Confessions of an Allergic Producer
by John Culshaw
LONDON--I have been reading some dreadful reports about what can happen to those whose profession re quires them to listen to high-decibel pop music for long periods. It seems that many of them go deaf before they are twenty-five, which is at least two years before the anticipated retirement age in that particular world. To the best of my knowledge no such affliction comes upon classical-music producers, if only because most of them are aware of Culshaw's First Principle of Recorded Sound, which states that anything, no matter how bad, will sound good if played back at a very high level for a short time. Thus classical producers tend to play back at an optimum level, high enough to drive the speakers efficiently but not so high as to sever the faculty of aural judgment.
Yet classical producers are not immune to other, horribly insidious maladies. In my very early days I produced a 78-rpm version of Bach's cello suites played by Enrico Mainardi that, at the outset, seemed like a very enjoy able project because the suites are marvelous and Mainardi was an en chanting man. But by the end of the second of six days I was going quietly insane during out-of-session hours by the sound of another cello playing incessantly in my head. Moreover, it was not playing Bach, but some mad, endless invention of its own that nothing would dispel until Mainardi picked up his cello and started the next suite. That, at least, was a temporary affliction; but there are much worse things, like allergies, which the classical producer can easily develop.
Shortly after the Mainardi incident British Decca began to cut its first LPs.
Since it had not yet acquired a tape machine, the method used was to dub directly from 78s, which meant lining up a row of turntables so that the end of one 78 side could be made, with luck, to dovetail with the start of the next. It was a perilous process, for if I gave a wrong cue or the operator whose job it was to "drop" the next pickup was a fraction early or late, or if the pickup skipped a groove or one turntable was even marginally different in speed from its predecessor (or about one thousand other things, now that I am thinking about those dreadful days again), there was nothing to do but go back to the start. And at the end of it all you had only produced one 33-rpm lacquer, whereas the factory always required at least two, so even after a successful run you had to do the thing all over again. I reckon that I heard Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra more times in six weeks than anyone else has heard them in a lifetime, and I have been allergic to them ever since. If trapped in a con cert hall when either piece is being played it takes a great effort of will to stop myself from leaping up and yelling "Drop!" at each four-minute cross over point.
That is an example of an induced allergy. But what about the real ones, the ones that you are born with and that, if you are a recording producer, you may have to disguise if you want to stay employed? After all, it takes a brave man to declare that he can't bear Puccini just when he has been as signed to produce the latest Butterfly.
The trouble is that we are all to varying extents victims of fashion: if you abominate Beethoven and happen to be a dentist, the worst that can hap pen is that you will be regarded as an eccentric and risk the loss of a few Beethoven-loving patients, but if you are a music student of similar persuasion, you may become an outcast.
Even when you are established you risk ostracism if you so much as nudge a sacred cow, which almost happened to me some years ago when fate de creed that I should produce four recordings of Beethoven's Seventh virtually one after the other. This led me to express the opinion that the As soi mono presto in the third movement was the most boring, pretentious clodhopping music ever committed to paper and that it made me sick to see conductors drooling over its spurious profundities instead of treating it as the rather poor Austrian folksong (or imitation thereof) which it actually is.
This mild observation caused sensitive ladies to faint and worthy gentle men to turn their backs.
The fact is that we are alternately inhibited and two-faced about our allergies. I can think of one well-known conductor who dares not mention the fact that he loathes Mozart's operas.
Fifty years ago you would have been thought eccentric if you admired Mahler, whereas today you are eccentric if you do not. Size also has something to do with the case in an in verse sort of way: It is permissible to attack Wagner's Ring or Beethoven's Ninth, but it is a heresy to suggest that even some of Haydn's symphonies are workaday trifles or that the only thing that makes Stravinsky's Mass bear able at all is its extreme brevity.
I am conscious that these views may cost me whatever reputation I have left. Yet, in the unlikely event that any record company should take pity and become concerned about my chances of earning a living henceforward. I must state that whatever happens I shall never be in the market to pro duce the complete unaccompanied viola sonatas of Max Reger.
(High Fidelity, Nov. 1977)
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