“If you have a producer who is really hearing everything, it’s like a master class for the orchestra.” “Rob Suff is the best producer in the world,” Vänskä said this month in an interview at Orchestra Hall. The admiration is mutual with these collaborators. “He also instilled in the players the stamina and concentration you need to make a good recording.” Vänskä has a way of coaxing better performances, Suff continued. “When Osmo took over it was a great orchestra, but playing with slightly less focus on detail and precision.” Here in Minnesota, Suff has observed improvements under Vänskä’s direction. The landmark 68-CD Sibelius collection Vänskä recorded with BIS in Lahti established the orchestra’s international reputation and cemented Suff’s high opinion of Vänskä’s ability. Suff’s collaborations with Vänskä stretch back over 25 years, to when the Finnish maestro was chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. That pays in the quality of the music-making.” “It’s a relaxed atmosphere, which means nobody is feeling tense and pressurized. “It makes my life much easier,” Suff remarked during those sessions. That made a big difference over the 17 hours it took to complete a final version of Mahler’s hourlong Fourth Symphony last June. “They have pride in their work, which translates into a positive attitude and friendly demeanor.” “It’s an amazing recording orchestra,” he said. For Suff, the Minnesota Orchestra’s ability to stay cool under pressure is crucial to the high artistic quality of the finished product.
So it forged an innovative financial partnership with BIS, with the orchestra shouldering the upfront cost of paying musicians for hours worked on recording sessions (with a generous assist from donors).įinances are just the beginning, though. The Minnesota Orchestra still wanted to make a play for recording relevance. Then the age of Spotify and YouTube brought plummeting album sales.
Back in the heyday of the classical recording industry - Suff places it in the late 1980s/early ’90s - multinational companies including Deutsche Grammophon and Decca typically paid orchestras for recording, with the label earning back money via sales. One answer is found in the BIS financial model. How did the Minnesota-BIS team buck the trends? And how does it keep making successful recordings when other orchestras seem to find that impossible? are not recording at all or release only occasional live recordings, usually on in-house labels with zero support from major record companies. No other American orchestra comes close to equaling the Minnesota Orchestra’s achievement as a recording powerhouse over the past quarter-century. It was followed by four more albums of the remaining symphonies, completing a cycle hailed by Gramophone magazine as “a Beethoven reforged for today’s world.”Īfter that came a complete recording of Sibelius’ symphonies - a Vänskä specialty - with one disc earning a 2014 Grammy for best orchestral performance. Suff’s recording with the Minnesota Orchestra earned rave reviews, becoming an international bestseller. So, too, was the advent of online streaming services and their decimating effect on the classical recording industry. “Nobody was recording in America,” he remembered. Suff first came to Minneapolis in 2004 to record Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies with Vänskä and the orchestra. Five of the 10 symphonies have been recorded, with the Second up next for release in January 2019. “I’ve been coming here so often, it feels like a second home,” Suff said at Orchestra Hall in June, in between recording sessions for Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Now he’s doing the same with all 10 Mahler symphonies. He has worked with Minnesota Orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä on 60 recordings including the orchestra’s complete cycles of Beethoven and Sibelius symphonies. Suff has served as producer on more than 300 BIS recordings, working with a wide range of conductors and orchestras worldwide. The legend’s name is Robert Suff, artist and repertoire director at Sweden’s BIS Records. And he wore an expression of intense focus while presiding over an event that has become virtually extinct in the United States: a full-scale studio recording session with a major orchestra.
#BEST SIBELIUS 5 RECORDING 2019 PLUS#
He brought an assortment of high-tech instruments including headphones, a laptop computer and a split-screen television, plus a modest pencil for note taking. A classical music legend walked into Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis this summer, situating himself in a white-walled room near the main stage.
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