When obituaries refer to the great legacy a person left the music world, they usually refer to musicians and their recordings. Ted Perry was no musician (‘I don’t know much about the dots and dashes,’ he once said), yet his legacy is no less monumental, influential and affectionately held for that. Hyperion Records, which he founded in 1980 and initially ran from his kitchen table, driving minicabs at nights and at weekends to support it financially, has since grown into one of the best-loved and most courageous of the independent labels. 

George Edward Perry (always known as Ted) originally trained as a printer’s apprentice, before joining the staff of London’s EMG Record Shop in 1949. In 1956 he spent a year working for the London office of Deutsche Grammophon, before moving to Australia where he worked in distribution and A&R for Festival Records. Returning to the UK in 1961, he ran Saga, a small British label. Then from 1963 until 1972 he sold ice creams from a van. ‘I had a family growing up and I needed to educate them. You can make money selling ice cream,’ he said. By 1973 he was back at Saga, then in 1977 worked for Meridian Records, which produced ‘A Shropshire Lad’, the first independent disc to win a Gramophone Award. Three years later he launched Hyperion, the first disc being clarinet concertos by Stanford and Finzi with Thea King.

It was while driving his minicab that Perry heard a radio performance that changed the fortunes of his fledgling label. Christopher Page’s Gothic Voices were performing music by the then little-known 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Perry then contacted the musicians, and the resulting disc ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ went on to sell 330,000 copies (and counting). ‘It pays for all my mistakes,’ he once said.

Under Perry’s stewardship, Hyperion developed a kaleidoscopic range of both repertoire and musicians. Choirs to have recorded for the label include Westminster Cathedral under David Hill, James O’Donnell and Martin Baker; St Paul’s Cathedral under John Scott; and The King’s Consort under Robert King. Its roster of pianists includes Stephen Hough, whose recording of the complete works for piano and orchestra of Saint-Saëns (itself, number 27 in Hyperion’s The Romantic Piano Concerto series) was last year’s Gramophone Record of the Year; Leslie Howard, whose monumental survey of Liszt’s solo piano music took 14 years to record and ran to 95 discs; and Graham Johnson, who worked with Perry on some of the labels most ambitious projects. Their encyclopaedic Schubert song series took 13 years to record, ran to 37 volumes, embraced 600 songs and involved 50 singers of the calibre of Dame Janet Baker, Ian Bostridge, Lucia Popp and Matthias Goerne.

Artists, in their tributes to Perry, consistently referred to him not simply as a paymaster, but as someone who nurtured and supported their careers. Angela Hewitt said: ‘He made Hyperion feel like a big family — one to which you were so happy to belong. His support made you feel secure at a time when the record industry is anything but secure.’ He had faith in young artists at a stage when major labels could not or would not. He would also respond to gut instinct – often with remarkable speed. Robert King recalled that ‘his decision to take on The King’s Consort onto Hyperion was pure Ted. I sent a letter containing a tentative proposal for four possible discs. At 9.05 the next morning the phone rang: “Hi, Robert, it’s Ted here. We’ll take them all. Let me know when you’re going to record them.” How many other record executives would have made such a decision in seconds?’ And, as with Hildegard of Bingen, his decision proved right. Those first four discs sold nearly a quarter of a million copies, and the group’s catalogue on Hyperion now stands at nearly 90 discs. Likewise, Hewitt recalled approaching Perry with her first Bach CD. ‘While other labels either never answered or gave excuses as to why they couldn’t, Ted took exactly eight minutes to answer the fax I sent him, and immediately said he’d take it (as long as I recorded the complete works, of course!)’ His instinct became highly respected. Susan Tomes of the Florestan Trio noted that ‘Having the Hyperion “seal of approval” made us interesting to audiences all around the world.’

Perry was, as Johnson described him, a ‘shrewd businessman’. In his hands projects that, on paper, never looked like being commercial successes, would often prove to be exactly that. Of course, this did not always happen: ‘I will have to make a record which sells a million to pay for all my frivolities,’ he once told Gramophone, though added that ‘not once have I ever made a record that will knowingly be a financial disaster – they must all have a reasonable chance of selling’. But ultimately, what governed his repertoire choice was a simple philosophy. ‘I am not in the business to sell a lot of records and to make money. I want to make nice records, records that need to be made, that no one else will make.’

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