe with Bocelli. She would be staying in any case as we planned a photo shoot in St Peters Square with the three artists.

In the meantime, Bocelli and a troop of handlers had arrived. Andrea went to his dressing room where he asked to speak with me in private. As my Italian is far from perfect, I asked Gaston Fournier, the excellent manager of the Santa Cecilia Orchestra to join us in the event any translation would be required. I could hear the handlers pacing outside the room, clearly reluctant to allow their charge to be alone with a classical record executive. Bocelli asked me directly: how much money was Sugar asking for the track. I replied, somewhat naively that surely he knew as Sugar only gave me the fee request after consulting with him. No they had not and he would rather not sing without the information. I reluctantly told him 350 million lire. He sighed quietly, turned away, and said, Grazie.

We rode the short way to St Peters and begin filming and photographing Bartoli, Bocelli, and Chung walking through the square, laughing, chatting and doing all that Lucy requested. A crowd gathered and the police as well. When they saw our stars, they allowed the show to go on. I walked Bocelli back to the car where two Italian sailors stood transfixed: could they touch maestro's hand?

Knowing that Chung was about to read the forbidden 'I Believe' with our two singers, I asked the manager of Sugar Records, former Italian pop star Caterina Casselli, if she would stroll back to the Sta Cecilia with me. We took the most roundabout way. When we finally arrived at the stage door (with the recording booth round a close corner), she heard the fatal strains. She began to remonstrate: "This is not correct, this is not correct," proceeding on stage with the same refrain. The reading session ground to a halt as Myung-Whun eloquently defended his right and that of Cecilia and Bocelli to read and record anything they liked for their own pleasure. He understood that nothing could be released without contracts but they were just having fun. I stood in the middle of the crossfire trying to calm both sides. Lucy was terrified that we would "all get fired." I moved away from the fray for a quick call to Chris Roberts alerting him, in the calmest possible way, that he might be receiving a call from an offended Sugar Records tomorrow. None of us remembered that a French television crew had been engaged to do some footage of the recording sessions and that they ran film during the altercation. Lucy confiscated the footage and made an edit for our amusement later which shows a bemused Cecilia, eyes moving right and left with a curious expression as Chung and Sra Casselli traded barbs. Bocelli sits in his chair head down.

Somehow, we managed to resume recording with only Chung, Bartoli, Bocelli and me of stage. The orchestra track was fed into headphones on stage. At one point, Bocelli missed an interest causing a brief outburst from Chung. I whispered, "Myung-Whun, he's blind." Bartoli quietly took the tenor's hand and squeezed it in rhythm nudging him gently for his entrances. For both singers, the music was new, neither sang in English, and of course, we had no rights to release the material. Still, there was exciting material on tape. The Sugar Records people remained in a belligerent mood as they drove off with Bocelli. One even suggested I "lock my doors at night."

The next day, I had a call from Jack Mastroianni. He had heard the whole story from Cecilia and after we had a bit of a laugh suggested I send on the edited material to her and we would see what could be done with it.

The edited version, while not perfect, gave us all an idea of the song's potential. Please don't think that "I Believe" is a masterpiece: a likable and memorable tune allied to an occasionally cumbersome text, I began to hear people humming and singing it all over the DGG building in Hamburg and at the production facility and Hannover. To think all this trouble over this pleasant piece and not over decisions to record important repertoire exercised my thoughts over many late nights. And yet, its simplicity and the presence of the two stars made it worth fighting for.

Both artists wanted to redo individual phrases. We had arranged one such session while Bartoli was recording in Milan. My assistant had made all the arrangements and I went to New York on other business satisfied that we would finish Cecilia's contribution to the album. It was meant to happen the afternoon of the day I was flying back to Germany. I rang up Cecilia to ask how it went. I was incredulous when she said neither equipment nor producer turned up. I had the seven hour overnight flight to mull over what went wrong. Surely my assistant, near perfect in attention to detail, couldn't have forgotten.

With everything to obtaining the Vatican's imprimatur and a statement from the Cardinal for Cultural Affairs for the disc's booklet to the DGG attorney's unhappiness with including a sponsor's name in the booklet, I had my hands full. The recording came out without "I believe." A version in Korean was recorded and for France, the fabulous jazz singer Dedee Bridgewater tracked "I Believe" to the same accompaniment track Bartoli and Bocelli had used.

"I Believe" was finally released on Hymn for the World II with only Andrea Bocelli. We were forbidden to promote the song as Sugar and Polydor feared it would interfere with sales and promotions of the tenor's forthcoming pop album. Both I and II were DGG's best selling new releases in their respective years and I still get occasional requests at home for the music to Levy's unintentionally contentious Hymn. They are not crossover recordings - horrible phrase - but present a survey of the world's greatest and most popular sacred music from Bach to Messiaen.

