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The Grammy’s award excellence in artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry.  The Kansas City Symphony’s recording Britten’s Orchestra for Reference Recordings has been nominated as Best Surround Sound Album for surround mix engineer Keith O. Johnson and surround producer David Frost.  Frost is also nominated as Producer of the Year, Classical.

Under the direction of music director, Michael Stern, the recording features Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (without narration), Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, and Sinfonia da requiem.

What’s unusual about this recording is the extraordinary "dynamic range." Engineers modulate the sounds so that the recording really makes you feel as though you are in a concert hall. The difficulty in classical recording is capturing the extremes in dynamic ranges without eliminating the high and low ends of the sonic spectrum. Good recording engineers and producers balance classical music knowledge, acoustics, and electronic technologies.

The following is a conversation with the two men behind this Grammy-nominated recording.

David Peironnet: "Dynamic range in its extreme" is a quote from your press release accompanying the Kansas City Symphony recording of Britten’s Orchestra. This must be exceptionally challenging for a producer and engineer, isn’t it?

David Frost: For me the issue is whether the dynamic range is faithful to the score and realistic, yet at the same time is listenable to most people on a good system. The music on this album goes from a whisper to the thunderously loud. To me dynamic range for its own sake isn’t the point. In translating music into audio, one must consider the imperfections of the medium and compensate for them. Music with this kind of dynamic range does present a challenge, but I think this recording is successful in conveying its dramatic dynamic contrasts without surpassing the inherent limitations of the medium.

Keith Johnson: High resolution equipment I have built and use has plenty of headroom for a master recording that captures the full emotional-dramatic buildup dynamic of Stern’s performance and Britten’s intent. Difficulties would occur in trying to compress the program for the car commute, background listening and radio play. Better processing encourages a chronic mezzo-forte background that may lubricate social settings or play from weak equipment, but otherwise it is sonic death to great work. I did experiment a few times to reign in the performance but virtually everyone preferred the all out uncompromised rendering that captures the sense of concert and performance so well during serious undistracted listening.

DP: Can you offer an example of where your talents were tested to the extreme as you produced this recording?

DF: Always when recording orchestras, one is under time constraints, so often the hardest decisions for a producer are regarding how to manage time. Deciding exactly how to divide time, what one should focus more attention on and setting priorities can make a huge difference in the outcome of the sessions.

This is always a challenge. A complete and thorough knowledge of the score and the ability to quickly convey necessary input to the conductor and musicians is a must. In this case the orchestra played beautifully and I very much enjoyed working with Michael Stern. I think these performances are really wonderful and I was very happy to have had this opportunity. 

KJ: Many hours of listening to the most important recordings as well as learning the music or scores are fundamental to making a good recording. Then I become familiar with the composer’s ideas, performance interpretations, tone combinations from instruments, difficult passages along with the strength and weakness of each production. This knowledge becomes a subconscious—almost like playing an instrument background of a working a session and making a good recording. With practice, experience and knowledge, this part is easy. By far, the toughest [part] is capturing and presenting the concert experience of being with the orchestra in the hall along with the performance feel. We see, we move, and respond. This visual acoustic or dynamically focused and changing awareness is a phenomenal experience with the orchestra in front but it is lost from old ways of putting up microphones and excessively forcing balance. Instead, like good jazz, we nudge, play, change settings as we go and ultimately capture great moments that feel right. Sounds easy, but quite difficult.

DP: There is a variation in The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra which uses nothing but percussion instruments. Each instrument—castanets, a whip, and wood blocks, along with more traditional equipment as timpani, cymbals, and snare drums presents its own special challenges. How do you make it all work together so that the recording sounds like we hear it in a concert hall?

KJ: Love that part. These [percussionists] just balance and play so I back-off unrelated mics in the setup and let them have at it. However, they do get benefit of fast microphones I have built and honed in over the years for this purpose. The mics are placed quite far from instruments so their staging is very well defined and clear but behind the other musicians and not excessively loud just as we would hear them live.

DF: I think the idea is to represent the score properly. In this case that would mean creating a realistic and musical blend of the percussion section. Some instruments project more, some are closer to the main mics or other section mics, so one must compensate with proper placement of the percussion mics.

Some percussion instruments don’t need any micing other than the main mics in front of the orchestra. Other percussion instruments sound distant and diffuse without a spot mic. Sometimes if these discrepancies can’t be overcome through mic placement and mixing, I will ask the players to adjust their balances. It may or may not sound correct in the hall, but it does on the recording and that’s what matters. In this particular passage I believe no such adjustment was necessary and that the players created a balance which also worked nicely for the recording.

DP: Britten’s Orchestra was recorded at the Community of Christ auditorium in Independence. Did that large, open area present any special challenges to you as you made your recording?

DF: Keith should answer this one. He did an amazing job of creating a clear and attractive sound that used this space to its best advantage.

KJ: This place is special and we are very fortunate to use it. The orchestra is more in the middle than most spaces so the audience around it hears powerful focused sound with secondary images from curved surfaces. Our "surround-sound" recording captures this wrap-around effect. In the recording, we hear clarity, fine detail and a very big stage. The Royal Albert Hall, Mormon Tabernacle and the now demolished Chicago Medinah temple [where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded many works] would be world-class arena spaces with similar acoustic properties of immediacy, ability to delineate complexity and power—things I’m sure Britten would have preferred for these works.

DP: Have you seen our new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts? It will open this coming autumn. What do you think about it?

DF: I have not seen it but hope to very soon. It think it’s very exciting.

KJ: I’ve seen its construction and have worked successfully in other Yasu Toyota designed halls. These have demonstrated fine acoustic balance, good stage hearing for musicians and flexibility to record different soundscapes – the very different acoustic settings that might be preferred by Debussy, Bernstein, and Britten to name a few. He’s very thorough in his designs and testing but also quite exacting in achieving concert balance. I predict good things.

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The 53rd Annual Grammy Awards will be announced on February 13th and broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m. ET

By David Peironnet

Special to KCM

David Peironnet has been a concert-goer for more years than he would care to admit, and can clearly recall hearing the Kansas City Philharmonic under the baton of Hans Schweiger. This comes from someone who admits to be only 24 years old though acknowleges that his undergraduate degree was not in math but rather political science -- a group of people who are notoriously able to see only those facts they want to see in statistical data.

David has churned out the newsletter for the Friends of the Symphony - Kansas City for six or seven years. He doesn't recall and really doesn't care how many years it has been because the only thing that's important is the next deadline -- and the one after that.

This is one of a series of interviews he runs periodically usually consisting of five open-ended questions which reveal answers which can give information to the person walking into a concert hall for the first time, or like himself have been enjoying concerts for many years.

David and Kathy Peironnet frequently work at the Friends of the Symphony gift shop which is located in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre. The next time you come to a concert, stop by and say, "hello." Ask for a copy of the current FoS newsletter. If a copy isn't available, just ask and one will be mailed to you.

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