After completing his music studies in London, post-graduate studies at the Hamburg music conservatory and two years as Musical Assistant at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg’s principal theatre, Christopher Alder joined Deutsche Grammophon as a tape editor in 1980.

Trained by the company as a recording engineer, he became a Recording Producer in 1986. Three years later, Alder was also appointed Executive Producer and for the next two decades was unique at Deutsche Grammophon in combining both those roles. Since 2004 he has produced the recordings of the label’s best-selling artist, soprano Anna Netrebko.

In the course of his career at Deutsche Grammophon, Alder has produced several hundred recordings, including all of Maurizio Pollini’s and virtually all of Claudio Abbado’s. He has also made countless solo albums with Martha Argerich, Kathleen Battle, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, the Emerson String Quartet, Yevgeny Kissin, Magdalena Kozená, Yundi Li, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Anna Netrebko, Maria João Pires, Thomas Quasthoff, Mstislav Rostropovich and Bryn Terfel, and worked with other international stars such as Bruno Ganz, Sting and Roberto Benigni.

Alder has also produced numerous orchestral and opera recordings with Myung-Whun Chung, James Levine, Paul McCreesh, Seiji Ozawa and André Previn, as well as Claudio Abbado, working with all the world’s great orchestras and leading singers. In 2006 two of his recordings won two Grammy awards, and his production of Mozart’s Zauberflöte (Magic Flute) conducted by Abbado received the coveted Gramophone award as “Opera Recording of the Year”.

In February 2007 Christopher won another Grammy for his recording of the Chopin Nocturnes with Maurizio Pollini, making this his sixth Grammy Award in total.

For German, French and international TV Alder has been the audio producer of several New Year’s Eve concerts; the Berlin Philharmonic’s annual Europe Concerts in Lisbon, Athens, Budapest and Palermo, with Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Mariss Jansons, Sir Simon Rattle; concerts from the Lucerne Festival; and concerts from Berlin’s Waldbühne, the most recent one featuring Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazón and Plácido Domingo.

In 2008 he was the audio producer for TV coverage of the historic visit of the New York Philharmonic to North Korea with Lorin Maazel.

In recent years Christopher has been working as a freelance producer. He has continued to make albums at Deutsche Grammophon with Anna Netrebko, Thomas Quasthoff, Gustavo Dudamel and Maurizio Pollini among others. He has also been asked to record with the major artists of other labels such as Placido Domingo, Jonas Kaufmann, Vittorio Grigolo, Lang Lang , Yundi Li and Aleksandra Kurzak for SONY, DECCA and EMI as well as at numerous small labels; and privately by artists like Thomas Hampson, Catherine Manoukian, Luca Pisaroni, Stefan Solyom, and Andrew von Oeyen, and by organisations such as the Orquestra Nacional de Espana and the Los Angeles Phílharmonic. He is much in demand for TV and video productions (see ‘Recordings‘).

Since 2008 Christopher has won a further four Grammy Awards for albums, most recently in 2014 when the album of Verdi Arias with Plácido Domingo, the Orchestra of Valencia conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado was awarded the Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album. This brings Chris’s total count to ten.