This year brings the 40th anniversary of the launch of the compact disc – and quite apart from its major innovation in the domestic preservation and reproduction of recorded music, its development and birth were an exceptional collaboration by fierce competitors. In 1982, Philips was one of the ‘big six’ mega companies recording classical music, along with CBS, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, and RCA. Although since 1962 Philips Phonographic Industries and Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft had been operating within a joint holding arrangement that had been renamed Polygram in 1972, and in 1980 Decca’s holdings had been absorbed into Polygram, all the six labels proudly retained their autonomies of artistic and technical enterprise.

In the case of Philips, their independence as a record label nevertheless had to be accounted within the overall Philips gamut of home entertainment equipment manufacturing – as a leading global maker of magnetic tape recorders, in the early 1960s they had been one of the two major pioneers of the compact cassette along with their powerful rival Sony. That Philips and Sony had in 1979 decided to collaborate in the research, manufacture and production of the new compact disc format had been an almost inconceivable situation for the zealously solicitous marketing and advertising departments of each company, but for a host of reasons too intricate to outline here, the CD made its historic maiden impact on the joint Philips/Sony shoulders. At that time the Sony Corporation was not making recordings, and so it fell to Philips to decide finally on vital matters of artistic and quality judgement. For this they consulted one of the most distinguished, experienced and brilliant members of their balance engineer team who had won a string of awards in three decades of making recordings for Philips. His name wasn’t as well known then as it is today, since Philips in particular did not like to reveal the identities of their balancing personnel to the public.

Hans Lauterslager in any case was – and is – an eloquently discreet and unostentatious person, and when I took part in some of his recordings during the now distant days of my time as a musician, I was always struck by his reticent humility about the outstandingly fine results he achieved. Now 92 years old but with a crystal clear memory, he here shares with us his recollections of some of the most highly impressive and unfailingly natural sounding recordings he made in his 40 years at Philips when he was the balance engineer for artists such as Eduard van Beinum, Pierre Monteux, Leonard Bernstein, Neville Marriner, Riccardo Muti, Jose Carreras, Bernard Haitink, Colin Davis, Lamberto Gardelli, Karl Bőhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Antal Dorati, George Szell, John Eliot Gardiner, Jessye Norman, Monserrat Caballé, Jon Vickers, Kiri te Kanawa, Anne Sofie von Otter, Clara Haskil, Ingrid Haebler, Alfred Brendel, Arthur Grumiaux, and, and, and…

‘"The classical music people should know" they said. After some consultancy I gave them our answer: minimal 1 hour. And that resulted in the CD's actual size.’

‘My contribution to the CD launch was briefly just twofold’, Hans Lauterslager understates. ‘Firstly there was a difference of opinion between Philips and Sony about the size of the disc. Philips wanted a 12 inch format like the LP, so that we could continue creating beautiful album sleeves and comprehensively written texts and comments in three languages, an element of Philips albums that had won a high reputation. Sony however wanted a disc as small as possible, no doubt with future release of portables in mind: the discman! Philips conceded on that, but with the new minimal size disc came the matter of the minimal playing time – and with that question they came to us in Baarn. “The classical music people should know” they said. After some consultancy I gave them our answer: minimal 1 hour. And that resulted in the actual size. So far, my modest share in the development. But then later I did lead the team judging the quality of the sound, as Sony had to rely on us for that, which they did most gracefully I must admit.’ma

Sony knew and admired the standards of the Philips classical recording team. By then Hans Lauterslager had become Philips’ principal balance engineer, and especially in opera projects when producer Erik Smith always selected him. He had been acclaimed for his achievements in, for instance, Sir Colin Davis’s ground-breaking Berlioz cycle, Lamberto Gardelli’s pioneering early Verdi opera recordings, Antal Dorati’s trailblazing Haydn opera cycle, Tosca with Monserrat Caballé in the title role, and most recently at that time Philips’ first digital opera recording: Il trovatore with José Carreras, Katia Ricciarelli and Yuri Masurok, and Colin Davis conducting, which won a Gramophone Award. Made in 1980, it had only been available on LP prior to the CD launch, but I can attest the wonder that all present at the tape playback sessions expressed hearing the startlingly lifelike sound – open, spacious, present and naturally atmospheric in a seemingly unlimited dynamic compass, and above all with voices and orchestra immaculately balanced.

