5121cdd@houxm.UUCP (C.DORY) (10/22/84)
I knew as soon as I hit the "return" key after the "inews" command on my last posting that someone would take offense to the way it appears I slighted the Cleveland Symphony. My statement, however, was not meant that way at all. By "smaller", I was speaking in terms of commercial output and recording contracts. Take a look in a recent Schwann catalog and you'll understand what I mean -- Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York each have many more commercial products on the market than does Cleveland. The major labels such as RCA, London, DG, et.al. have long-standing contracts with these orchestras. Cleveland while definitely top-five in terms of musicality, it is well behind the other four in terms of commercial output. Enough said. (However, I am still partial to Chicago (for its brass) and Philadelphia for its strings -- sorry Greg.) In my experience recording musicians, I really have found three camps: (1) Those who want note-perfect performances -- these are the types that even after hours and hours of editing seem to get MORE critical as time goes by. (2) Those who want good, cohesive performances and are willing to "get it right the first time" with a minimum of edits and overdubs. (3) And, those who simply don't care -- all they're worried about is when the next break is and making sure they get paid overtime scale for that extra ten minutes. Luckily, the majority of my contacts and clientele have been in camp #2. I recently mastered for a record the New Brunswick Chamber Orchestra and the Westminster Choir College Oratorio Choir performing a previously unrecorded Hummel Mass. There were two sessions with extensive preparation for each. The conductor of the chamber orchestra and I went through the score so I would be familiar with the work -- I even went to rehearsals and recorded a performance of the piece before the sessions. After the first session, the conductor and I listened to all the takes making value judgements as to which takes were good, which weren't and what we needed to do for the second session. After the second session, a week later, we assembled the final tape ready for disk mastering -- there was only one edit needed in a 40 min. (approx) piece. The musicians, however, are not the problem in commercial recordings. Rather it is the producer(s) and front-office types (generally the ones that know nothing about music) that are the real trouble. The producer as well as the director lay their reputations out for everyone to judge on each recording. The front-office accountants count the beans, and, naturally have their concept on how things should be run (albeit somewhat askew of reality). Remember, the great majority of these large companies has historically made recordings to sound good on the "average" person's system (whatever the !?$# that is). The corporate philosophy is to make money. We can be thankful of companies like Telarc who have showed that it is possible to make money (look at how much Telarc's catalog has expanded in the last five years) as well as put out a good product. Craig Dory AT&T Bell Laboratories