Had you been a reader of The Gramophone (as it then was) during the war, and opened your March 1945 issue, you’d have encountered an article entitled ‘Rachmaninov: Two Years After’ (that is, after the composer’s death). The author was given his full title: ‘By S/Lieut. (A.) John R. Culshaw, R.N.V.R.’ Within 18 months, John Culshaw would join the staff of Decca at the age of 22, later becoming one of the most important – and visionary – record producers to have emerged from the UK.

May 28, 2024, marked the centenary of Culshaw’s birth, and to commemorate one of the classical recording industry’s undisputed greats (the man who produced the ‘Solti Ring’ and Britten’s War Requiem, to name two classics from his vast catalogue), Decca’s Label Director, Dominic Fyfe, has assembled a fascinating 12-CD set, ‘John Culshaw: The Art of the Producer’ – impressively remastered by Philip Siney, and given a striking retro design by Matt Read. The bulk of Culshaw’s best-known recordings have never been out of the catalogue, and many have also been remastered frequently, employing every new technology as it’s emerged, right up to Spatial Audio treatment (something which Culshaw would certainly have approved of), so the new set focuses on the first seven years of his work at Decca (1948-55), basically taking us up to the arrival of stereo and including a number of gems that have never before been available on CD.

Anthony Pollard, whose association with Gramophone ran from 1946 until 1999 (in various, increasingly senior roles including Editor, Publisher and proprietor), was in his mid-teens during the war when the magazine’s offices became a mecca for its servicemen readers from around the world whenever they passed through London. ‘The magazine’s offices were in Kenton, in north London, so only a 20-minute journey on the Metropolitan line from Baker Street,’ he told me recently. ‘The first to come was an American chap called Fred Lord – Fred Lord III from Boston – who had nothing to do with the music industry. But he was a reader of Gramophone, and he came wandering down the road when my father was in the front garden pruning roses. Fred came up to him and said, “I wonder if you could help me. I’m looking for the offices of the magazine, The Gramophone.” And my father said, “Well, you’re there.” And Fred became a lifelong friend. But soon my parents found themselves providing a base at weekends and other leave times for services people who’d been readers of Gramophone and had come to investigate. And John was one of those who appeared under that guise. I don’t know how my parents accommodated them all because we lived in a semi-detached three-bedroom house, but they all seemed to be fitted in somewhere. But what we did have was a big gramophone there, an HMV machine, and a lot of records, so these chaps were in their element.’ Among those early visitors (the American ones, as Pollard recalls, always coming well-armed with goodies from the PX) was Harold C Schonberg, who would become the New York Times’s Chief Music Critic until he retired from the post in 1980. ‘A lot of lasting friendships were made at this time,’ Pollard recalls, and Culshaw was among them.

Culshaw sharing a joke with Karajan and Giulietta Simionato, Vienna, 1959 (Aida) (photo: Decca)

John Culshaw was born in Lytham St Annes in Lancashire. He left school at 16 and followed his father into a profession at the Midland Bank. He had no musical training but, as Pollard points out, ‘He was a typical schoolboy of the late 1930s in that music was a strong element of his education.’ He was clearly passionate and knowledgeable about music, his article on Rachmaninov informed and balanced, concluding: ‘Rachmaninov’s critics are right when they say that his was a static talent – yet it never was a minor talent. If it contributed nothing to the development of music, it added a brilliant, warm and sincere page to the literature of music. Music so sincerely conceived and so perfectly written can never die.’ Culshaw went on to write a book about the composer (1949) which, because it was no hagiography, caused some tension with Rachmaninov’s widow – until Nikolay Medtner had to step in and calm things down.

Always an engaging and stylish writer, Culshaw authored a number of books on music, including two fine memoirs: Ring Resounding (1967), about recording Wagner’s Ring for Decca with Georg Solti conducting; and Putting the Record Straight (1981), a posthumously published autobiography – which, although it is enormously entertaining, people who were around at the time suggest be taken with the occasional pinch of salt thanks to some rather more creative editing than it perhaps merited. He also wrote a couple of novels, and was a fine sleeve-note writer.

