We’ve just started a new CD which has made us reflect a little on why we actually bother to record at all.

The process of making a recording has little relationship to a conventional performance.  There you are, sitting in an air conditioned room behind two sets of doors to keep extraneous sounds out with no audience to win over except each other, the sound engineer, the producer and any one else who has nothing better to do with their time.  With some exceptions such as classical guitarist John Williams and pianist Glenn Gould who both claim(ed) to enjoy the studio, musique concrete practitioners and electronic composers, “classical” musicians typically view studio recording as a means to an end rather than an end in itself.  In this we are more akin to our jazz colleagues than many rock musicians who are happy to spend months or even years hard at work in the studio putting down the great “Album”.  Given that, a wonderful classical recording will often reflect years of patient, frustrating workouts in the Practice Room but that is another question.

For this reason, the recent rush to release live recordings by some symphony orchestras and opera companies is probably a good move.  John Elliot Gardiner’s recording of all of the Bach cantatas has taken the same approach – record a final rehearsal one day and the final performance the next so as to have another set of takes from the former to patch into what our Producer Llew Kiek calls “the hero take” from the day of the performance.  Classical music is best experienced live – glitches and all – rather than dead and notionally note perfect.

So why continue in the studio?

As far as The Marais Project is concerned, we rarely have the opportunity to perform the same program twice in the same venue which is a necessity underlying the “two take” live recording approach.  Secondly, whether live or studio-based there is in any case a discipline involved in recording which is good for us: tuning, ensemble, starts and finishes, balance etc.  When you have a microphone in front of you all performers start to think in terms of permanent record of their efforts.  Then the reality is, the studio does give extra control and additional microphone options.  In a live context audiences should not have to crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the performers through a tangle of wires and attendant microphones.  Finally, a good live recording requires a top class venue and all the costs involved in attracting an audience which we still have to meet along with Producers, engineers and traveling sound equipment.

But if someone pays us to record live, we will do it!