Klaus Mäkelä: My recordings get photoshopped
OrchestrasA new biodoc by Bruno Monsaingeon examines how the young Finn makes recordings:
‘When we record these days, everything has been done over and over and done very well. We therefore want to push our concept as far as possible. The priority is obviously music made on stage recorded during concerts and patching sessions. This is the heart of the CD and it is pushed to the maximum. But then the question arises: How much more can we refine things?
‘We record with a lot of microphones, which allows us to refine the balances slightly. Post-production, I adore. You take the best shots while maintaining the illusion of a single take. My ideal is to make music on stage as best as possible and improve it a little bit.’
Q. A kind of sound Photoshop?
A. ‘In a way, yes.’
More quotes here.
Bruno has boy crush
https://www.facebook.com/medicitv/videos/towards-the-flame-klaus-mäkelä/3650370285199946/
I’ve come to really hate his facile hagiographies where he pretends his subject is an earth-shattering genius when there are countless other musicians who are perhaps not as glamorous and flashy but who have done whatever it is BM claims is novel and astounding years before and with usually far better results. And yes, it’s impossible not to notice his penchant for young, pretty boys who look far better on a record cover than, say, old hags like Landowska or Nikolayeva.
In all fairness Monsaingeon has made quite a few documentaries on aging, non-photogenic old masters.
https://www.brunomonsaingeon.com/EN/EN_FILMOGRAPHY.html
That his documentaries on younger stars are mostly about photogenic people, may reflect a reality of our days: good looks open doors, and the star system is no exception. I don’t think Monsaingeon makes documentaries of prodigiously talented unknowns.
I clicked on the link and a silent clip came on so I just watched it for a while wondering what piece he was conducting, with such verve and ecstasy and not even having to beat time he must be a boy genius, until I clicked on the sound.
Everyone should do what I did, turn off the sound, and try to guess the piece.
I won’t spoil the surprise, but C’MON, the kid is out of his mind, and the orchestra is too for indulging his excess. Even Lenny was not this extravagant.for this piece,
My goodness, I NEVER would’ve guessed the piece. Excellent suggestion!
As for the boy wonder’s histrionics, oof; how does a musician perform with a huge grin whilst trying not to guffaw in his face.
Agreed. Does anyone notice whether the orchestra follows that much the conductor? To me they don’t seem to.
One should have no problem guessing the piece once they see the close-up of the snare drum followed by the string bows!
How many cliches can one person fit into each sentence? Is any of this new?
It’s good to see that Bruno Monsaingeon is still productive. He’s certainly one of the best what it comes to making documentaries on Classical music.
But, it’s 2024… Menuhin? Richter? Gould?…No, Makela. Golden times are gone for classical.
The lament of the goners.
After many takes in the studio, and much snipping of tape (in those pre-digital days), the producer finally felt that he had created a recording that would not inflict any further damage upon the Diva’s already fading reputation. As they listened to the playback, she beamed and said “I didn’t know I could still sing so well!”. “You can’t”, he muttered under his breath.
I think it’s a true story. Anyone remember the name of the Diva?
I recall a very similar anecdote being told of Artur Rodzinski and a pianist with whom he recorded a concerto in the 1950s. The final recording required an inordinate number of patches, much to the conductor’s frustration. On hearing the final product, Rodzinski said to the pianist, “Don’t you wish you could play like that?”
It’s an interesting question where the limit is for mixing the tapes. Even in Currentzis’ recordings and others you can hear instruments and balances that are completely impossible to achieve even in the best live concert in the best hall. What happens when we get used to recordings whose sound mix is impossible live and we are then always disappointed when we hear the piece in concert without realising that the recording is an artistic product of technology, not a stroke of genius by the conductor and orchestra?
Something like that happened in Montreal under Dutoit. Thanks to Decca’s recording team and the church of St. Eustache, people expected a certain sound and overall acoustic excellence when they went to see the MSO. But their old home was an acoustic dead zone, and many people never went to a second concert.
The latter happened to me as a teenager, in the late 70s and early 80s. I overcame it as I gradually discovered the beauty of natural sound and understood the artificiality of recordings.
Nothing wrong with that? The hall is not the reference. The score is. What would the composers want to be done, if they knew the possibilities? That’s the ultimate question.
This is why I prefer recordings (Gould, too): artist and composer prolly arrive closer to a real sound picture than in a one off performance.
That said, I’ll never forget the night MTT conducted when it was announced he would be the next conductor at SFS: that Rite was absolutely electric.
So, what’s new? Splicing is the old photoshopping. Nothing to see here.
“Push our concept” in terms of moving mics around, not in terms of playing better than anyone before? Well, somehow not surprising.
In the attached newspaper article in French comparison an unfair comparison was made between Maazel and Cantelli. The former was a fine conductor but Cantelli was in a different league. Even at his early demise his genius outshone most conductors. If he lived longer he might well have been a candidate for the greatest conductor of his times. This is no hype, just listen to both his commercial and live recordings.
True enough, but had we gotten more years of Fricsay or Kertesz, had C. Kleiber performed more than twice a year, there would have been plenty more competition. As it was, there would still have been competition.
I have no problem with this. Live performances are like a play. Recorded performances are like a movie. I happen to prefer live.