During the war, Culshaw had served in the Fleet Air Arm as a navigator flying on Swordfish aircraft with their open cockpits and remarkable capacity for carrying a colossal variety of weapons. They were pretty primitive aircraft and required the sort of teamwork within the crew that surely helped mould Culshaw’s way of working, making it so successful. When the war ended, he approached Pollard’s father, Cecil, who was then The Gramophone’s London Editor (and, basically, managing director), and said (as Pollard recalls): ‘Look, my father wants me to return to the bank in Lytham, but I don’t want to go back. I can’t imagine anything worse. Have you got any ideas of anything in the musical world that I could do?’ Pollard explains, ‘At the time, there was the very well-established Gramophone Company – EMI, whatever we want to call them – and then there was this very young, thriving company, Decca, which had only been founded in 1929. And so my father said to John, “Well, Decca is the company that’s expanding at the moment, and I’ll see if I can find you a job there.” There was a man called FE Attwood, the Publicity Manager of Decca, and my father got in touch with him and introduced John, who, to cut a long story short, was given a job in the publicity department. And that’s really where he started. It was a very lowly sort of job, but John was terribly happy because he was in the music business.’ It was 1946, and Culshaw was in the company for which he’d work, apart from a brief sojourn at Capitol, until 1967, and which he was instrumental in turning into one of the great classical labels.

Culshaw with Birgit Nilsson and Fritz Uhl, 1960 (Tristan und Isolde, Vienna) (photo: Decca)

Within two years, Culshaw had made the jump from publicity to the rock face itself, becoming a producer. In his autobiography, he recollected the elation of the move: ‘I loved the atmosphere of the studios and the new experience of very close proximity to music-making.’ Shadowing the senior Decca producer Victor Olof and his junior, Terence Gibbs, Culshaw learnt the ropes, and, as Fyfe points out in his note for the celebratory box, ‘It was Gibbs’s resignation in 1948 that created the opportunity for Culshaw to take his place, but those first sessions [Grace Williams’s Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes with the LSO at Kingsway Hall, London] cemented a partnership with Decca’s balance engineer Kenneth Wilkinson (“Wilkie”) on recordings which still sound astonishingly vivid.’

Michael Mailes, who was an engineer with Decca for 45 years from 1951, recalls Culshaw in the studio. ‘My impression was always what a nice man he was. He was a true gentleman and he had a wonderful knack with artists. You know, if there was any kind of problem, he was able to smooth it all over. His relationship with the artists was fantastic.’ Peter van Biene, another Decca engineer (1962-74) who often worked with him, recalls, ‘If Culshaw was in charge, it was quite a peaceable sort of session. He kept everything under control, and was definitely in charge, and, as I remember, they all went well. And he was an easy chap to work with. He was always very well prepared and he had a very good relationship with many of the artists he worked with like Clifford Curzon, Georg Solti and Ben Britten. Ben could be quite awkward sometimes, but John sort of calmed him down, and brought the best out of him. Ben often conducted his own music. He didn’t much like conducting, but he was very fine at it, and Culshaw worked really well with him.’ It’s clear that Culshaw created an atmosphere in the studio that was conducive to productive music-making, and it’s a tribute to his character that he was able to turn some of the musical idols of his childhood – people like Clifford Curzon and George Szell, both temperamental in their very different ways – into colleagues who trusted and respected him. Somehow, it comes as no surprise to learn that it was Culshaw in charge – amazingly, in only his fourth outing as a producer – in February 1949 for Kathleen Ferrier’s immortal recording of the folk song Blow the wind southerly. It would have been done in a single take, which in many ways epitomised the Decca recording philosophy of the time: big results from simple means.

