Many people have written with great affection about their memories of Bernard Haitink, following his death last week. I’ve been reading comments online from orchestra musicians talking of their vast respect for him, from listeners for whom his recordings were peak experiences in their appreciation of orchestral music, and from audience members who were transfixed by his presence on the podium.

I was lucky enough to work with Haitink in my years at EMI Classics as a recording producer in the 1990s, and it gave me some real insights into how he worked. The role of a classical recording producer is an interesting one. You are not directly an interpreter, of course –  yet you’re much more than an interloper in the recording process. Most people have little idea of the degree to which even the most famous musicians rely on a trusted pair of ears in the control room to advise them, encourage them, and help them realize their vision of the music in a way that will stand the test of time.

Haitink made over 450 recordings, including a trailblazing Mahler cycle, touchstone performances of most of the great works of the classical repertoire, some magnificent opera recordings, a few outliers like the pristine Debussy and Ravel recordings from the Concertgebouw era, and his indispensable recordings of Elgar, Walton, Britten and Vaughan Williams for EMI.

The UK was his adopted home. The Queen bestowed on him the title of 'Knight of the British Empire', and had he taken British citizenship, he would have been allowed to style himself Sir Bernard Haitink. He had a deep affinity for English music; his natural reserve was a perfect fit for music that needs to speak with sincere feeling but steadfastly avoid sentimentality – a combination that has sometimes eluded those from beyond British shores. To the regret of many of us, he never championed this repertoire in the concert hall, but his recordings of the core works of the English repertoire are unforgettable. It was this strand of recording that I was involved in. I can claim involvement in only a tiny handful of recordings from his massive discography, yet he had an outsize influence on me, and we got on well together even though he was almost 40 years my senior.

It always felt like an immense privilege to be in the room with Bernard. He wasn’t a commanding presence off the podium, but he had deep wisdom, a wry smile (if you could coax it out of him), genuine humility, and complete devotion to achieving the best for the music. It was a privilege to watch him at work, and my small tribute here is a 'symphony in three movements', each of which is a small episode with a lesson attached.

Movement One: Taking Responsibility

Orchestra musicians adored Haitink because he gave them what they needed to do their best, and utterly trusted them. I saw this demonstrated one morning in the studio, working with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. After a few takes of a particular movement where one section just never came together, I decided I had to ask him for a 'patch'. Despite his long experience with recording (or maybe because of it!) Bernard had little time for the numbing repetition of studio recording at its worst. He loathed doing short sections of music, preferring to create a sense of performance through the architecture of long takes – and every request for patches from the control room was agreed to reluctantly, if at all. So you had to choose your moments. Here’s a typical control room dialogue:

Simon, on phone line to studio: 'Unfortunately It has never been together at letter J. So we really need to patch that part.'

Bernard: Deep sigh. Long pause. Stares at score. 'Must we?'

Simon: 'I don’t think you’ll be happy with what we have on tape. It’s just not together in the brass.'

Bernard: 'OK.' Puts phone down. 'Letter H please.' Starts the music.

Here’s an important nuance: most conductors would have made a comment to the orchestra along the lines of 'Could the brass please be careful to be together, especially in bars 135 and 136'. He never said any of that. In fact, he said absolutely nothing to them. But at letter J, it was perfect. Why? Because he saw the imprecision of the previous takes as his failing, not theirs. He knew that if he fixed it himself, the orchestra would be perfectly together.

After more than 30 years of watching conductors at close hand, I return to this random moment time and again in my head. Most orchestras can do anything if they have in front of them a conductor who has mastered their craft, takes responsibility, and trusts the musicians to do their best.

Movement Two: Consummate Craft

One of the projects we did together was the complete recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1992 with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Peter Grimes is full of traps for the recording team. It has complex ensembles, big choruses, an offstage dance band, an offstage church organ and chorus, a long a cappella section without orchestra, many sound effects, and a lot of stage movement. Despite a cast including some of the most famous British singers of the time, a chorus and orchestra who knew the work backward, and a great recording venue, I was anxious about our ability to capture such a complex work with a conductor whom I feared would only want to do takes of entire scenes and would resist breaking it into more manageable chunks. And the technology in 1992 was a lot less helpful than it is today.

