It’s 10 in the morning on a Thursday in mid-November. I’m heading to the Berlin Philharmonie to catch the final rehearsal of The Rite of Spring, which will be performed along with Stravinsky’s Roi des Étoiles and Rachmaninov’s The Bells this coming weekend. This concert will be transmitted live via the BPO’s Digital Concert Hall and also broadcast to cinemas throughout Germany. 

The orchestra members are casually attired and the hall is nearly empty, save some onlookers who are presumably family and friends of the musicians, as well as a class of very well behaved kindergarteners. Sir Simon Rattle raises his baton and they begin. They are surprisingly awake for the early hour of day and obviously enjoying themselves by casting glances and smiling at each other. A percussionist punches through a large bass drum, which elicits laughter from everyone.

Although Rattle and the Philharmonic have performed the work a number of times, this is their first time recording the piece together, a fact that is perhaps surprising given that Sir Simon recently marked his first decade in Berlin.

Like virtually all of the orchestra’s recordings under Rattle’s tenure, Rite will be released as a live recording. The process is more complicated than the name ‘Live Recording’ implies, much more than just taping the performance. They record all the performances of the concert (three, in this case), as well as the dress rehearsal (a pre-take to catch the quiet moments) and then have a patch session afterwards, if need be.

‘This is a significant recording, because it’s a piece with which Simon Rattle has made a lot of headlines with the soundtrack to the film Rhythm Is It, which enjoyed great acclaim around the world as a documentary about reaching out with music to underprivileged parts of the city,’ explained Stanley Dodds, an Australian violinist who has been with the Philharmonic for 20 years and currently serves as the orchestra’s Media Chairman. ‘His name, in conjunction with the educational program that he’s initiated here, is greatly connected to Le Sacre,’ he continues, referring to the work by an abbreviation of its French name.

Dodd is upfront about the potential for a performance to be influenced by the knowledge that the musicians are being recorded. ‘You need to be honest and say: of course, when you know its being recorded for CD or broadcast live on Digital Concert Hall there’s someplace in your mind that’s aware of this. Ideally, though, in the performance itself – and that’s what’s so great about a live recording – you free yourself of the sometimes artificial nature of a studio and when performing in front of the public – for a musician, that’s the most natural performance setting you can get. When you have an audience you’re playing with the audience’s ears as well, so it just sharpens all of the senses,’ he explains.

Rattle is known for bringing clarity and passion to his performances. With Rite, Dodd says he admires the maestro’s careful handling of the piece’s emotional antipodes: ‘He has a sensitivity for the softer sounds and when it explodes, it really gets wild. It’s very organic. He goes way beyond just executing the piece,’ he adds.

But in order to capture this on a recording, the technology must be as unobtrusive and invisible as possible. This requires mutual trust between Rattle, the musicians and the CD’s producer, Christophe Franke (not to be confused with Christopher Franke, a member of the band Tangerine Dream).

‘I appreciate [Franke’s] take on our sound, because after all, the engineer is actually creating a sound with his mix. He’s as familiar with the hall’s natural sound as with what’s coming in through the microphones,’ Dodds explains.

Fergus McWilliam, a horn player from Scotland whose been playing with the orchestra for 27 years explained that his generation of musicians was the first to play Rite with regularity. ‘It’s no longer the shock, the scandal and the north face of the Eiger that it used to be,’ explained McWilliam, adding that now was a particularly rich time for the orchestra to be recording the work with Rattle.

‘Sacre is a kind of emblem, a badge, something where you can look at the 10 years of work we’ve been doing with Simon, shows up frequently as a measure, a bellwether, something by which we measure our progress,’ he adds. ‘There’s more to the score that’s often heard. It’s all there, but it doesn’t often get revealed the way Simon Rattle’s doing,’ he says.

McWilliam, who has played and recorded under Karajan and Abbado, prefers the experience of live recording, which he feels captures the essence of the orchestra better than in the lavishly engineered studio recordings of the past. He gives Franke, who has worked on the orchestra’s live recording for the past decade, a lot of credit: ‘When [Franke] started recording us I said, ‘Hallelujah, he finally got our recordings to sound like who we are. Finally we sound like ourselves.’