Without entering the fray about Andrea Bocelli as an operatic tenor, I found him very musical and a genuine opera lover. Somehow, this musicality does not always come across in his recordings. Prior to recording "I Believe" (the second time) we sat in a dressing room in the "old" Santa Cecilia, site of many famous old opera recordings with Renata Tebaldi. Bocelli sat at room's piano and began playing opera scores from memory singing along. He began to play the opening of the fourth act duet from "La Boheme" and I joined him in that and several duets, I singing as badly as one might imagine. When his laughter wouldn't permit him to sing, we talked opera and opera recordings. A big fan of Franco Corelli, he was excited to be working on the state where the great singer had recorded Tosca with Nilsson and Fischer-Dieskau. He asked me if I knew which microphones were used for that old Decca recording. I was able to find out from Christopher Raeburn, producer of those sessions and of the Bartoli tracks on Hymn for the World II.

Life in Germany

Most of our friends refuse to believe we enjoy living in northern Germany. Now that I am no longer employed by Deutsche Grammophon, our American friends send notes asking when we are coming home "for good" or that we now, "can finally leave Germany." When I took the job, living in Hamburg was not the offer's principle attraction. Tammy and I were both convinced it would be a grimy industrial town. We were both pleasantly surprised to discover a gracious and green city not overburdened with skyscrapers or what someone, I believe Prince Charles, has called "urban brutal" architecture. Like the low countries and Denmark, the bicycle remains a favored method of transportation and this was one of our first and perhaps our wisest purchase shortly after arriving. Two Kettler aluminum bicycles. Tammy was somewhat dubious: bicycles were not a major part of her childhood. She dreamt of the horses she rode as a girl and later on in California. For me, the bicycle was part of the fabric of my youth. Perpetually stolen, occasionally recovered (with a new coat of spray paint), my bicycles carried me on most of my childhood adventures.

Tammy planned a week's visit for house hunting. In the States, one call to real estate agent provides a friend for life or at least till you make a purchase. Loneliness and its more appealing sister Solitude are banished. The Realtor can't resist calling at any hour of the day or night with a "must-see" property. We assumed that the same system applied here in Germany. Wrong again. The various rental offices we spoke with didn't seem particularly interested in our business and most had nothing to show us or perhaps one or two houses which they might be able to show us next week. We finally found one agent with a modicum of enthusiasm who had two houses for rent, one on a wooded cul-de-sac in a village twenty kilometers from the center. The house with garden was a short walk from Hamburg's superb rapid-transit system. Tammy and I loved the house at first sight, not that we had many others. We thought the process would involve paying a deposit, signing a contract and moving in. I could hear the agent's private thought "Americans are so impatient." First, we had to meet the owner, an eighty year old widow and her children to see if we were suitable. There were also other candidates. The rent was high, more than the mortgage on our Long Island home. Nevertheless, Tammy had her heart set on the house and had no desire to find an apartment in town. With the support of this rare and enterprising Realtor and, I'm convinced, sheer luck, we got the house. Had we known that a few hundred metros west, we would have lived in Schleswig-Holstein, avoiding Hamburg's high-taxation and making most of Germany's beauracratic procedures easier, we might have passed on the little house in Rissen.

Another myth quickly vanished. We were told it would be years before we would make the acquaintance of our neighbors. Our first day in the house, the Gorbahnts, two houses down, stopped by with the traditional gift of bread and salt as well as a welcome to their home and offer to help Tammy with anything she might need.

Though work took my inwards towards city on those rare days that a tax wasn't running me to the airport in the pre-dawn hours, our real joy began at our street's end where the bicycle tracks headed into the woods which we began to explore. The trails on weekends on those endless summer afternoons were often crowded to our tastes - like Bangladesh as we uncharitably noted to each other. Lakes and moors with their own characters began to receive our private names - one stretch of moor and heath became Alaska as it reminded us of part of Denali Park minus the snow-capped peaks. Another stretch, more barren, looked like an African watering hole and this section became Africa. We were charmed by the small villages, still with thatch-roofed houses and windmills, that we passed through. Being Germany, even the trails had names and numbers: Feldweg 91, for example.

We had gotten used to the convenience society - everything open all the time and of course twenty-four hour telephone service for airline tickets and virtually anything else. Hamburg offered quiet Sundays, early closings on Saturdays and quiet hours when no power tools or lawn mowers, the bane of the American suburban weekend, must be still. In short, we felt quickly at home relishing the long, almost endless summer days and learning to enjoy the comforts of winter days in front of the fire place. Summer mornings came early as we were awakened by a glorious symphony of bird song heralding the sun's arrival. Despite my natural aversion to taxes - and I was paying all told over sixty percent of my wages to Bonn - I felt I was getting value for money, from the rapid transit system to the rich cultural life. We're still here (though we enjoy the ease with which we reach Toscana and Norway when either the south's warm breezes or something more bracing beckons.)

We had a number of contracts to cancel upon leaving the United States, including the security service that monitored our house alarm. This is a factual account of Tammy's call to the alarm company: 

Tammy: We'd like to cancel your service as we're moving to Germany next month. 

