Recordings in my life

I made my first recording at the age of six. I had a doting grandmother who had kept an audio diary of her three intrepid trips to the Australian outback, and she was evidently alive to the possibilities of this novel medium. In a side room of the palatial HMV record store in London’s Oxford Street was a small studio where, for a modest price, you could record your voice on a 78 rpm acetate disc which was yours to take home and play till the grooves wore out. As a birthday treat she took me there, sat me down in front of the microphone, and told me to sing something. I sang The first Nowell – perhaps the start of a special relationship with Christmas – and the recording was duly played to my parents and probably to any willing or unwilling visitors. Thankfully the disc is now lost, but as they say, you always remember the first time.

There have been many later recordings that I recall. As a teenager I sang as a member of the boys’ choir in the original 1963 recording of the Britten War Requiem. As a Cambridge student I conducted my first commercial recording: Christmas carols that I had composed or arranged. It was recorded one November in what felt like sub-zero temperatures in the glorious acoustic of the Ely Cathedral Lady Chapel. In 1984 came the inaugural recording for my own record label, the Fauré Requiem in the composer’s 1893 chamber version, blessed with a Gramophone magazine award. A whole string of recordings has followed, and in this year of my round-number birthday, there are no less than four new ones scheduled for release, one by King’s College Choir with the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by the King’s Director of Music Daniel Hyde, one by Clare College Choir under its director Graham Ross where I served as producer, and two which I conducted – more on those later.

Unlike many musicians, I genuinely enjoy the recording process. Perhaps it’s the composer in me, but when I make music I like there to be, literally, a record of it, warts and all, so it can continue (I hope) to give pleasure. A concert, however beautiful, is all gone the next morning. But I’m glad no one can now hear my recording of The First Nowell.