Of course there were many sets of Il trovatore available on the market, but Philips had taken brave leads with new horizons in the aforementioned projects – as in fact it had always done ever since its very earliest days. Just two years after its inception it was Philips that made the first ever studio recording of Strauss’s Salome in 1952 with Walburga Wegner in the title role (the previous available version with Christel Goltz had been dubbed from a 1948 radio broadcast). Two years later it was Philips that dared to press a disc of Berlioz’s Te Deum that had pushed the limits of the technology considerably further than ever before, truly challenging the gramophones of the day – its conductor Sir Thomas Beecham had been thrilled with the range and space when he had heard the tape playback, especially as he had insisted all along that there would be no reductions in the size of the huge forces demanded by the composer. And in the same year, 1954, Philips embarked on what was surely the greatest technological risk to that date in recording history when they decided to record a live performance of the then very rarely heard Symphony No 8 by Mahler. The at that time audaciously ambitious event, which had been initiated by the musicologist Professor Eduard Reeser, was being mounted in the enormous Ahoy’ exhibition hall in Rotterdam, and the conductor Eduard Flipse, a passionate champion of the then unfashionable and ‘way-out’ Mahler, had prescribed a performance fully honouring Mahler’s intentions: so, 1000 performers, with massed choruses and two orchestras (the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Brabant) merging to make 146 players. Even a new organ was specially built in the hall for the occasion, which Philips was co-funding with the city of Rotterdam.  Among the Philips team of several engineers was Hans Lauterslager – now in his second year with the company that he had joined in 1952.     

‘Eduard Flipse even thought about the quality of paper in the printed programmes: he realised that as the audience of a few thousand people turned the pages this would be picked up by our microphones’

‘It was a huge challenge – really unprecedented in the history of recording. I must say that Eduard Flipse was very meticulous in his preparation not only with the performers but also with us. He even thought about the quality of paper in the printed programmes: they contained the texts of the sung parts, and he realised that as the audience of a few thousand people turned the pages this would be picked up by our microphones if the paper was too noisy, so he insisted that the material of the paper must be as soft as possible. Imagine a conductor thinking of that, most especially back in those days! He also insisted that stamped presence cards were issued to the chorus members before rehearsals – so that if a card was missing, there would be an inquest. That worked very well – there was not a single absentee. He was most curious to hear how everything that we were recording in the rehearsals was sounding in the listening booth, so we arranged playback sessions of these before the performance happened. During them he had a lot of discussions with the producer Jaap van Ginneken, and this really was greatly helpful to us because we had only a short amount of time to try and achieve a balance – of course in a recording of a live performance you cannot stop to make adjustments, and here we were in this enormous Ahoy’ exhibition hall in Rotterdam with around 1000 performers and just a limited number of microphones and input channels for mixing, even though we added a five channel mixer to our regular 6 channel mixing console. In any live recording it’s always a guess where to put the microphones for an optimal sound, and no commercial recording company had even dared to venture capturing this scale of forces in the studio in 1954, so it was a very big test for us. Don’t forget, this wasn’t a broadcast: it was a recording for posterity, and we had no opportunity for any editing later on as there was only the one performance. Much later when live recording became more frequent, the record labels would have at least two and sometimes more performances to choose from for editing, but we had to do our best with no second chances – you can imagine the tension and the dramatic atmosphere in our recording booth!’ 

Capturing dramatic atmosphere as realistically and as truthfully as possible was at the heart of Hans Lauterslager’s recording philosophy all through his time at Philips. To that end he spearheaded Philips’s first forays into stereo recordings (his recollections of working with Eduard van Beinum at that time can be heard in a forthcoming retrospective van Beinum box set from Decca) and his passion for preserving the full atmosphere and realistic balance in opera triumphed when Philips won a new contract to record many years of live performances at Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus – beginning with the Wieland Wagner production of Der Fliegende Holländer in 1961 in which Franz Crass sang the Dutchman and Wolfgang Sawallisch conducted. It was another formidable challenge.

