News from Orchid

Orchid Classics is delighted to announce the recruitment of industry veteran Hywel Davies to the team.
Click here to read more

Norman Lebrecht promotes a series of special downloads over the festive period, the music being provided by Orchid Classics and another independent label, Onyx.

Read all about it here

Guy Johnston Film

Click here to view a brilliant short film about Guy Johnston and the making of his new album:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VVdjgEbZUM&feature=player_embedded

June newsletter

Click here to see our June newsletter

http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=a2af71e1a956abb0e0166beb6&id=32ad76bf62&e=1e54bc687f

Conchord

London Conchord Ensemble are today's CD of the week in the Daily Telegraph- congratulations to them!

Rave Reviews

Our two new albums, Guy Johnston and London Conchord Ensemble, are both available to buy now!
Click here to see the fantastic reviews coming in.....

http://www.orchidclassics.com/press.htm

Brodsky blog

After a four year break from recording it was lovely to be back at Potton Hall with its easy acoustics and beautiful surroundings. It was particularly pretty in the snow and quite a contrast to the taste of the music we were recording- steamy South American and Hispanic flavours and the great impressionist painting that is Ravel's quartet.

Trips to the pub after a full day's work often revealed startled deer in the dusky light, perfectly in keeping with the winter wonderland picture. Luckily Jeremy keeps his studio cosy and warm...

Patrick got some lovely snap-shots, which should look great in the booklet. Who needs long and stressful photo-calls?!

See below for pictures of the sessions

May releases on Orchid

Brodsky Quartet session pics

This week the Brodsky Quartet were at Potton Hall, making their first album for Orchid.

Pictures: Patrick Allen

James Gilchrist blog

Jan 2010.

It's a few months now since Die Schöne Müllerin finally hit the shelves, and we have had a chance to draw breath and think about what we have managed to achieve. For Anna and me, the appearance of this disc was both an end and a beginning. An end for us, because we have wanted to record this piece for so many years, and have approached so many record companies to be turned down solely on the fact of my not being a native German speaker; and a beginning since, having found a company that seems to want to be bold and break out a little from the norms of the industry, we hope to be doing more!

DSM is a work Anna and I have performed more and more often through our (yikes!) twelve-year partnership, and recording it last year felt like the right time. It's the right way round to do things: to know a work inside out and then to set down a recorded version. In some ways the sessions themselves were the easiest bit: we knew what we wanted to say, and just had to hold in our minds the span and drama of a live performance. It is truly daunting to record such a well-known and well-recorded work. We felt that we had to hold onto our belief to do it how we felt right, and not worry about comparisons and critics and received opinion. We knew from our many live performances that though our approach delighted many, some were always troubled by the more drama-oriented stance, and felt offended that we couldn't "leave Schubert alone". I know what I think about leaving Schubert alone: he was 31 when he died, and did not have the Giant status he has rightly since acquired, and I'm quite sure that to demand a Schubertian "orthodoxy" is to lose the very heart of the passion that moved this young man to write such works of genius. Anna and I simply had to do it as we felt right, as we felt had moved the audiences we have stood in front of, and we had to trust our belief in the work and ourselves. To me, it's partly a mark of this music's greatness that it does really still speak through so many and such varied performances. But all this is easier said than done in such a cut-throat and public arena. So I must say, there was much nail-biting before the critical reception became known. And by and large, it did go down well. I think we haven't had such a consistently good field of reviews ever before, and we were really delighted.

Looking ahead, Orchid has asked us to record Winterreise and Schwanengesang. This is like a dream come true! The plan at the moment is to record in May, so now it's back to the huge task of coordinating another recording - booking venues, engineers, translators, coaches, writers, pianos and tuners. But the goal is in sight of setting down our vision of these works and to hope our freshness and belief in them comes out in a way that will move audiences and persuade them that English artists have something to say about great Austrian music. January in the snow seems like the right time to be thinking about a new winter journey.

Trio session pics

The as yet un-named trio consisting of Matthew Trusler, Lawrence Power and Simon Crawford-Philips was in the studio last week, recording works for violin, viola and piano by Bax, Brahms and rebecca Clark.

Lawrence


Lawrence & Simon


Simon


Someone thought it would be a good idea to switch instruments around for a while. It sounded suprisingly good actually.


Although Matthew still hasn't learnt the viola clef...

Conchord ask the questions...

Conchord members Maya, Dan, Emily and Julian ask each other some challenging questions:

Maya: What is your favourite city (after St Petersburg of course)?
Julian: Vienna
Emily: Spoleto, Italy (where I played two Russian operas, Eugene Onegin and War and Peace)
Maya: Paris (surprise surprise!)

Emily: What is your favourite Russian piece of music? (aside from Balakirev, of course:-)
Daniel: Eugene Onegin, Tschaikovsky. Devastating and perfect!
Julian: So many…but Evgeny Onegin is probably the piece I would take to a desert island
Maya: Glazunov String Quintet is certainly one of them. Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto (with Rachmaninov). Tchaikovsky 5 (Happy Philharmonia memories with Muti). Stravinsky Firebird. Balakirev Islamey. Glazunov Violin Concerto (Milstein). And so many more!

Maya: What was your most memorable experience of this recording?
Julian: Looking at the night sky above Potton Hall!
Emily: Other than the recording of course(!) jumping on Jeremy Hayes' trampoline in recording breaks
Maya: Jeremy Hayes keeping a smile on his face after 11 hours of recording in one day... (and everyone else, too, actually!)

