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When sound is a passion
At the side of the stage in the Concert Hall there is a technical facilities room hidden away, the size of the cockpit in a spacecraft. But a great deal more technology is needed when the sound of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra is to be transmitted every week to listeners and viewers.
loudspeakers. He personally knows a number of the musicians in the Danish National Symphony Orchestra from his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. ‘Sometimes the musicians almost queue up to come inside the producer room and listen to the recordings. It really is an exciting process to help both the conductor and the musicians achieve the optimum recording – and at the
To capture the sound of a large symphony orchestra requires not only a vast numbers of microphones, cables and soundtracks. Artistic flair is also needed to lead the recordings and create the absolutely right sound picture around the orchestra. Bernhard Güttler is one of Europe’s most coveted producers of classical music and he heads most of the transmissions and recordings with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. ‘In actual fact, my background is just as much musical as it is technical. I sang and played the piano as a child, but at the same time I was fascinated by science. As early as 16, I decided to become a recording producer, because the profession is a symbiosis between two worlds – those of music and science.’ ‘Studying to become a recording producer takes place at a classic academy of music, so
alongside the technical and theoretical disciplines we were close all the time to the artistic process that must always be the focal point of a producer room,’ Bernhard Güttler explains. As a professor in Germany he now helps train new recording producers. He emphasises that creating fine sound is not an end in itself. ‘As a producer my role should preferably be invisible. I must get the orchestra and the artists on stage to radiate out from the loudspeakers while ensuring that the sound picture remains as natural as possible for the listener. It is not a question of finding the perfect sound but of capturing the intensity and the presence on stage.’ As DR, Bernhard Güttler collaborates closely with the recording engineer Mikkel Nymand, who is responsible, among other things, for the positioning of microphones in the Concert Hall and the sound-mix the listeners hear from the