Operator (thick Long Island accent): Oh my God! Germany! Isn't that far away? Aren't you scared? 

Tammy: We're looking forward to it but there is a new language to learn. 

Operator: Oh my God! A new language. You mean they don't speak English. 

Tammy: No 

Operator: Oh my God! They have their own language? Tammy: Yes 

Operator: Oh my God! What's it called? 

Tammy: German 

Talking About Music

No one is ever quite sure about what Artist and Repertoire Directors do. Considering the large number of rich, calorie-laden meals one is sadly required to eat with artists, A&R has been called Artists and Restaurants. My son, not really sure what his father did for a living, attended a recording session in Israel I produced during which I gave him a pair of headphones to listen with. After a few moments, he said with a knowing smile, "You get paid to listen to music all day! Not bad." This was a reasonable assumption on his part and certainly close to the truth for the production side of my career. Another gentleman who runs a well-known music festival, intimated to a colleague that "A&R Directors talk about music with artists all day." This was a bit of wishful thinking as that gentleman was a candidate for a top job at a record label despite his lack of recording experience.

And yet, aside from the often memorable issues of budgets, personnel difficulties, and the general problems of managing a large department, speaking with the artists about music is one of the most pleasing aspects of the job when there is actually time for it. How could I ever forget Gil Shaham analyzing the Brahms Concerto on a transatlantic phone call, playing the accompaniment on an electronic keyboard and singing the violin part. Equally fascinating was a lunch with James Levine at Munich's sumptuous Raphael Hotel. Jim had led his first concert as the new Music Director of the Munich Philharmonic, a controversial appointment in the Bavarian capital, with a particularly fine performance of the Brahms 4th Symphony. As we ate, and we both enjoy eating, Jim went through the work in extraordinary detail including his own mental process as he conducted the piece.

Listening to music, first edits or auditions, with Claudio Abbado, was always a treat. With respect to all the great artists I have worked with, Abbado's concert Tristan in Berlin, Mahler 3rd in Ferrara, Mahler 9th in Hamburg and Salzburg, and Brahms 1st in Turin were the greatest orchestra concerts I have ever heard and all were, not incidentally, with the Berlin Philharmonic. A man of great personal modesty and charm, Abbado is for me the ultimate musician's conductor. For those of us who do listen to music for a living, there can be a dangerous tendency to be bored by the merely great. Critics are quick to praise eccentric performances as "fresh" because they have heard too much music and have lost a degree of perspective. There are a great number of podium practitioners who are, for me, unmusical. They receive an imprimatur from critics often leading to public acceptance because their awkward way with music can bring out a different dimension, unfamiliar and therefore revelatory to these jaded listeners. Abbado's ear for textures, elegant and musical line and sense of the architecture of the piece and for me, unerring sense of the phrase, are for me, always satisfying and often thrilling.

I recall a weekend in which one of the early music specialists stood in front of the Vienna Philharmonic offering a very poor parody of Schubert. The great lyric lines phrases were stunted, each downbeat painfully clear. His lack of understanding the music was aided by his poor stick technique rendering sloppy ensemble and poorly judged balances. Even a great ensemble like the Vienna Philharmonic could not play around him. The concert played with my nervous system like a loud piece of construction equipment adjacent to one's house on Sunday morning. I sat there, irritated and wondering when it would all end. The next day, Abbado did a pair of Schubert Symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe: they were unremarkable unless you believe that beautifully inflected performances of great literature in shimmering sound and jeweled precision is something to take for granted. Following the concert, I joined Lucy Maxwell-Stewart, the previously mentioned DGG Publicity Director, who was chatting with the critic of a leading London paper. I walked in at a bad moment as he loudly proclaimed "we didn't need to hear Abbado conducting Schubert any longer," preferring the previous day's debacle. Lucy saw me about to break the record business' prime directive of never hitting (or arguing with) a critic and deftly intervened, allowing me only one sarcastic comment.

I've only broken the rule once before (not hitting the critic, of course.) An American critic who enjoyed the recordings of one of the vanity conductors was upset that I was re-recording a piece with a legitimate, practicing maestro that I previously made, but never edited with the 'wannabe' musician he admired. He wrote this in his journal, implying that the vanity conductor was one of America's great musical treasures. Having worked with the object of his adulation, I knew that he was not only incapable of conducting an orchestra but could not read music. I made the mistake of placing a phone call leading to an unpleasant spat with the critic which unfortunately resulted in his writing outrageously bad reviews of the real conductors I recorded. Not their fault.