Culshaw with Britten (photo: Decca)

So what made Culshaw such an important producer? Pollard recalls a recording that Culshaw found inspirational. ‘The thing that I think fired off John more than anything else was that he’d listened to Goddard Lieberson’s [1951 CBS] recording of Porgy and Bess. It was a mono recording, but John was terribly impressed with the spatial effects which Lieberson had achieved, as well as the quality of the casting. John would say this recording was a totally professional exercise, which in a way was what you would expect of Lieberson, because he was a brilliant man. I think it was that recording of Porgy which was at the back of John’s mind as things developed, and then he obviously had a group of people at Decca on the engineering side to whom he subsequently gravitated and who helped him achieve what he had in his mind.’

It’s worth pausing briefly to acknowledge another of the classical recording industry’s titans of the studio, EMI’s Walter Legge; he was 18 years Culshaw’s senior, but another producer with a very clear philosophy and someone whom I’d always considered Culshaw’s antithesis. The producer Andrew Keener suggests otherwise: ‘What they had in common is that both Legge and Culshaw considered the medium as something separate from a concert – because you could perfect, you could hone. There’s a famous story of Legge producing a recording of his wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Karajan was sitting in on the sessions. They’d reached a phenomenal number of takes over a particular phrase, caressing it endlessly, and apparently even Karajan got up and said, “I can’t stand this any more,” and walked out. There were similarities in the way that both Culshaw and Legge considered recording to be a medium to be celebrated and adjusted, and treated accordingly. But in a sense Culshaw went a step further, because it’s well known that Legge didn’t like stereo. Apparently, he said, “I spend my whole life mixing sounds, and now they’re trying to separate them,” which seems to me to misunderstand the essential animal that stereo is. On the other hand, Culshaw celebrated it, particularly with the marketing of Sonicstage in his opera recordings – which, incidentally, he’s quite cagey about in his book. He doesn’t go into detail about what it is – and it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary in terms of technology, but it is revolutionary in the sense that he choreographed the placing of the singers. And there’s the War Requiem, which with its spatial planes in stereo still sounds absolutely fantastic. In the opera recordings produced by Culshaw, people would sometimes move about as they sang, whereas in Legge’s opera recordings they do not. So, in that sense, Culshaw was ahead of his time in terms of what one might call aural–visual imagination. As a result, the best Culshaw stereo recordings of opera are ageless. Wonderful!’

Michael Haas joined Decca in 1977 as a producer. He worked with some of the artists that Culshaw had produced, most notably Sir Georg Solti, and he also worked on Decca’s opera productions, either as an assistant producer or as the main producer – so he’s well placed to reflect on the aesthetic legacy that Culshaw had bequeathed the company by the time he left in 1967. ‘When I joined Decca, Culshaw had been out of the company for 10 years. Nevertheless, there was a spirit that prevailed and lived in the work of every technician and sound engineer. Among my colleagues in Decca’s A & R department, there were more differentiated, even critical, views, mostly because the department’s head, Ray Minshull, was against the concept of “star producers”. I was only in my early twenties when I joined the company, and it never occurred to me that there were different ways of approaching opera recordings, which at the time was what Decca was most famous for. Only later, when I began to work with a variety of international labels and technicians, did I fully appreciate the influence of Culshaw at Decca and the legacy of his recording aesthetic.

‘One way to simplify post-war recording approaches would be to consider those practised in America (CBS and RCA), Germany (DG and Teldec) and the UK (EMI and Decca). A further simplification would be to classify these different styles as America’s striving to achieve “objectivity” in recorded sound; Germany’s “analytical” approach to sound; and the UK’s flair for theatrics. Since the 1960s, a debate as to the purpose of recording had remained unresolved. Was it a documentation of a particular performance at a particular point on a particular artist’s timeline, or was it a means of achieving the “perfect” performance in the artificial conditions of the studio? If the Americans and Germans strove more towards the second option, the British tended towards the first. Arguably, the Germans and Americans produced recordings lacking in perspective, at the time dismissed as “boom”.’