‘He had the ability to create an uncanny sense of direct transmission from the notes on the page to the performance that emerged’

I needn’t have worried. It was extraordinary to watch Bernard’s ability to marshal the forces in long takes, giving the cast everything they needed, eliciting magnificent playing from the orchestra, all the time propelling the music forward with every ounce of dramatic tension the work demands. His craft was so consummate that you rarely noticed it – and it gave him the ability to create an uncanny sense of direct transmission from the notes on the page to the performance that emerged.

He only ever listened to the first take. After that, he went back to the podium, gave a few notes, and we did the whole scene again. Most of those second takes are what ended up on the final recording. I never saw anyone so efficient in their use of time, because there was nothing wasted. Why exhaust the singers and chorus doing ten takes if you can galvanize everyone around you and do one great one?

Movement Three: Creating the Sound

More than one person has commented about Haitink’s ability to change the sound of an orchestra as soon as he lifted his arms. This mysterious phenomenon is, in general, true of conductors – but never more so than with him.

During this era, I was based at Abbey Road Studios in London, which despite being famous for being the place where The Beatles made most of their albums, was ground zero during the frenzy to re-record the entire classical repertoire in digital sound in the 1980s and 90s. In those days, almost any morning of the week, one of the London orchestras could be found at Abbey Road recording yet another classical CD.

‘The sound he conjured from orchestras miraculously combined firmness, clarity, and luminosity. It was precisely drawn, in pencil not in watercolor’

Generally, at the beginning of a recording session, you spend 20 or 30 minutes 'balancing' the sound before you start putting down real takes. But with Bernard, often all it seemed to require was to position the microphones correctly, push the faders up on the mixing desk, and the 'Haitink sound' revealed itself. John Kurlander, the superb recording engineer who worked his magic on many recordings with me, would often refuse to take credit for the glorious sound coming out of the speakers, simply saying: 'Thanks, but it’s not me, it’s Bernard'.

And it was. The sound he conjured from orchestras miraculously combined firmness, clarity, and luminosity. It was precisely drawn, in pencil not in watercolor, carefully shaded within meticulously clean lines. I always had the impression that he gave the musicians such security and space that they were freed to concentrate on beauty of sound and on the natural and unforced shaping of the music he encouraged.

Listen to the last few minutes of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony as a case in point (you can find the full movement below at Apple Music -this section begins at 7'14"). At a daringly slow tempo, with each beat moving in perfect unison, beautifully phrased wind solos supported by a silvery cushion of string sound, it moves inexorably toward the serene conclusion. I will never forget the way we all exhaled at the end of that take, and it’s what I shall choose to remember him by. 

Coda

In 1997 I left EMI after almost ten years to become Artistic Administrator of The Philadelphia Orchestra. Bernard sent me a most touching handwritten letter to wish me well. It ends, 'I wish you all the very, very best, and ... how I will miss you. As ever, yours, Bernard.' I have it in front of me as I’m writing this. At the time, I couldn’t believe that such a great artist would be so generous to a young recording producer with whom he had made just a handful of recordings. But that was him – he was very loyal to those around him who supported him, loved music, and cared enough to do things right. He was an artist of immense stature, whose performances seem even more humane today as we view them from the vantage point of an age that often values exterior show above quiet wisdom. Those of us who got to work closely with him know just how lucky we were.

Simon Woods is President and CEO of the League of American Orchestras. He began his career as a recording producer at EMI Classics, based at Abbey Road Studios in London, where he worked from 1988 to 1997. After joining the Philadelphia Orchestra as Artistic Administrator in 1997, he went on to become CEO of the New Jersey Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Seattle Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic before joining the League in 2020.