‘For an audience the sensation of actually being there creates a psychological feeling of improvement in the actual perception of the acoustic – and for a live recording that psychological perception has to be created by the balancer’

‘When we started to look around the auditorium to consider where we might place our microphones, we were amazed by the lightweight construction of the materials – of course that was very precisely Wagner’s intention for the acoustic sound there. The inner walls and ceiling are covered with a light construction of thin wood, acting like the soundboard of a string instrument. The floor in the loft consists of narrow wooden boards. That made it very tricky to walk on, but this was necessary as I wanted to suspend some microphones for room sound – the ambience and atmosphere of the auditorium. The theatre was always completely full as the performances were all sold out, and so as the very large audience was eating up the reverberation, we had to find a way to record more room sound than was normally consciously audible there. This was to give the recording’s listeners the feeling of being at a live theatre performance, and it was a subtle matter that may come as a surprise to some readers even today. It is well known that for the audience that is present in the theatre the sensation of actually being there creates a psychological feeling of improvement in the actual perception of the acoustic, and for a live theatre recording that psychological perception has to be created imaginatively by the balancer since it cannot as a psychological sensation in the audience’s minds, as distinct from an actual aural sensation, be captured by any microphone or any mixing desk. It has to be injected, so to speak, by the balancer, and that means having some microphones placed high up in the hall quite some distance away from anyone in the audience.  So that’s what we added to the actual sound of Bayreuth – to give the listener the feeling of actually being in the Festspielhaus! We had to be very careful – Wieland Wagner, who was well-nigh critical of the new blood in the recording world, imposed all kinds of conditions and he was very reluctant for the famous Bayreuth sound to be changed in any way. Of course he was right, as it was imperative that the famous individual Bayreuth sound must be recognisable in our recording – but in fact we were adding a bit more of the auditorium’s air precisely so that the listener at home would feel the true atmosphere of the Festspielhaus.’ 

An elaborate skilled way of creating an impression of the true reality of the Festspielhaus – which would otherwise not be captured, for the complex reasons Hans Lauterslager explains. As one of the most especially expert and musical balance engineers in the history of his profession, he sensitively understood that for all the deep scientific knowledge necessary for his metier, there is no single formulaic method for recording.

‘There is no recipe for it – it’s a question of feeling as well as science. I don’t want to get mysterious about it, but not everything can be explained by placements or types of microphones, or mixer desk faders, or frequency adjustments’

‘There is no recipe for it – it’s a question of feeling as well as science. I don’t want to get mysterious about it, but not everything can be explained just by placements of microphones, or types of microphones, or mixer desk faders, or frequency adjustments, or whatever. In the end it comes to your own feeling when you are balancing – your feeling about the sound, about the performance the artists are giving. That guides you in everything you are doing as you balance the sound you hear. And you become more sure of your feeling with experience, as you make more recordings over the years. Also – and this could be difficult for the Artists and Repertoire department at Philips – I was very particular about the choice of recording hall. It was a long fight for me to have better halls. In London we mostly, though not entirely, had a choice of three town halls – the three W’s we called them: Wembley (it’s now Brent Town Hall), Walthamstow and Watford.  Our distinguished producer Vittorio Negri always recorded in Wembley, but I was never happy there: the hall had no atmosphere – it was clean and clear, but bare. I still wonder how we used to manage there, particularly when we made opera recordings.

'Watford was by far the best hall for atmosphere and warmth, but the A & R team always preferred Wembley as it was easily available, it was cheap, it was easy to reach via the tube trains, and we could leave our equipment there overnight. On the contrary at Watford we had to rig and de-rig each day – which was very tough going, but for me it was worth it for the sake of the sound. Walthamstow was good, but it did not have the space of Watford, so there was always a battle there to get a bit of air and room in to the balance. I still regret that we made Colin Davis’s recording of Les Troyens in Walthamstow and not in Watford. That was a fight I lost. It was a pioneering event as it had never been recorded in its entirety before, and for sure it’s a good recording that won many awards, but it would have been better in Watford: the massive size and scale of the work – eight harps in the orchestra, for a start! – was much more suited to Watford. I must say it was especially one of my most happy pleasures when we made Sir Colin Davis’s recording of Il trovatorewith José Carreras, Katia Ricciarelli, and Yuri Masurok in Watford Town Hall. It was the ideal place for the drama and atmosphere of the work – and the performance! – as it also was for the Tosca we made there with Monserrat Caballé, Jose Carreras, and Ingvar Wixell.’ 