Culshaw with Bernstein and James King, Vienna, 1966 (Das Lied von der Erde) (photo: Decca)

What Culshaw did that was so radical was to make listening to an operatic recording a dramatic experience. As Haas explains: ‘Culshaw saw opera as theatre, and there was nothing objective about theatre; and sound-analysis served the single purpose of achieving the sense, or feel, of the theatre. It was a challenge to be met while recording in the emptiness of the studio. To create this feel, he and his crew came up with what I can only describe as the acoustical vanishing point – it was to recording what Filippo Brunelleschi’s achievements in the early 15th century were to painting.’ It was the Decca tree: a T-shaped stand holding usually three omnidirectional microphones positioned about three metres in the air just behind the conductor, a system developed in the early 1950s by Roy Wallace and Arthur Haddy, and later refined by Wilkinson. ‘It offered a depth to recording which more objective and analytical recordings had failed to capture. Culshaw saw opera as something more important than the mathematics of ensemble and intonation. He wanted visceral interaction to come across, and this involved use of the acoustical vanishing point. Takes were long so that dramatic dynamics between protagonists could be created – and so what if each take was fundamentally different? That was the very nature, the soul, of performance. Nor did he shy away from the phasing effects of movement to and from microphones – it proved there were living people interacting dramatically with other living people at the same time in the same studio. “Panning” voices electronically allowed opera to be recorded like oratorio, but it removed the sense of stage action taking place. It allowed each take to be identical, which was a joy for editors and for musicians who believed the studio could produce “the perfect performance” – but for Culshaw and his subsequent “school” of recording at Decca, the “perfect” was in the imperfection of dramatic interaction. He created the opera stage in everyone’s living room. In an age before live recording became the norm, it was quite an achievement.’

Culshaw would be appalled to have these innovations credited solely to him: teamwork was absolutely fundamental, something his wartime experiences had instilled in him. ‘Culshaw went into the Fleet Air Arm in the war, which was a marvellous discipline for him in terms of logic, in terms of how to deal with people, in terms of clear thinking, lateral thinking, all of which are necessary for becoming a good recording producer,’ Keener points out; while Pollard believes that, ‘The foundations for recording The Ring and developing the sound aspects of recording were something which John, I think, very cleverly assimilated from the people around him. I wouldn’t say he picked their brains, but he used their enthusiasms, which was, I’m sure, a throwback to his service days. In the services you were taught that you worked as a team: there was no one person capable of doing everything. You were dependent upon other people. And I think that this was something that John brought to his work at Decca, which was not endemic in the recording industry at the time. If I think back to those early days of talking with people like Walter Legge or David Bicknell, very rarely would they involve their engineers in any conversation.’ (At EMI it wasn’t until the formation of the partnership of producer Christopher Bishop and engineer Christopher Parker that you’d encounter people working very much along the lines that Culshaw cultivated.) Haas recalls that conversations about Culshaw within Decca were less about him as an individual and more about him as part of a team: Culshaw and Gordon Parry, or Culshaw and Kenneth Wilkinson.

As Culshaw’s career developed at Decca (including a brief spell producing in Europe for the US-based Capitol Records, with which Decca had a distribution deal), he gradually moved away from overseeing sessions that were A & R’d by someone else (often as part of some Machiavellian grand plan cooked up by the Zurich-based Maurice Rosengarten) and took on the role himself. This was particularly the case with his opera recordings. His autobiography details numerous instances where his gentle diplomacy – or just sangfroid – was called into play. That was until he encountered some star tenor’s wife, and money was required to break an impasse. There was a nail-biting stand-off with Franco Corelli’s wife, Loretta (‘She was much smaller than Rina Del Monaco [Mario’s wife], but with the same kind of penetrating voice and without even the basic kind of charm’), during the sessions for Herbert von Karajan’s Carmen recording in Vienna. It ended up with the entire project being held to ransom before the Flower Song could be recorded, something $1500 painfully resolved. But Culshaw would go to enormous lengths, and travel hundreds of miles, to ensure that he had the best cast he could assemble. The Solti opera catalogue stands the test of time partly for this very reason.

