on recording ❧ 67
the recording sessions could be held only in the later evening and early morn-
ing hours. While night recording sessions have the advantages of greater quiet
and freedom from disturbance, I dislike them intensely because I can under-
take very little in terms of work or distraction throughout the preceding day
and early evening in order to be fi t for the forthcoming recording session.
The mania for recording in large halls persisted into the following year,
when recording sessions for the French Suites were arranged in the Friedrich-
Ebert-Halle, across the Elbe from Hamburg. This was a great barn of a place
that immediately proved to be totally unsuitable. In its vast spaces, the harp-
sichord emitted nothing but what sounded like a series of faint chirps. We
then transferred our activities to the foyer of a beautiful eighteenth-century
house in Blankenese. The surroundings were lovely, but the stucco-marble of
the foyer worked like a super-bathroom and made the sound of the harpsi-
chord swim in a blur of not-always-comprehensible polyphony. Why recording
companies choose such preposterous locales for their undertakings I will never
understand, any more than I understand the changing fashions of hi-fi sound.
The arrangements of the following year in Berlin in a little Protestant
church in Dahlem were more suitable for the recording of the Partitas and the
Goldberg Variations, although the conditions of living, eating, transport, and of
getting rest between sessions were deplorable. One of the hardest things to put
up with through a long sojourn in Germany is German food. It is complicated,
heavy, pork-oriented, drowned in sauce that guarantees frequent visits to the
dry cleaner of any article of clothing, and defi cient in simple vegetables, fresh
fruit, and in salad which is not soaking wet and contaminated by a mixture of
bad oil, worse vinegar, onion, and sugar.
Since the recording teams of Deutsche Grammophon were obliged to travel
so much, especially for the recording of orchestras in their own locales, the
company had never acquired its own studio. I learned that a subsidiary com-
pany, Polydor in Paris, had as a studio a converted cinema in the Rue des Dames
not far from the Place Clichy. Upon inspection, this studio seemed as good
as anything I had previously used, and I vastly preferred being in Paris where
I had friends and the possibility of comestible food. Deutsche Grammophon
had ordered a new Bach model Neupert to be built, supposedly according
to my wishes, in order to replace the unsatisfactory instruments I had had in
Berlin and Zurich in 1958. For the recordings with the Festival Strings Lucerne
in September 1958, I had been presented with a lottery of rental instruments
that bore all the marks of having spent the summer in a waterlogged cave.
Although it had slightly better basses, the new harpsichord turned out to be
just another run-of-the-mill Neupert Bach model. I recorded on it the French
Overture, the Italian Concerto, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and the Four Duets.
[RK inserts a note here to check this statement]. The Paris studio had the
advantage of having about the right size and of being equipped with curtains
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
#1