Early Memories

My earliest memories are musical. I even recall the first time I had that indefinable thrill, that peculiar but good feeling that some call frisson. Please don't judge my taste too harshly as I was very, very young but I retain the indelible memory of feeling that something when I first heard Beecham's recording of Chabrier's Espana. I could mitigate some of your criticism by adding that the first opera I heard was Tannhauser, when I was a young teenager. There were a series of “Stories of the Operas” with romantic watercolors and short musical motifs that I would play at the piano. Tannhauser intrigued me also because, truth be told, of the Venusberg. It never occurred to me that the singer who performed Venus would not necessarily look like the Venus de Milo or for that matter like Mariyln Monroe. I took the train to Manhattan thinking of combining the joys of music with more adolescent urges. Standing room at the 'old' Met was inexpensive - just over one dollar - and the standees then lines the side walls of the theater. (In the 'new' house, they were exiled to the back of the orchestra, in an acoustically dead part of the hall.) I remember Ossie Hawkins, the sonorous-voiced executive stage manager, striding out before the curtain opened to announce that the tenor, an ill-favored Finn, was indisposed. Thunderous applause. With the timing of a practiced actor, Hawkins added "... but will sing anyway" to the groans of the audience.

When the curtain rose on the Venusberg scene, a strange woman not far from me shouted out "look, they're all nude." (This may have led to the standees' exile.) Venus on her couch - Anita Valkii, I think - was far from physically appealing. At that age, it would have to have been Marilyn Monroe to provide the proper impact but then I imagine her mezzo-soprano not up to the part. Even worse, when the tenor began to sing, I realized that opera recordings and staged operas were not the same thing. The situation improved dramatically when the beloved Leonie Rysanek sang "Dich, teure Halle." I became a confirmed and regular opera standee spending what little I could earn from odd jobs to make the trip to New York and wait on the long queue for precious tickets.

About the same time, I received my introduction to the business of music. I was able to convince a local radio station that I should do a Sunday evening program of classical music. Although I was under age to be legally employed, they were kind enough to never ask and "Sunday Evening Concerts" was broadcast to who knows how many tens of people. The program always began with the Nimrod music from Elgar's Engima Variations. The station's library of classical music was small, but I was able to augment its selection with records from my grandfather's larger collection. The program had a local jewelry store - not coincidentally a customer of grandfather who made and designed watches - as a sponsor. Things went well, I like to think, till one evening shortly after I began Nimrod. The station was usually deserted on Sunday nights. As in most small American stations, I was the producer, announcer, and engineer for my program and also did the news, weather, and required meter readings. I heard the door open and looked to see a stranger in a cowboy hat enter the sanctum of the studio. In a voice whose crudity I can still hear, he shouted "Get this shit off the air." I learned quickly that the station had been sold and the new format was to be cowboy music.

Find me a tenor

The clash of cultures was never more apparent than the night France won the football World Cup in 1998. I was in Aix-en-Province for Abbado's Don Giovanni, a rare performance of Britten's strangely beautiful Curlew River, and a meeting to plan the program for the Berlin Philharmonic Sylvester concert which would be recorded live. Curlew River took place on the night that France was engaged in defending her honor on the playing field. The streets of Aix were silent save for the sounds of men setting up televisions in each of the town's many restaurants. The performance of Curlew River was surprisingly full and played undisturbed though one could hear the occasional distant cheer. There were minutes to go when all of a sudden, the bells of Aix rang out. France had won. The singers continued on stage unheard. The bells continued to ring as I left the theater imagining it must have been like this following the liberation of Paris in 1945. People raced down the streets carrying French flags screaming "Vive le France." Strains of Le Marseille were never out of hearing. When I returned to my hotel, ear plugs, a fan whirring next to my head, and a dose of melatonim never got rid of the sensation that I was in the center of a major celebration in the city square.

My love of Mozart and Britten aside, the main reason I traveled to Aix was the Sylvester concert. Gala musical events were becoming an important part of the classical music business. The pop world understood the connection between concert tours and record sales but it took us a little longer to catch on. One of the most important events in DGG's year was the Berlin Philharmonic's annual Sylvester concert, televised early on New Year's Eve immediately preceding the German President's New Year's greeting. We had been recording the concert for several years but it was never easy coming up with a new program which would work for television, international record sales, and the gala character of the event. The program also required the consent of the orchestra and most importantly, Claudio Abbado. There were also budget considerations: the artists needed to paid by us for the recording, by the television for their media rights, and by the orchestra for the engagement.

It was already late in the planning year when the interested parties sat around an elegant picnic spread just outside Aix-en-Provence where Abbado had taken a house during his run of Don Giovannis. Around the table, with a glorious view of endless vineyards, were the Maestro, Elmar Weingarten, Intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic, Michael DeWitte, Abbado's personal assistant and head of the Salzburg Easter Festival, producers from ZDF Television, the recording's producer Chris Alder, myself and various members of the Abbado family.

The desert plates were being gathered as we began to hammer out our ideas. In a short while, we agreed on pairing two major operatic celebrities with two rising talents: superstars Lucianno Pavarotti and Mirella Freni and the young soprano Christine Schaefer and baritone Simon Keenlyside. (Bryn Terfel, the label's star baritone had sung in the previous year's concert and was not available.) It was left to Chris Alder and me to work out a program with Abbado and secure the participation of the artists.