Emily: What has been your best seafood experience in Suffolk?
Daniel: lobster and chips, Aldeburgh fish and chip shop
Julian: The Butley Oysterage at Orford

Emily: Do they play wooden flutes in St Petersburg?
Daniel: Balakirev Octet would certainly have been played on a wood flute. So I will be helping to recreate original 19th century Russian sound!
Maya: Really???! I had no idea!

Maya: How long did it take you to read Crime and Punishment (718 pages..)?
Julian: Several months – the book is connected in my mind with a neighbour playing Mahler 10 over and over again at top volume, creating an unforgettable mixture of Austrian and Russian angst...
Emily: I'm embarrassed to say that have not read Crime and Punishment (yet), but have read War and Peace, which took about 6 weeks...

Emily: What is your favourite flavour of the Russian dumplings I make on Christmas eve? (a leftover of my Ukrainian heritage!)
Daniel: sauerkraut and mushroom

Maya: Have you ever seen more stars than in the Potton Hall sky?
Julian: No
Emily: I have only seen more stars in my homeland of Minnesota, where I've seen the Northern Lights.=

BBC Choice for Korngold

Matthew Trusler's new Korngold/Rozsa album has received five stars and is selected as 'Music Choice' in the Christmas issue of BBC Music Magazine.

Gilchrist Gramophone Editor's choice

Congratulations to James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook on receiving the Gramophone Editor's Choice for their new Schubert recording.

The pitfalls of live recording

Tony Wass, the Chief Engineer of Ninth Wave Audio, describes the experience of recording Ex Cathedra in Bach's St Matthew Passion, under the pressure of a ‘live’ performance.

"Live recording is always an unknown quantity as there are so many potential pitfalls. Apart from the obvious musical considerations there are the problems of extraneous noise from the audience and technical issues. These days equipment and techniques are very reliable but there is always scope for something to go wrong; we are human after all!

I remember attending a performance of Liszt’s ‘Christus’ in Westminster Cathedral many years ago, as a member of the audience. Seconds before the live transmission started the sling wire holding the main microphone across and over the audience became detached and the microphone fell stopping just short of their heads - I’ve never seen engineers move so fast! Thankfully Health and Safety and better techniques prevent such occurrences these days!

No such problems in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, though, certainly one of the world’s greatest concert halls and a very rewarding place to work. The hall ‘takes no prisoners’ though as the acoustic is ruthlessly analytical and the silences are truly silent!

Bach’s St Matthew also presents its own challenges. It is a very ‘bitty’ work with many short recitatives and choruses using different styles and forces. The performers are divided into two distinct groups left and right, Chori I and II, which are a virtual mirror image of each other. Then there are many small solos which are usually sung by chorus members from different areas of the stage, as well as obbligato instrumental solos played from within the orchestra. In addition there are large-scale arias from nine soloists and the whole work is unified by the role of the Evangelist, a solo tenor who tells the story of Christ’s Passion in recitatives. So in many ways it is a very ‘operatic’ work. It is also a profound dramatic, musical and spiritual journey, and a live performance gives the unfolding architecture an emotional depth that is very difficult to achieve in the sterile environment of the recording studio. This is what makes for such a rewarding experience."

Conchord Session Pics

Conchord recording their forthcoming album, of music by composers from St Petersburg, at Potton Hall in Suffolk.
(photos: Patrick Allen, www.operaomnia.co.uk)



Julian Milford and Maximiliano Martin


Andrea, Maya, Tom and Joel (in serious mode)


Joel Waterman


Gemma Rosefield


Thomas Carroll



Tom, Andrea, Gemma, Ning, Maya and Joel

Ex Cathedra pics

Pictures of Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra, during the rehearsals and live recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion, at Symphony Hall, Birmingham.
(photos: Patrick Allen)

Gilchrist CD of the Month

James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook's new recording of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin has been awarded Classic FM Magazine's Vocal CD of the Month.

BBC Music Magazine declared 'In a highly competitive field of ever more thought-provoking recordings of Die schöne Müllerin, this latest one is worthy to stand with the best.'

Matthew Trusler Blog

Finally the album is out- it seems like so long ago we made it!
Recording in Dusseldorf was a fantastic, if fairly stressful experience. We had flown over Patrick the engineer, Jeremy the producer, Yasuo the conductor and me the violinist, so there was a constant sense that if any one of us ate an unfriendly shrimp, or became ill by any other means, the whole thing would fall apart like a house of cards. By some miracle nobody did, and the week went by pretty smoothly.
As you can see from the photo below, the recording box in the Tonhalle was about half a mile up in the sky, and climbing what seemed like several thousand stairs in between takes to see if we liked what we'd just played lost its novelty very quickly indeed. The sound was wonderful in there though, a really memorable place to make a record.
Dusseldorf itself is a very interesting place to spend a few days- hundreds of Japanese restaurants to feed the massive Japanese community there, and, of course, the Schumann connection. Schumann was Music Director at the orchestra, and threw himself in the river in fact. Producer Jeremy disappeared off on a Schumann pilgrimage during a morning off, but opted not to follow in the great man's footsteps by having a swim in the river.
The pieces- Rozsa and Korngold- are two of my very favourite concertos. Both terribly difficult but great fun to play. I just wish Heifetz hadn't recorded them...

The view from the recording box
(photo: Patrick Allen)

Gilchrist Session Pics

James Gilchrist with pianist Anna Tilbrook, recording Die schöne Müllerin at Champs Hill.
(photos: Patrick Allen)