A Singer’s Life: Let’s Make a Recording
“Hi Brian, did you know you were on the radio last Thursday? You sounded terribly young. It was good, mind you, but it must have been a long time ago when you recorded that?” That’s the thing about a long career in singing: a lot of one’s recordings were indeed made decades previously. I’m not objecting, mind you, as these recordings are very important to me. Without appearing morbid, long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil, my recordings will still be available in whatever form of listening device people are using in the future. In the same way that I have been drawing your attention to recordings that I recommend for particular pieces of music in these Blogs, other people will be able to direct future generations’ attention to the oeuvre of Brian Bannatyne-Scott, Bass. I’m not setting myself up in any way to rival the great recording artists of the past, but the modern ubiquity of recorded sound available will at least give our successors the chance to choose what to listen to.
I thought today that you might be interested to learn something about the process of making a recording, and also a little about the various ways one finds oneself, often surprisingly, on YouTube or Spotify!
My first appearance on record is anonymous. I know I am there, but no one else would. In 1968, to commemorate the visit by George Watson’s College Choir to the east coast of America, the school released a vinyl record, at 33rpm (not 78, I’m not that old!), entitled ‘Music of a School’, featuring pieces of music we played on that tour. I was still a boy soprano, and not a very good one at that, so I appear deep in the treble section, untroubled by solo singing.
By the time I had become an undergraduate at St Andrews University, my voice had established itself as a bass, albeit one with a very flexible baritonal top. I was still clueless in terms of musical ability, knowing nothing of musical theory and harmony (nothing’s changed there!), but my voice had been recognised as promising. I had won the school singing prize (the wonderfully named Moonie Memorial Prize) three years running and had won prizes at the Edinburgh Music Competition Festival (an institution founded in 1920 to encourage amateur musicians). In fact, an appearance at this Festival around the same time, with the Watson’s Madrigal Group, had produced my first memorable review, read out by the judge, in a fruity Yorkshire accent- “Well, your Fa La Las were quite nice!” Praise indeed!
I have just discovered that the school singing prize, the Moonie Memorial, was named in honour of James Moonie (1853-1923), and his son William Moonie (1883-1961), who were both musicians and Edinburgh worthies. James ran Mr Moonie’s Choir, while William taught at Daniel Stewart’s College and wrote quite a lot of music, including three operas. He was organist at Grange Parish Church in Marchmont and was buried in its cemetery.
During my first year at St Andrews, I sang in a concert given by new students, which is preserved, via cassette tape, now on a CD and music file. This, and a recording made in early 1974 of the St Andrews Candlemas Choir, conducted by Thomas G Duncan, singing Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor, with me as bass soloist, are my first solo recordings, not in any way commercial, but good archive material.
It was one of my tasks in winter of 2021-22, to rationalise and put on one memory stick, my entire recorded archive from 1974 to now. My most recent CD appeared in 2022, when Alexander McCall Smith released a CD of his and Tom Cunningham’s ‘Songs of Edinburgh’, a song cycle performed by Beth Taylor (mezzo), Michał Gajzler (piano) and myself during the 2021 Edinburgh Festival. This is on the Birnam label, run by Martin Hadden, formerly of Silly Wizard, as was my previous CD, ‘Songs of Stevenson’, which, by the way, is still available to buy either through Birnam’s Online Shop or Amazon UK.
This BBS Archive will consist of all the recordings I possess from my long career, including radio broadcast recordings of operas and concerts I have appeared in, private recordings of concerts and operas by keen local specialists, recordings of concerts I have put on over the last 25 years at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and my many commercial recordings, released by such important companies as Philips, DG, Linn and Chandos. Although not in the same league as some early music singers, such as Rogers Covey-Crump and Caroline Trevor, who seem to have appeared in every recording issued over the last 50 years, I do have a decent back catalogue, and am lucky enough to have recorded some of the world’s greatest music with acclaimed ensembles and conductors, more of which later.
Perhaps it might be helpful to find out about how a commercial recording is made. One gets used to hearing about how a pop group will make a record, working together over a long period, often over a year, with multiple takes and double-tracking, multi-layers of single lines of music, cutting and splicing, and all sorts of techniques, modern and ancient. There are stories of late night sessions with the group members, their sound engineers, and their producer, fuelled by booze, drugs and groupies. You may not be surprised to learn that, in my experience, this does not happen in a classical recording (at least, very rarely!)
We are usually approached through our agents to take part in a recording at a certain venue on a certain day. Sometimes a recording may be scheduled around a few performances of the work in question, so you turn up on the first day note perfect to start rehearsals with your fellow singers, and the orchestra or ensemble with whom you will be performing. Ideally, you will rehearse for a decent length of time, which may vary from one day to a week, in order to reach a stage when you are ready to perform in public. Recording in Britain, you will, if you are reasonably well-known, be working with colleagues many of whom you have already performed with, while in Europe this may not be the case, as the pool of singers available is much greater. Generally, you will rehearse together and then perform a few concerts of the work, in order that, when you finally come to record, you are used to each other, and the dynamics of performance. In my experience, this is the best way to make a recording, but I have been involved a few times in recordings which have featured no performance or have been recorded before a series of concerts. This, usually done because of artist availability, is rarely ideal, as inevitably performances will introduce a different dynamic to the feel of the music and the interaction between various singers and conductors.