Luck seemed to be with us as we quickly reached agreement in principle with all four. Decca Records which had an exclusive contract with Pavarotti kindly agreed to release him for the record. I turned my attention to other matters when someone noted an article in the Berlin paper mentioning Mr P's tax difficulties following a Three Tenors concert in Germany. The presenter was to go on trial and might face imprisonment. Pavarotti stated his reluctance to work in Germany. This reluctance was confirmed by Herbert Breslin, his manager. Knowing that there are no border checks between Italy and Germany didn't help. There were, in fact, no charges pending against the tenor and Abbado called Pavarotti encouraging him to come. Dr Weingarten was in touch with the Berlin Senate who would consider offering Pavarotti an award and officially invite him to Berlin. We offered to fly him in the most discrete way by private jet and deliver him to the door of the Philarmonie. Meanwhile, the Philharmonic had announced the concert and were selling tickets. We had announced the recording.

While we continued to work on encouraging Pavarotti to come, we quickly cast about for another tenor and struck upon Jose Cura, a charismatic young Argentinean with whom we been negotiating for several projects. Chris Alder shuttled around Europe's opera houses on the trail of Cura who finally agreed to think about the Sylvester concert. (We had already ascertained before approaching Cura that Domingo was also not available.) Cura's participation would change the whole tenor of the evening. Now we had three fabulous young singers and one genuine star. Someone suggested we drop Freni. Under no circumstances: she was the star and despite the sterling credentials and established reputations of our young singers, for many concertgoers and record buyers around the world, the only familiar name on the cover of a caliber with Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic. We would simply revise the program.

At this point, my boss Karsten Witt intervened telling me to cancel the recording if neither Cura nor Pavarotti were available. This was sensible as the recording would be expensive and difficult to market without "the tenor." His good sense was unacceptable to Abbado and the Philharmonic who understandably saw us as having made a commitment to the project. I also was reluctant to cancel, both out of respect for Abbado and to protect our newly good relationship with the orchestra but also because I wanted the recording, especially to bring Freni and Abbado together again. Abbado also felt that Pavarotti might just agree to come at the last minute. It was now December and we had two programs arranged, one with Cura, one with Pavarotti. What Freni would sing depended on which tenor appeared with her.

Christmas was nearly upon us and we had not yet reached a resolution. Karsten Witt left for one of the world's few locations where he could not be reached by mobile phone, the island of Mauritius. Tammy and I left for a delightful Christmas in Salzburg, one of the world's loveliest locations. We stayed at our regular digs, the Statdtkrug Hotel in the old town where they treated us like family, and anticipated a peaceful holiday accompanied by Salzburg's wondrous scenery, architecture, ambiance, bells, and music.

As we racked our brains for ideas, we thought of Marcello Alvarez, a young Mexican tenor who had just made a well-received debut recording on SONY. We had tried to reach him through his New York agents but was told he was in Tokyo and requested that he not be disturbed over the holidays. I reached Abbado with the news. Not an easy task either as he was in his Swiss mountain home without telephone. You called his neighbor, the doctor, who walked to Abbado's house, weather permitting. Weather permitting, Abbado than walked to the doctor's house and returned the call

Abbado rang back. He would reach Alvarez and convince him. Chris Alder reached our attorney who was able to contact SONY and arrange for a release. As Alvarez and his charming wife later told us, the phone rang and a quiet voice asked for Marcello. Who is it, inquired his wife. Claudio. Claudio who? Claudio Abbado. She almost dropped the phone. Abbado got Alvarez agreement quickly. He was excited to sing with "il piu grande Maestro" with the Berlin Philharmonic, live on television, and to record for the world's most famous record label. A lovely man. He and Abbado agreed on the repertoire we suggested. Even though they were well known operatic excerpts, Abbado needed scores delivered to him in Switzerland. Unlike several well-known conductors, Claudio never "winged it." He studied everything he was going to do and usually memorized it.

Abbado rang back. He would reach Alvarez and convince him. Chris Alder reached our attorney who was able to contact SONY and arrange for a release. As Alvarez and his charming wife later told us, the phone rang and a quiet voice asked for Marcello. Who is it, inquired his wife. Claudio. Claudio who? Claudio Abbado. She almost dropped the phone. Abbado got Alvarez agreement quickly. He was excited to sing with "il piu grande Maestro" with the Berlin Philharmonic, live on television, and to record for the world's most famous record label. A lovely man. He and Abbado agreed on the repertoire we suggested. Even though they were well known operatic excerpts, Abbado needed scores delivered to him in Switzerland. Unlike several well-known conductors, Claudio never "winged it." He studied everything he was going to do and usually memorized it.

