We continued our recording in Yerevan with the cellist Mario Brunello and the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergey Smbtyan. The main work was Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s cello concerto as well as the 7 Dances by Martin Ulikhanyan. At the end of August I went to Shanghai for the start of a large project, recording all of Shostakovich’s symphonies. Long Yu rehearsed the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for over a week before we arrived (we being the balance engineer Rainer Maillard and myself) and we had 5 days of sessions for Symphony No.5 and Symphony No.7 “Leningrad” as well as concerts.

I started the year with a regular client, the harp and piano duo Praxedis. The quality of repertoire which they have found for this combination of instruments – which was very popular in the 19th century – always impresses me.

In February I went to Luxembourg to work with the violinist Natalia van der Mersch and pianist Natalia Kovalzon. We recorded Grieg’s violin sonatas at an unusual location – in the middle of a palace belonging to a major bank. Security guards escorted us to and from the hall. Later in the month I was together again with the Armenian Sate Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sergey Smbtyan. The cello concerto Ubi est Abel frater tuus? by Tigran Mansurian was the main work, and the soloist was Mario Brunello.

In April I went to Madrid to record Mahler’s Symphony No.6 with the Orquesta Nacional de España under the baton of David Afkham. It was a great pleasure to record this wonderful work again and the Auditorio Nacional is one of my favourite halls. In May we continued and finished the recording with Lang Lang of Piano Book II in Paris. We recorded rather more repertoire than will end up on the double album so that a good balance could be found between classical and modern pieces.

In June I was delighted to record again with Plácido Domingo. We were in Madrid for a week to record some zarzuela arias including some not recorded by him before. Oliver Diaz conducted the orchestra.

In August I was in Armenia for a recording with the Armenia State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergey Smbatyan. The repertoire was of songs by Artur Grigoryan, an important Armenia composer in the latter half of the 20th century. His songs were deservedly popular, and Martin Ulikhanyan arranged them for large orchestra for the recording.

Returning to Hamburg, more songs, these by Oliver Gruhn. Sebastian Lang-Lessing conducted the Hamburger Symphoniker in three major song cycles, as well as two songs by Richard Strauss completed and orchestrated by Gruhn. Shortly afterwards I went to London to record a varied program including Bernstein’s Serenade with Esther Yoo and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Long Yu.

In November we started an important project with Lang Lang in Paris. ‘Piano Book II’ continues a theme initiated in the first Piano Book album. It is a collection of classical masterpieces, modern favorites and treasured themes from gaming, anime, and film.

An unusual recording this one. At the end of 2023 I had received a mail from Laurie Christman asking if I could imagine making a recording with the London Symphony Orchestra of her compositions. She told me she is a 70 year old nurse in Californian hospice with no formal compositional training, and she had saved up for several years to have her compositions recorded. I was very sceptical, but she had included two demo tracks which impressed me. I agreed and we were fortunate that Robert Ziegler accepted to conduct, having looked at the scores. Unusually, the orchestra applauded after the first run through of the first number and we were all very happy with the results. The album is due to appear in 2025.

Due to the illness of a colleague I was asked at short notice to fly to Yerevan to record Camille Thomas and the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sergey Smbtyan. The album consisted of arrangements for solo cello and orchestra of songs by Charles Aznavour to celebrate his 100th anniversary year. The mixture of Camille’s sunny temperament and musicality with the enthusiasm of the orchestra was quite intoxicating. It will be a lovely album.

We also recorded the short violin concerto by the Armenia composer Tigran Mansurjan (whom I knew from a previous recording of his works in 2021). The wonderful young violinist Leia Zhou was the soloist. She proved to have formidable stamina, having missed a flight due to a delay, then spending 12 hours at Vienna airport and arriving at 6 in the morning for the midday session.

September started with a recording in the south of my home city, in the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle. This school auditorium is famous in the recording world (but unknown even to Hamburg citizens) and many famous pianists have recorded here, including Wilhelm Kempff, Ivo Pogorelich, Vladimir Horowitz, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Nelson Freire, and Maria Joao Pires. I was here for an unusual combination of harp and piano original repertoire, played by the Swiss virtuosi Praxedis Duo.

For the rest of the month and much of October I decided to take a long holiday, interspersed with some editing. In November there was a giant and exciting project planned in Shanghai, a work commissioned by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director Long Yu. Émigré, composed by Aaron Zigman on a libretto by Mark Campbell, is a 90 minute cross between an opera and a musical and is based on the story of two Jewish brothers, Otto and Josef, who fled from Germany to Shanghai in the late 1930s. (Shanghai welcomed at least 25,000 Jews from central Europe despite the Japanese invasion.) Josef falls in love with Lina, a Chinese woman recovering from her loss of her mother in the Nanjing Massacre. The cast included Meiji Zhang, Diana Newman, Huiling Zhu, Matthew White, Arnold Geis, Andrew Dwan, Shengyang, and members of the New York Philharmonic Chorus with their chorus master Malcolm Merryweather. The week in Shanghai was hard work but fun, and as always we were well looked after by the staff of the SSO. The weeks following, up to shortly before Christmas, I spent editing so that Émigré was ready for the launch of Apple Music in China and for its release on Deutsche Grammophon coinciding with performances with the New York Philharmonic at the end of February.