The venue of the recording is often crucial to the finished product. You often read about famous albums creating special effects that generations come to love due to the quirks of a producer’s individual imagination. The great crash in Simon and Garfunkel’s track, ‘The Boxer’, apparently came about because someone dropped the lid of a grand piano and they loved the noise so much that it featured in the final cut. Gene Pitney’s much loved tinkle effect in the middle of ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’ was actually the guitarist acknowledging that he had made a mistake and signalling the error to the producer. They liked the “ting ting ting” so much, they kept it in the recording.
In a classical recording, the sound people normally prefer a really dry acoustic, so that they can tinker with balance and echo effects, while singers generally prefer a warmer acoustic so that they can play with the sound themselves. This often brings in complications. I offer a couple of examples: when we recorded Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, with the LSO, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, for Philips, we gave a couple of concerts first in the Barbican. I sang Theseus and was very excited to be recording such an important role in what was to be one of only a few definitive recordings of this iconic work. Our shows were semi-staged, with a starry cast, and costumed by the Queen’s tailor, Hardy Amies, and were well received in the hall and in the press.
Sylvia McNair, the American soprano who sang the role of Tytania, was ill for the concerts, and replaced by her excellent understudy. She recovered in time to record the role, but as Theseus and Tytania never meet in the story, I only met Sylvia in the restaurant after the recording! The Barbican Hall is rather nice to sing in, as there is a lot of wood around, but the Dutch engineers at Philips sucked all the ambience out of the recorded sound, and to me the end result is a wonderful recording with almost zero atmosphere. Britten’s magical score cries out for spooky effects, and indeed the composer’s own recording from the 60’s, with the magnificent Decca engineers at work, is a miracle of atmosphere and wonder. A trick missed I feel.
However, when I recorded Handel’s ‘Messiah’ in France with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre, we first gave performances in Grenoble and Paris before recording at the Opéra Bastille, Level minus 5, in Paris. The venue for the recording was desperate, with no reverb or echo of any kind. It was like singing in cotton wool, and Handel’s wonderful music sounded to us dead and buried. Yet, the finished product, having had reverb and ambience added, sounds fabulous. Weird.
My favourite recording venue is Henry Wood Hall in south London, where we recorded Purcell’s ‘King Arthur’ with the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock. This is a former church, with appropriately lovely acoustics, and Nancy Argenta and I were able to use our own expressive abilities to create a little Purcellian magic.
I have made recordings in all sorts of venues over the years, when recording live performances. Ethel Smythe’s opera, ‘The Wreckers’, set in sea-blown Cornwall, was recorded at a BBC Proms concert in the Albert Hall. Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ was recorded in Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh for Linn Records with the Dunedin Consort (still one of the recommended recordings of this great work), and Janáček’s opera, ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ was recorded live at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. Many Lieder recitals for the BBC were recorded in the Concert Hall in Broadcasting House in London.
My own personal recordings of recitals were recorded at the Canongate Kirk and at St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in George Street, and I have recently discovered the excellent acoustic of St Michael’s Church in Slateford Road, Edinburgh, where I recorded my solo CD ‘Songs of Stevenson’, and the ‘Songs of Edinburgh’ CD.
Returning to the recording process, the actual time spent is minimal, as you are simply paid to turn up and record your bits. The professional companies have a very tight budget, and if you get to do more than two or three takes, you are fortunate indeed. Individual singers have very little input. You can say categorically that you don’t want such and such a take but can be over-ruled. The producer’s word is final, and you have to trust him/her. It is entirely up to the producer, and to some extent the conductor, whether another take is required. It is usual that you record a section at least twice, but, if time is running out at the end of a session, you may be done and dusted just once. It means that a recording is quite stressful, and you have to keep your wits about you. For example, if you are not happy with what you have just sung, you may have to make an even bigger, and more obvious, mistake to allow another take. Clearly, you can’t do this too often, but sometimes, needs must!
You are paid a fee, negotiated by your agent, but only very rarely would you receive royalties. All contracts these days have an unpaid radio recording written into them, so it is almost impossible to make any money beyond the fee. Spotify and their likes pay tiny fractions of a penny for each track played, and when I was preparing for the release of my ‘Songs of Stevenson’ CD, I was told categorically that no one makes money from recording at all. The only classical exception I know of, and it incorporates jazz into its format, was the collaboration between the Hilliard Ensemble and the Norwegian saxophonist, Jan Garbarek, on their album, ‘Officium’ in 1994. The artists chose to accept royalties rather than a fee, and the album went Platinum, selling more than 1.5 million discs and earning the performers a decent return. Serendipity indeed! This has never happened to me, but it is extremely satisfying that there are recordings available, of great music wonderfully played, which feature my voice. Although not receiving royalties, I was very well paid for my major CDs, and I would be delighted if you were to seek them out.
Apart from my recordings already mentioned, I am also particularly fond of Monteverdi’s ‘Coronation of Poppea’ and Vaughan Williams’ ‘Sir John in Love’, both of which I recorded with the late and much missed Sir Richard Hickox, and Handel’s ‘Tolomeo’ which I recorded in a school hall in Halle in Germany.
What I was unaware of until recently was that any commercial recording will probably appear on YouTube or Spotify, earning me zilch, but welcome nonetheless. Even some of my less commercial recordings appear on these sites. I have no idea how, but this is a fact of modern life!