Beyond that, he says that he’s glad to be recording in the Philharmonie, in front of an audience. ‘When you see a red light that says this is a take, it’s hard to get spontaneously passionate when it’s on command. Whereas if you know that there’s a little risk involved, this is a full performance and we’re just going to record what happens. We’re not worried about accidents. In fact, fewer accidents happen when you take a chance. And we much prefer, we live for the concert. We are quite happy to let what happens happen and let it be recorded. But to work for the recording seems counterintuitive. It’s not what we do,’ he continues.

I’m led upstairs to the sound studio, called Studio 3, the sanctum sanctorum of the producer I’ve heard so much about. The profusion of nobs and controls is dizzying; I feel as if I’m inside the cockpit of a spaceship. From the window, Franke has a great bird’s-eye view of the Hans Scharoun’s world famous auditorium. ‘The hall itself is really the perfect studio,’ he says, praising the ‘clarity and homogenous sound you get from the orchestra.’

For this recording, the main hall of the Philharmonie has been outfitted with 45 microphones. The majority of the sound, however, comes from two main units. ‘We also use quite a number of spot microphones which are added at a nearly inaudible level,’ which serve the purpose of outlining the sound. Franke explains what this means with a metaphor: ‘If you paint something with watercolors, you can do it so that everything is very soft and blurry, which can be nice for sound. But you can also then use a little pencil and just draw the contours of everything. And that’s what you need if you listen to something, and you only listen to it. You need that contour, because you’re missing the visual cues.’

Franke does more than just mix the recordings into its final, CD form (which in itself is a laborious process). He follows along in the score during rehearsals and concerts and he both gives and receives feedback from Sir Simon about which parts of which performances came out best. ‘The recording process is, on one hand, a technical process of setting up the whole recording equipment; you have to also imagine a certain sound picture you want to achieve and they trying to get this picture with the tools you got. But this is only one part of the recording process. The other part is the interaction with the orchestra and of course, mainly Sir Simon. He comes and listens to the recording, then we discuss whether the sound should be aggressive or rich and full (or ideally maybe both) and whether the tam-tam is loud enough or the recording reverb makes the sound we both imagine. And either I point out things to him, which in the recording don’t work. I might say, ‘Sorry I can’t hear this crescendo in the bass clarinet, which is actually making lots of sense’ and he might say, ‘Well, I do hear it on stage but maybe I’ll talk to the clarinet player.’’ In this way, Franke works as Sir Simon’s feedback, in lieu of the audience. ‘If I say, the woodwinds don’t sound sharp or clear enough or the double-basses sounds weak, then we need to do something, because everyone in this orchestra is really working on getting the best result,’ he explains.

For Franke, producing the best possible CD from live performances is not about trying to imitate the live experience of concert going, which he admits can never – or very rarely – can be replicated. ‘There is nothing like a live concert, you know? But there’s also nothing like a well-produced CD, which is something completely different, because you get completely different benefits of that recording. You get maybe more clarity and transparency in a recording than what you can get in a concert,’ he adds.

Sir Simon himself, who has recorded The Rite before with Birmingham in 1990, said that he was glad that he was able to train the orchestra with this piece over the past decade. ‘We’ve played the Rite of Spring a fair amount together. Since I’ve been here they haven’t played it with anyone else. And I tried to get a point where they were really free enough to dance it, and not to calculate it, and make it come from the earth. This is a wild orchestra. That’s the great thing. You don’t need to encourage them to be wild,’ he tells me when I meet him in his office.

‘Normally we play much better live,’ he continues. ‘This is a real performing animal in that way. Particularly for these pieces that need the big structure, it’s so much better. For these pieces what’s important is the live impact. I hope that that still comes out in the recording. But the orchestra is so used to it and Christophe is such a master,’ he explains, adding that he sometimes listens to the CDs that Franke burns him on his morning drives to the Philharmonie. ‘I trust him absolutely, but I still listen,’ the conductor explains.

Sir Simon acknowledges the potential danger of being overly cautious during a live recording and says that the best approach is to carry on with business as usual. ‘Of course you worry about doing something that will be there for the rest of time, but there’s a certain point when you just need to throw caution to the wind and go for it and hope that it’s not too grotesque. But if you’re too careful, you hear that as well. It’s better when you can release yourself from that,’ he adds with a smile.

Sir Simon Rattle's new recording of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra will be reviewed in the June issue.