My next call was to Jack Mastroianni who managed Freni. We had already agreed that if Pavarotti was not in the picture, Mirella would sing the letter scene from Onegin, an opera she recorded brilliantly for DGG several years before. Jack, whom I would later dub King Jack, was as cooperative as usual and agreed to tell Freni the latest twist and assure her the concert and recording were taking place. (I shouldn't fail to mention that while all this was going on, the ZDF TV had still failed to reach agreement with all the soloists and their representatives were on the phone with me begging for DGG's intervention and financial support.)

When we walked into the Salzburg Dom where the choir was getting ready to sing a rare and beautiful mass setting by Diabelli, Tammy reminded me to shut off the mobile phone. It was Christmas Eve in Salzburg and we did our best to enter into its special magic and leave the world of record deals behind. As the choir began to sing, the music completely filled my mind leaving no room for any other thoughts. Christmas dinner at the Stadtkrug was rewarding in a completely different way. Fortified by more than one bottle of an admirable wine from the Austrian-Hungarian border region called Poekl, we wandered through town long after midnight. We were a little drunk and intoxicated by the scene as well: a crystal clear night with a light snow falling. As we passed the Mozart statue, Tammy, more drunk than I realized, began addressing Mozart telling him how great he is and how much she loved him. I couldn't have agreed more.

The Sylvester concert was a success though Pavarotti never turned up. I will never forget the thrill that raced through the packed audience when Freni walked on stage. Stars have that power. She thanked me afterwards, telling me she had always wanted to sing Tatiana with Abbado and the peerless Berliners. Tammy and I, with Lucy Maxwell-Stewart and marketing director Rene van Hulst, hurriedly said our good-byes, grabbed two bottles of champagne from the reception and raced to the train station where we just made the last EuroCity express home to Hamburg arriving in Rissen just before midnight. A memorable Christmas and New Years Eve.

Buy-Out

I hadn't any idea that in fewer than six months, I'd be fired. Universal Music's purchase of Polygram, DGG's owner, gave all of us in the company pause. They had no classical music in their vast stable of labels and were clearly interested in the entertainment business rather than music. Chris Roberts gave every impression of leaving the company and was virtually silent for months. The interregnum gave the DGG management an opportunity to be somewhat autonomous as we took advantage of the power vacuum above us to conclude several deals that would never have been approved by Roberts. One of our major concerns was the ability of important markets, such as the American, to pick and choose what they would distribute from our offerings. This frustrated the consumer and reduced our sales. Their argument, that they would focus on the key releases, was neither factual nor convincing and played havoc with our plans to introduce new artists, develop existing artists in new repertoire and build a cohesive catalogue. Even more unreasonable was Polygram's refusal to allow us to find other distribution partners for recordings Polygram did not want to sell. We were not surprised when BMG Direct Marketing in New York said they would be delighted to have Deutsche Grammophon product to offer their customers

He came to Hamburg with one subject on his agenda: restructuring, an American corporate euphemism for firing people. It was a typical meeting with our management: he arrived late and left early. He noted darkly that the Universal corporate culture was "rougher" than Polygram's and that as German labor law made it difficult to remove people, we should make those reluctant to go miserable. When the meeting ended, Karsten Witt and I walked to the rail station, he vowing that he would never allow this sort of American culture to invade DGG. Not more than a week later, he announced that he would probably be leaving to take over the prestigious South Bank Festival in London. He knew he could not win the battle and warned me that we would not succeed in protecting DGG as a cultural and musical bastion. Witt, a man of great culture while not particularly interested in the recording business, left just in time.

He came to Hamburg with one subject on his agenda: restructuring, an American corporate euphemism for firing people. It was a typical meeting with our management: he arrived late and left early. He noted darkly that the Universal corporate culture was "rougher" than Polygram's and that as German labor law made it difficult to remove people, we should make those reluctant to go miserable. When the meeting ended, Karsten Witt and I walked to the rail station, he vowing that he would never allow this sort of American culture to invade DGG. Not more than a week later, he announced that he would probably be leaving to take over the prestigious South Bank Festival in London. He knew he could not win the battle and warned me that we would not succeed in protecting DGG as a cultural and musical bastion. Witt, a man of great culture while not particularly interested in the recording business, left just in time.

Robert's next step in dismantling the label came with the plan to centralize the re-release program in London. DGG's control of its catalogue, a cash engine, was vital to its survival. He warned me that this would happen despite all our objections. The DGG active catalogue represented a very small part of its total holdings, estimated at over seventy-five thousand master tapes. Could we not sell this catalogue on our Internet site which had over a million 'hits' per month? No.