A busy summer, starting off with a week in Leipzig for a French programme featuring Lang Lang and the Gewandthaus Orchestra conducted by Andrew Nelsons. The repertoire was the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No.2 and the popular Carnival of Animals, where Lang Lang was joined by Gina Alice. A mixture of several concerts and studio sessions, the recording was also filmed by arte for television. To complete the recording, pieces for 4 hands by Ravel, Fauré and Debussy were also set down. The following month, in July in Paris, Lang Lang recorded solo rarities by French female composers including Lili Boulanger, Charlotte Sohy and Germaine Tailleferre. The piano summer continued in Munich with sessions in the Herkulessaal with with Maurizio and Daniele Pollini. They recorded the Schubert f minor Fantasie for 4 hands, and Maurizio also played the G major sonata D894 and Daniele the Moments Musicaux D780.

In August the Swiss guitarist Christoph Denoth came to Hannover and recorded an exciting programme of Spanish music in the Tesmar studios. From there it was a few hours drive to the middle of the Belgian countryside where, in a beautiful chateau near Conjoux, the violinist Natalie van der Mersch played and recorded the Brahms violin sonatas. She was accompanied by Olivier Roberti on the piano.

The summer is of course festival time and musicians are either on holiday with their families, preparing their busy autumn and winter programs, or playing at festivals. Recordings tend to become rare and we producers are normally trying to finish off those productions which will appear in the weeks before Christmas. So it was this year, except for a video production with Maurizio Pollini in
Salzburg, which had to be canceled due to the artist’s post-Covid complications. Most of August I had to finish the editing of several albums including the Beethoven recorded in April with Pollini and the two violin discs from the beginning of the year. This was especially hard because of the extremely hot weather. I moved to our house in the Alps where it was cooler at night which made life easier.
At the beginning of September I attended the launch of the Disney Album with Lang Lang in Paris. This was a large affair with over a hundred label managers, press and music industry people from all over the world in the Hotel de la Ville. The album was released in the USA a week later and immediately reached #1 in the Billboard charts. Later in the autumn Daniele Pollini recorded pieces by Debussy in Munich and this too will have to be edited fairly quickly.

I enjoyed the sessions with the violinist Natalia van der Mersch of pieces by Kreisler for violin and piano – absolutely the right music for Spring. The recording took place in the music room of the Chateau de Conjoux in Belgium, a lovely place in the middle of the countryside close to the Luxembourg border. Shortly afterwards we were recording two late Beethoven sonatas op.101 and op.106 with Maurizio Pollini. Putting down op.106 “Hammerklavier” is a challenge for any pianist but Pollini was full of energy, especially considering he will be celebrating his 80th birthday at the beginning of 2023. The recording will be released at the beginning of December 2022.
In May a few days were spent in Zürich at the Swiss Radio studios Brunnenhof recording a mixed program with the Praxedis Harp Duo. This wonderful studio and building has housed the SRF for 80 years and will now be turned into a music school (SRF radio will join the TV in a new building). One of the main attractions for us apart from the perfect acoustics was the proximity of the 24 hour canteen to the control room! In June Maurizio Pollini returned to the Herkulessaal with his son Daniele to record a Schubert program including the f minor Fantasy for four hands.

The year started as the year 2021 ended – with editing a backlog of recordings, especially the June 2021 sessions with Daniele Pollini, August 2021 sessions with the Praxedis harp and piano duo and the very recent London recording of November 2021 with Esther Yoo playing Bruch and Barber violin concertos partnered by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, recorded at the end of 2021.

At the end of January another recording of the famous Bruch violin concerto also in London but this time with the Philharmonia orchestra and the excellent young Austrian conductor Patrick Hahn. I had already heard glowing praise for the the Canadian soloist Kerson Leong and the sessions were delightful. Britten’s wonderful violin concerto was the other main work and Bruch’s In memoriam a charming filler.

In February I had a couple of days in Paris adding a few pieces to the Disney album with Lang Lang. With these sessions the album is finally finished – in fact more than two hours of music. Some of the pieces which are not from Disney films will appear later. Most of the rest of this quarter was spent editing and mixing this big project. Due for a late summer release, the pressure was on to wrap up the post-production as the Chinese censorship process can take a few months.