Philip Hobbs - Too Many Records

I was one of those appalling children who was born with the demeanour and sensibilities of a fifty-year old. I managed to maintain this through most of my teens, eschewing outdoor activity of kind in favour of a variety of nerdish interests involving music and electronics. Only work saved me from a lifetime of ‘fogeydom'; at the age of sixteen I turned up for my first day at work at the Hifi company, Linn Products, in my three-piece suit, eager to learn more of the intimate secrets of loudspeakers. I was given a tub of bitumen and a brush. Twenty-odd years later I'm still there, which may demonstrate a staggering lack of enterprise, but I like to think it is more to do with the fact that because I was lucky enough to find myself in a business that was prepared to let their people go where their ideas took them. So when in the late 1980s I thought I might try to make some classical and jazz recordings, the question was not why, but how? It was worth it in the end: this year we're Gramophone Label of the Year, a huge honour, while between them Linn Records and Linn Hifi are rapidly building a new market for streamed high resolution ‘Studio Masters' and. Business has never been better.

I was born and brought up just outside Glasgow, which conveniently is also where Linn is based. However I've effectively lived on the road for most of at least the last 15 years:. my career. One of the curious realities of recording classical music is just how few really good places there are to do it: since quite apart from the obvious prerequisite of an excellent acoustic, the number of places which are actually immune to the global infection of traffic and aircraft noise is vanishingly small. You have to go to where the halls are. so life for the recording engineer/producer is essentially itinerant.  

However, there are compensations. As I write I'm sitting in from the control room of Potton Hall, in deepest Suffolk, quite a long way from the madding crowd and on the edge of the Minsmere Bird reserve. From my window I have my own personal version of AutumnWatch, with the creature-count for the last hour standing at two red deer, innumerable rabbits and a beautiful green woodpecker.  Better still, the Breathless commentary is provided not by Kate Humble, but by the magnificent Kate Royal, delivering yet another ravishing take of Duparc's ‘Extase'.  It is important to Please remember that this constitutes work. 

There was music all around me when I was growing up. My parents met in the church choir and My dad was, and still is, is still active in the local Gilbert and Sullivan society and I maintain a passing interest in this myself and. It has proved surprisingly useful; if you can detect Gilbertian sympathies in those around you, then there is no end to what you can get away with. Dear and much-lamented Sir Charles, of Pineapple Poll amongst so much else, was a case in point: any growing irritation with regard to violin balance could easily be diverted, if not entirely assuaged, by ‘if one of us must destroy the other, let it be me!'   

A small epiphany occurred when I was about ten, in York, ostensibly to visit my grandmother, but more importantly making pilgrimage to Banks, in those days the most splendid music shop on earth. A labyrinth of tiny rooms and musty cardboard files on the corner of mediaeval Stonegate, Banks had its own house elves who had traded any contact with daylight for a ferocious knowledge of sheet music and a splendidly Yorkshire-camp solicitude. The whole place felt like a bizarre amalgam of Diagon Alley and the Fast Show's "suits you" outfitters, but I loved it and would spend hours there, rummaging. And there I found a slightly tatty marked-down box set of Harnoncourt's Weihnachtsoratorium. I had no idea what this was and certainly couldn't pronounce it, but it was obviously monumental, and surprisingly cheap.

I think it took me about a month to get beyond the first chorus. As with so many things in life, it is impossible to un-know something, but I still wish I could repeat the thrill of first hearing that blaze of D major when the chorus comes in with the first full ‘Jauchzet'.  I was astonished by the work, but the longer I spent with the recording the more I was drawn into the sound-world, where you could hear individual voices and where each line had real character.  

This was authentic performance and I discovered that it was all around me: original instruments, smaller, focussed forces, tuning based on ancient temperaments. I was fascinated by the technology and archaeology of it all. I loved the purity of tone and clarity of line of these recordings, since it seemed to me that you really could hear far more clearly what was unfolding in the music. But the thing I found utterly addictive was the sound. I've always been fascinated not just by music but, as Beecham would have it, "by the noise it makes" and I found that these textures and colours were just more brightly painted.

I worked my way through the rest of the Cantatawerk with enthusiasm, but other voices soon came into view. I found two Classics for Pleasure albums, both now so famous as to be genuinely commonplace: The Clerkes of Oxenford's recording of Spem in Alium, and the original Tallis Scholars' Allegri Miserere. They are still a fascinating pair, showing how in just a few years David Wulstan's pioneering work on pitch and vibrato-free voice production was then carried forward by Peter Phillips' meticulous attention to ensemble and intonation. The amazing thing was that these were hugely important albums which genuinely changed the musical landscape, but they were on sale in the corner of every Woolworths in the country and through their very ubiquity opened up this area of repertoire to an entirely new public.

The Tallis Scholars' Allegri, but actually more the Palestrina Missa Papa Marcelli which accompanied it was were the background to all my school revision, on an ancient Walkman, whose batteries were so suspect that by the end of a couple of hours the pitch was down by about a 4th. A few years later I had the great good fortune to start making recordings with Peter Phillips and Steve Smith, his producer, a relationship which continues and which I still relish.  Most of my early recordings for them were done in the lovely church in Salle in Norfolk, which was a delightful place to spend time, but these recordings never had the magic of the Allegri recording. Then in 1998 we made a ‘live' recording in Merton Chapel, Oxford, and suddenly ‘that sound' came back. For the last few years we've been recording in Merton regularly and I have come to really enjoy it. In fact I've just been back there recording the complete Byrd viol music with Phantasm. No matter how much technology you throw at the problem, the building is as much part of the performance as any other aspect.

And some of them have very distinct personalities, which become very familiar indeed over time. In Britain one of the most characterful best is St Jude-on-the-Hill, Lutyen's great cathedral in the miniature New Delhi at the top of Hampstead Garden Suburb. It is an enormous barn of a church, with has a wonderful acoustic, which you will know from any number of recordings, from St Hildegard of Hyperion's Feather on the Breath of God through to Ian Bostridge's new Three Baroque Tenors. Many of the great Academy of Ancient Music recordings were made there, and in particular, their ‘Foundling Hospital' version of Messiah, which I played to death.  It has many virtues, and it was impossible not to have it at the back of my mind as I worked when working on the Dunedin Consort's 1742 version, but for me the greatest marvel of the AAM recording was the string sound. Decca's engineering is beautifully warm and clear, but the sound of gut strings in St Jude's is one of the most expensive sounds you will ever hear. About twenty years ago now I got to record it for myself. There are very few real moments of ‘arrival' in this line of work, since it is mostly about making sure that everyone else is happy and able to perform to their best, but the first time I opened the fader in St Jude's with a baroque orchestra at the other end was one of  the best of them.