We learned through the impressively well-informed grape-vine that Edgar Bronfman, Jr. was coming to Hamburg and assumed he would make an appearance at DGG, giving us an opportunity to acquaint him with the company. He did, indeed visit Hamburg, but never came near the office by the Alster, preferring to spend his time at Universal Music's office by the main rail station. When we read that Universal was paying vast sums to the Boston Consulting Group to review the situation with classical music, we anticipated another chance to make the case for our music. BCG only spoke with Roberts, never once visiting any of the three labels he managed. I was reminded of the period in the early 1960's when the US railroads wanted to end passenger services and concentrate on the more lucrative freight business. A conductor on the New York Central which served my town told me they planned to make service so poor that their would be no ridership and the carrier could make an easy case with the government agency which regulated the railroads. The analogy here was destroy the classical labels through cutbacks and unconcern and then discontinue what had become an unpr

Seasons

Anne-Sophie Mutter was the undisputed star on a label of stars. Only thirty-five and a household name in Germany, she had begun her storied career and begun recording for DGG twenty years earlier. Mutter had just recorded a uniquely compelling and highly personal set of the Beethoven Sonatas for Violin following a world-tour of the cycle. We recorded live in Wiesbaden when the performances were at their considerable peak. Her contract called for an additional recording, a disc of encores. I was having a good time researching unusual encores and thinking ahead to the next contract under which we would be producing the Mozart Concerti, possibly with Anne-Sophie conducting the ensemble as well, and the Beethoven Concerto which she had recorded many years previously with Karajan (and which still sold well.)

Rene van Hulst, the marketing manager, was perusing Mutter's concert schedule with an towards promotional opportunities, when he noticed that the violinist was touring Vivaldi's perennially popular 'Four Season' with an ensemble we were both unfamiliar with - the Trondheim Soloists. Mutter had recorded the 'Seasons' year before with Karajan, but for rival label EMI. Why not record it now for DGG. It would be her first play-conduct and had guaranteed sales potential. I called Anne-Sophie whose response was a very sane "Let's see." I decided to attend the tour's first concerts and ordered a set of the Trondheim group's recordings from our Oslo office.

The first concert was the extraordinary beginning of the adventure that would lead to Mutter's startlingly original recording of the famous Seasons and coincidentally prolong my employment. (Roberts waited till the recording was safely in the can and acted a half hour after the courier delivered the signed contract!) The Trondheim Soloists, an astonishingly young group of players led by the man who had been their teacher, Bjarne Fiskum, played with elan and spirit. There were rough edges to be sure but even these added an additional energy to what was already the liveliest collaboration imaginable. This performance would never have worked with a conductor. Mutter's troops followed her fearlessly from tempi faster than one imagined possible to the most elegant and refined moments without a hitch. Here, a conductor would have been in the way. Elated and excited by what I heard, I alerted key people at DGG to assume we would have a recording. As the tour progressed, various colleagues returned from the concerts as convinced as I was that we must have a recording. Mutter and I agreed to plan on the tours's penultimate date - in Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens Concert Hall - for the recording. We began contract negotiations and though we only reached agreement at the last possible moment, I always knew that this recording would take place. Preparations included the Scrooge-like payment to the Tivoli Gardens to shut down some of the nosier rides during our session time. We decided to record live with patch sessions.

In the meantime, I was back behind the controls at Abbey Road producing sessions with Kent Nagano conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein's White House Cantata, a concert reworking of LB's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a show which had not been a success despite some very fine music including the lovely song "Take Care of this House." We had assembled a great cast including Thomas Hampson who would portray a number of Presidents and June Anderson who impersonated the First Ladies. The text had a strong leftist bias and made rather unsporting fun of the Republicans but it all came right in the end for one of Bernstein's most moving finales "To burn with pride." It was fun being back in the producer's chair and to make matters easier, one of my employees was on hand as executive producer to take care of all the logistical details.

Our buy-out plan was proceeding with a good likelihood that the necessary money would be raised. Our bank contacts liked the plan we had devised and suggested that it was time to meet some potential funders. In their opinion, the company was worth at least four times the valuation we placed on it if managed properly. We met in a London board room on a Thursday afternoon. Van Hulst and I had explained our plan so many times that we had to force ourselves to add that note of energy and enthusiasm that repeated tellings had diminished. After answering questions and providing detailed answers for what seemed like the hundredth time, the gentlemen across the table simply said. "OK, We'll back you." Particularly pleasing was our provider of equity's comment that they backed people: I and my colleagues were the right people, in their opinion, to make the company work. This was a bold step as we were unable to give them much financial information. DGG's balance sheet was a closely guarded secret and even our President, despite repeated requests, did not have access to much of the financial information that would show, we were convinced, how profitable DGG was. At one point in the discussions, the bank's numbers cruncher, who's face was usually hidden behind a calculator, looked up and announced that not only was DGG a potential gold mine but that our personnel costs in comparison to our annual turnover was "trivial." Big smiles all around the table. The next step was how to present the offer. Everyone agreed that the decision maker was the head of Universal, Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and that he would have to be approached directly.

Conspiracies

Several days after this hopeful meeting, I boarded a plane to London for the much more pleasant task of hearing Cecila Bartoli and Bryn Terfel sing an evening of opera in the uniquely idyllic setting of Glyndebourne with Myung-Whun Chung conducting the London Philharmonic. On the flight with me as well was one of our staff producers, Sid McLauchlan, who produced Terfel's records. That morning, McLauchlan handed me the business card of a venture capital executive at one of the big brokerage house, suggesting I should speak with him. Did he know something or were we simply thinking along similar lines. He had asked me in a department meeting how a buy-out would work, just theoretically.