And Watford Town Hall was the venue for a set of magnificent recordings that revealingly illustrate Hans Lauterslager’s open-minded versatility and skill in pursuit of sonic truth.  With just three microphones he vividly captured all the subtle details and nuances of Antal Dorati’s scrupulously moulded performances of the four orchestral suites of Tchaikovsky that he conducted with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in 1966. Although issued on the Philips label, the sessions took place under the auspices of the Mercury recording company, as two years earlier Philips had begun making Mercury’s classical recordings in Europe.  Once again Hans Lauterslager’s discreet quest for the ideal was to herald cutting edge innovation.

‘Harold Lawrence, Mercury’s principal classical producer, came to Baarn to explain how their two balancers Robert Fine and Robert Eberenz had been making their recordings. He showed us figures and drawings and also photos of some sessions. Well, we were very interested and I had the idea of building a new three channel mixing desk with a fourth channel as a contingency spare. This console would be made specifically to suit the three omni-directional microphones that always solely made up Mercury’s total orchestral pick-up. The problem was the microphones!  Mercury was using Schoeps M 201 models, and when I went to see Karl Schoeps and his technical director Wilhelm Küsters at the factory in Karlsruhe to discuss the specific qualities of the M201, they threw their hands in the air and Dr Schoeps said “By Jove – that is the worst microphone we have ever made!” They then showed me a diagram of the frequency characteristics curves, and I saw to my amazement that they had discovered that by putting a small ring on the mouth of the microphone you could engender a very substantial correction with a high frequency lift of 10 to 12 decibels at 10,000 Herz. So, specifically for our upcoming recordings they built new microphones adding a ring on each one – they were very co-operative. When we began the sessions I decided to have our regular Neumann microphones at hand as a standby, but the newly modified Schoeps M201s (they were now called MK 23s) gave a marvellous sound. The new adjustment was crucial for the method of using just three microphones for the entire orchestra picture as the highest frequencies of the more distantly placed instruments – the woodwind, brass and percussion – can be somewhat lost if you have microphones just at the front of the orchestra. The overall sonority was now very fresh while at the same time the full depth of acoustic space was there, and that depth of perspective can be lost when there are microphones placed close to many instruments. With this system I also recorded the Messiah conducted by Colin Davis – with such a large ensemble and just three microphones it was one hell of a challenge.’

‘Bernstein listened to the whole work all the way through without saying a single word – around 5 hours. After the last note had finished, he sat motionless for a minute or so. It seemed hours.’

Which succeeded triumphantly to widespread acclaim. As well as his outstandingly special skill and his deeply detailed knowledge, the achievement in Hans Lauterslager’s art and craft bears a similar philosophy to that of other especially highly acclaimed classical balance engineers of the last 70 years or so. Like Kenneth Wilkinson, Robert Gooch, Christopher Parker, James Burnett, Tony Faulkner, and Jonathan Allen, his sensitive musical feeling and awareness about the performances he was recording was his strongest guideline of all in his zeal to preserve them with the maximum fidelity to their essence. Be it with many or few microphones, his pursuit brought unfailingly natural and truthful balances that preserved great music making with striking life-like realism. Perhaps the greatest tribute of all to his gifts came from Leonard Bernstein who recorded Tristan und Isolde for Philips:

‘After doing weeks of hard work on the tapes we finally had a listening session with Bernstein. This was the moment when he could decide whether the recording was good enough for his benefaction so that we could release it. A moment of high tension, and not only for me. As always, he had a group of friends, admirers and other persons around him. Before we started listening, he told them that nobody was to give comment or to speak at all through the entire session. He listened to the whole work all the way through without saying a single word – around 5 hours. After the last note had finished, he sat motionless for a minute or so. It seemed hours. The tension became almost unbearable. Then he stood up, turned to me, embraced me and said, with tears in his eyes: “Thank you. You did a splendid job. This is the best thing I ever did’.  What followed was an outbreak of cheers and congratulations all round. A memory to cherish.’

‘In the 20th and 21st centuries music has been brought in all sorts to all parts of the world by two great inventions: recordings and radio. Through them, classical music was no longer heard only in concert halls and theatres by a secluded public. I feel privileged in having been able to take part in the fascinating process of the development of recording techniques. My contribution, however small it might be, trying to preserve as best I could the musical performances of so many great musicians, is filling me with gratitude. It is music that helps us in bad and in good times, always and everywhere.  Music is indispensable.’