Some conductors do care about how their recordings sound (good example is Dorati) and some don’t have any interest in the process. What is interesting to me is that Makela claims to be very involved and yet his recording of Sacre with the ODP was criticised by the typically reliable Edward Seckerson as having not much bass drum presence and numerous other “lack of impact” complaints. I heard Klaus M and the ODP live at Carnegie Hall last night. In a word – magnificent – and having read Seckerson’s review I was expecting same – and yet – we got a sensational concert – with plenty of impact and bass drum. I thought “oh – Makela let down by poor engineering – he isn’t the first and won’t be the last”. Then I read the above. Which means they don’t know what they’re doing in post production. All of them. I will say this – now I know why the Concertgebouw (and probably the CSO) picked him. Quite wonderful. The orchestra refused to stand at the third curtain call and everyone (yes, everyone) in the orchestra applauded him. It’s a French orchestra – isn’t this against their religion?
I played as an extra player in Klaus´debut with the Frankfurt radio( he was 21 then), Shostakovich 7. One of the greatest displays of conducting i ever witnessed…he looked like a 16 year old, but conducted with the experience,skills and maturity of someone 30 years in the business. Amazing!
Attended the same concert at Carnegie, with some trepidation given the reviews of Mäkela’s Stravinsky disc. Thought they played superbly with no lack of impact.
So, recording exactly like it’s been done for the last 40 years? What an innovator this kid is! I’d never imagine using lots of microphones, choosing the best takes, and editing them together to create the illusion of being seamless. WHAT WILL THE WUNDERKIND THINK OF NEXT!
But seriously, judging by both Klaus’ Stravinsky discs with Orchestre Paris, they need more than Photoshop. Terrible interpretations. Especially Petrouchka.
“especially Petrouchka”. Agree with you there (just listened to the Boston/Ozawa to hear what can really be brought to the score – MTT was pianist there!). BTW NL seems to have liked the new Makela if not the Debussy couplings.
Karajan´s DG recordings always got terribly photoshopped….Adding(often very clumsily) Mantovani like artificial reverb to the strings,different groups of the orchestra seemingly playing in different acoustics….And i won´t even start about the terrible Melodya echo chamber.
Recording as photoshop… or, as Otto Klemperer said to his daughter: “Lotte, ein Schwindel!”
Of course, that pertains to all editing and remixing, not just Makela’s recordings. I bet he doesn’t even approach Glenn Gould’s extremes.
Ask the composers, what they would like to exploit, given the possibilities. Concerts are what they are. The magic of a concert is the immediate interaction between musicians and audience. Of course recordings can’t have that. But neither can recordings of concerts. Because they are missing the immediate presence of each other as well.
The whole popular music branch is laughing about the idea, that live performance were the ultimate standard for musical quality.
Hoped someone would remind us of the Klemperer comment.
I don’t know anyone who is a serious and seasoned music lover who doesn’t prefer live recordings, with all of their attendant idiosyncrasies and inaccuracies, to their comparatively sterile and “perfected” studio counterparts. It’s why I almost always prefer old “historical” recordings, which due to the technological limits of the age, were done in much longer takes. Listen to Schnabel’s Beethoven set, for instance. Comparatively “sloppy” compared to modern studio recordings, but so much more alive and full of fire and inspiration. Or compare Furtwängler’s live recordings to his studio efforts. In the latter he sounds shackled and earthbound, and like a totally different conductor live. Not surprising that both Schnabel and Furtwängler hated recording. It’s also why I’ve always been suspicious of Glenn Gould, who famously loved dicing and splicing his recordings. That’s not art. It’s artifice.
That’s just proven to be nonsense. People have been given studio recordings with audience “live” sound artificially added. They thought those recordings were better, compared to those same recordings without the added audience noise. It’s just an opinion, not backed up by fact. Something that happens in people’s minds, believing, not existing.
Studio recordings don’t have to be heavily edited, and many aren’t.
There are even many one-take studio recordings. For instance Prelude to Meistersinger with Karajan and Staatskapelle Dresden.
Some conductors were far more inspired and exciting in live concerts than in the studio (e.g. Tennstedt) others made records that were pretty much just like their concerts (Reiner, Munch).
Everybody, conductors and musicians, feel more adrenalin in concerts than in studio recordings. That can be a good thing, for other high risk passages also a bad thing. It’s ultimately the job of those musicians and the producers, to demand the same intensity in the studio like in a concert. Add the benefit of full risk possibilities in the studio that you don’t have in the concert, except with a few handful of fearless genius musicians.
The supremacy of live over studio is nothing but a myth. Mostly promoted by the industry, because live is cheaper to produce.
Not withstanding boring studio recordings of course, but there are boring and timid concert performances as well.
Yeah, the first time I realized how important the sound engineer was was when I heard the Berlin Philharmonic live for the first time, it was, like meeting a cover model without makeup and before being airbrushed: she has all her good bones and facial structure, but also all her skin blemishes and pock marks.
One must consider recordings as a different genre from live concerts.
I double dare KM to record with ONE mike (like Mercury did for Rafael Kubelik 70 years ago). But he probably doesn’t know about that.
On the other hand, after hearing the Berliners live for the first time, I realised that no recording could come close to that sound, the string in particular.
Isn`t Decca/Deutsche Grammophon the biggest plastic manufacturer in the world today?
Couldn`t they move on to just printing doctored photos?
Well this explains why I’ve never taken to his recordings. Even so heard live, at the Edinburgh Festival last year, I still wasn’t very impressed.
In over 60 years of attending concerts I’m amazed at how frequently the flashy ones become stars and finer musicians are comparatively ignored.
Does anybody remember that recordings have only been around for the last century and a quarter? Before then, music was always alive, played by and in the presence of real, living, breathing people. I can’t imagine life without recorded music, but at the same time I wish it wasn’t so.
For god’s sake HE’S TWENTY-EIGHT! What the hell worthwhile does he have to say about music yet?