I took my seat on the Lufthansa jet preparing for a relaxing hour of peace and quiet and was undecided between a book and a nap. Shortly after take-off, the man next to me began to chat. He was an American and worked, he said, in the investment capital business. We chatted about business in general, the markets, and he offered to review my investment portfolio. In response to his question about my profession, I offered that I worked for Universal Music. Something put me on my guard when he asked if I knew anything about Deutsche Grammophon. "A very well run company" I offered in return. He asked me if the firm was "in play" and I noted that there persistent rumors that it was indeed for sale. As we landed, he kindly suggested that his waiting car - a red Jaguar with chauffeur - take me into the city. I asked if he had room for my colleague and the three of us along with his secretary headed into central London. As we left the plane, I cautioned Sid not to mention that we worked for DGG but only to say that we worked with Universal Music. Our new friend, who called himself Michael Adams, queried both of us about the music business during the forty or so minutes it took to get to London. I gave Adams my mobile-phone number on a blank piece of paper, thinking that if our venture capitalists fell through, he might be a good source. Sid McLauchlan noted that Adam's secretary looked like an actress.

When I arrived home and told Tammy the tale, she was immediately suspicious. I searched for his company, Schomburg Global Equity, on the Internet and found nothing. When I called the number on Adam's card, there was no Shomburg Global Equity at the other end but a strange sort of phone messaging service. I remember mentioning this curious airborne conversation to Chris Roberts who had nothing to say on the subject.

I should have listened to my wife. Mr Adams was, of course, a private detective. He later invited me to a meeting in which I told him about our plan. All investment bankers work under a code of privacy and confidentiality. Private detectives have other rules. We had signed no exclusive agreement with the bank that we had been working with and Mr Adams seemed to be providing some additional assurance. I did in fairness tell our bankers about Adams and his "firm." When I was called in to Robert's office to be fired, Mr Adam's dossier, an apparent transcript of our discussions, was the primary "evidence" against me.

A few months to go

Those last months at DGG moved swiftly. I was optimistic about the buy-out, busy with the Mutter recording, editing the White House Cantata and generally settling down to the job. Tammy and I only made one trip together in those five months - to Israel for my daughter Raya's wedding in a small village outside Tel-Aviv. Her husband's father was a scientist active in developing solutions to the problem of music software piracy. It was a quick trip with a short break away from my now large family including seven grandchildren - to the mysterious, magical Dead Sea. As we drove through the pristine Wilderness of Judea to our Kibbutz Hotel at Ein Gedi, I was drawn back to my army days, years before when I spent far too much time in the heat and dust of the desert. We had completed a particularly successful maneuver and our commander, as a reward, suggested a lottery to determine which lucky soldier would be allowed a rare, midweek visit home. I won lottery, when my name was drawn from a helmet. Covered in the powdery dust of the wilderness and dirty beyond measure from weeks of military exercises in an area where water is delivered by truck and for drinking only, I began the bus ride to Jerusalem. I noticed a newspaper ad for an Israel Philharmonic concert that evening with Isaac Stern performing the Prokofiev 1st Concerto. I would just make the concert if the bus arrived on time; the hall was just across the rode from the Jerusalem Central Bus Terminal.

I fell asleep, being jolted awake when my bullet cartridge fell out of my pocket onto the feet of a unpleasant looking Army Lieutenant Colonel. He reprimanded me and tired as I was, summoned a look of grave concern. Nothing was going to prevent this gift of a day off and the prospect of hearing a concert. I arrived at the hall with a half-hour to spare to find all tickets gone. A man appeared announcing he had a ticket for sale and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of hopeful concert-goers. He looked my way briefly and said, "I'm giving the ticket to the soldier." He refused my offer of the price of the ticket and entered the hall, ignoring a request to check my M-16 assault rifle. Soldiers in the Israeli army are married to their guns. Losing it often meant prison and I often had moments of angst after reserve duty ended when I didn't feel the gun's strap over my shoulder.

The ticket was in the first row and the gun would not fit under the seat. I must have looked a frightening sight in my filthy uniform and my gun propped up, pointing ominously as the spot on the stage where Stern would stand. He came out to the generous applause of the audience and bowed into the face of my rifle. He didn't play particularly well that evening and I have always felt responsible.

Music, as I mention elsewhere, was a particular comfort in the army During the Lebanon incursion, the power of Israel's classical radio program was increased to reach us north of the border. The programming was changed to an all-request format. A young girl called in asking that they play the Elgar Cello Concerto for her father who was in the army. I still remember standing on a hill-top overlooking Lake Karoun and the devastation of the recent battle with DuPre's inimitable performance playing through the tiny earpiece of my transistor radio.