His rapport with Benjamin Britten and the resulting recordings of the bulk of the composer’s mature output is something for which every music lover should be grateful to Culshaw. He fought to get Peter Grimes on record, and even if he had to hand the 1958 sessions over to Erik Smith to actually produce (he was busy on another project), he prepared the recording meticulously. Van Biene points out that Culshaw was one of the first producers to sit centrally at the control desk (previously that seat was occupied by the engineer). ‘He made that change, in conjunction with [the engineer] Gordon Parry. They had new equipment installed in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, in 1964. It was a Siemens mixer sound desk with the 10-channel bank on the left for the orchestra and the 10-channel bank on the right for the stage. And John would sit in the middle, so they relied on him to get the stereo right. There was criticism from other engineers (I know Ken Wilkinson didn’t like it), but it was swings and roundabouts. It was a different idea and we made some fine recordings that way.’

The January 1963 recording of Britten’s War Requiem is not only a huge musical and technical achievement, a testament to Culshaw’s ear for the work’s inherent theatricality, but its marketing revealed Culshaw’s fine business acumen and commercial skills. Even the cover – with its simple yet bold lettering – added to the recording’s impact, and in turn to its spectacular sales figures.

Culshaw with Solti at Kingsway Hall, London (photo: Decca)

Culshaw left Decca in 1967, frustrated at the senior management’s increasingly cautious approach – believing the company had lost its pioneering spirit. He sought pastures new at the BBC, where, ironically, he would encounter hurdles of a different kind, namely miles of red tape. Pollard believes that things could have been very different. ‘Leaving Decca wasn’t an easy decision for him. Sir Edward Lewis [Decca’s founder and Managing Director] was still there when he left, and I think that Ted was a little short-sighted, because had he gone to John and offered him a directorship in the Decca Record Company, I think that would have been enough to give John the confidence to continue working for Decca. But as it was, there was no indication from Ted that there was going to be any furtherance of John’s position. I don’t think he was even the director of classical recordings, I think he was a classical manager, or some such. So it was probably the attractiveness of a broadcasting corporation which tipped the balance for him and took him away from Decca.’

As BBC TV’s Head of Music Programmes (till 1975), Culshaw was able to further his mission to make music more accessible while never dumbing down, employing the visual medium to best effect. He instigated the hugely popular André Previn’s Music Night programmes, in which the conductor would talk to the audience and then conduct a casually attired LSO, attracting a vast audience. He oversaw the filming of a Beethoven symphony cycle conducted by Otto Klemperer. He filmed operas for television, even persuading Britten to conduct productions of Peter Grimes and Mozart’s Idomeneo for the medium, as well as making a film of Peter Pears and Britten performing Schubert’s Winterreise. But arguably his most enduring achievement was to commission an opera from Britten, made expressly for television. It was Owen Wingrave, premiered in 1971 at The Maltings, Snape – a hall in whose creation Culshaw had been heavily involved.

Culshaw is remembered as peaceable with a gentle diplomacy (photo: Decca)

Culshaw would occasionally make recordings on a freelance basis: Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, made in Vienna for CBS in 1971 with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, was perhaps the most glamorous – and the most unsuccessful (something that Bernstein was only too aware of, hurling the box-set across the room when Culshaw went to visit him in New York. ‘That’s a load of absolute rubbish,’ the normally level-headed Bernstein apparently said to Culshaw, as Pollard recalls).

The final chapter in Culshaw’s career, after a couple of years serving as Chairman of the music panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain, found him in Sydney working as a consultant to the Australian Broadcasting Commission. And it was in Australia that he must have contracted a rare form of hepatitis. He returned to the UK for treatment, but died, aged only 55, in 1980.

Culshaw’s legacy needs no special pleading. He and his Decca engineers advanced the techniques of recording with such skill and sympathy for the music that their numerous productions totally defy time. It’s interesting, as Fyfe notes in his excellent essay in the commemorative issue, that Culshaw showed extraordinary prescience about streaming, something that was still some decades away. ‘The listener will be able to command a performance to take place by dialling some code through which a computer will channel the performance to him,’ Culshaw wrote in Ring Resounding in 1967, adding, ‘We remain faithful to outdated techniques and methods because they are a sentimental part of our past.’ Few people so magnificently proved that vision rather than sentiment can set a vital new agenda.

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today