The Philips engineer Onno Scholze has died. He joined Philips in 1973 and worked with many of the company's leading artists including Jessye Norman, Mitsuko Uchida, Zoltán Kocsis, Sir Colin Davis, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Kurt Sanderling and Gidon Kremer. He worked frequently with the producer Wilhelm Hellweg who referred to his late colleague as 'an ideal partner with an unlimited human loyalty and endless interest in music and new technical developments. I shall miss him very much as partner and colleague and I will miss his surprising humour, which often helped to keep recording sessions under control.'

An often forbidding personality, Scholze's sometimes grumpy exterior masked a character of great warmth and considerable humour. Costa Pilavachi, who was president of Philips Classics during the 1990s, commented that Scholze's recordings 'have an immediate and visceral quality that will stand the test of time'. 

As well as engineering for Philips, Scholze also recorded for Finlandia, Brilliant Classics, Channel Classics, EtCetera, Decca and DG. And among his many accolades was a Gramophone Award for the Percy Grainger collection conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner in 1996.

Jared Sacks, founder and MD of Amsterdam-based Channel Classics, paid tribute to Scholze: 'Onno was always  experimenting with new mic setups and sharing his ideas with others. He was  interested in how others created their sound and was very supportive to those like me who were just starting out in recording. Needless to say I learned a great deal from him.'