Джон Ройдс Калшоу: Классикалық музыканың көрнекті өндірушісі

Classical record producer from England
the English comedian and impressionist

John Royds Culshaw, OBE (28 May 192427 April 1980) was a pioneering English classical record producer for Decca Records. He produced a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, begun in 1958. Largely self educated musically, Culshaw worked for Decca from the age of 22, first writing album liner notes and then becoming a producer. After a brief period working for Capitol Records, Culshaw returned to Decca in 1955 and began planning to record the Ring cycle, employing the new stereophonic technique to produce recordings of unprecedented realism and impact. He disliked live recordings from opera houses, and sought to put on disc specially made studio recordings that would bring the operas fully to life in the listener's mind. In addition to his Wagner recordings, he supervised a series of recordings of the works of Benjamin Britten, with the composer as conductor or pianist, and recordings of operas by Verdi, Richard Strauss and others. Culshaw left Decca in 1967 and was appointed head of music programmes for BBC Television, where he remained until 1975, employing a series of innovations to bring classical music to the television viewer. He later undertook several academic posts. He remains best remembered for his Decca records; along with Fred Gaisberg and Walter Legge, he was one of the most influential producers of classical recordings. His father then sent him to King George V Grammar School, Southport. When he left school in 1940, aged 16, he followed his father into the staff of the Midland Bank as a clerk, working at a branch in Liverpool. He had little aptitude or liking for banking, failing to pass the company's examination in banking theory, He trained as a navigator, was commissioned as an officer, and promoted to lieutenant as a radar instructor. What spare time he had, he devoted to his passionate interest in music. Apart from piano lessons as a child, Culshaw was self taught musically, and had no ambitions to be a performer. The critic and biographer Richard Osborne wrote of him, "Like many people for whom music is an obsession, Culshaw was a lonely and meticulous person, jealously guarding the sense of personal integrity which his precocious interest in music had helped form and deepen." While in the Fleet Air Arm, Culshaw "wrote articles on music by the dozen and – quite rightly – they came back by the dozen." This led to invitations to broadcast musical talks for the BBC and to contribute articles to classical music magazines. It was followed by two further books; a popular introduction to concertos (The Concerto in "The World of Music" series in 1949), and a guide to modern music (A Century of Music in 1952). By 1947 Culshaw had been given the chance to produce classical sessions for Decca's rapidly expanding catalogue. At Decca, the musicians whom he recorded included Ida Haendel, Eileen Joyce, Kathleen Ferrier and Clifford Curzon. In 1948 he first worked with Georg Solti, a pianist and aspiring conductor. In 1950, after the introduction of the long playing record (LP), he produced the first LP versions of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. In 1951, Culshaw and one of Decca's senior engineers, Kenneth Wilkinson, were sent to the Bayreuth Festival to record Wagner's Parsifal. For Culshaw, Wagner was an abiding passion, and he persuaded Decca and the Bayreuth management to let him record that year's Ring cycle in addition to Parsifal. The Ring recording could not be released, probably for contractual reasons. The Parsifal recording, on the other hand, was released to great acclaim in 1952. The Decca team returned to Bayreuth to record the 1953 performances of Lohengrin. The resultant recording was well reviewed, – Culshaw arranged for eighteen anvils to be hired and hammered. Similarly, where Wagner called for steerhorns, Culshaw arranged for them to be used instead of the trombones habitually substituted at Bayreuth and other opera houses. In The Gramophone, Edward Greenfield wrote:
It was thanks to Culshaw's devotion to Wagnerian intentions – ever encouraged by the engineer who was at his right hand through the whole project, Gordon Parry, himself a devoted Wagnerian – that in the Solti Ring cycle one is able to hear the scores in a way literally impossible in the theatre. Siegfried's voice made to sound like Gunther's, the voice of Fafner from his cave, not to mention the splendour of anvils and rainbow bridge harps in Rheingold, all transcend what is heard in the opera house. In 1967, after the Decca Ring was complete, Culshaw wrote a memoir, Ring Resounding, about the making of the recording. In 1999, Gramophone ran a poll of its readers to find "the ten greatest recordings ever made." The Decca Ring topped the poll.

Culshaw produced a series of Decca recordings of Britten's music with the composer as conductor or pianist. The Times described them as "a priceless heritage for posterity." Culshaw, who was then responsible for recordings in Vienna, was unavailable to produce that pioneering recording, which was also the first modern opera to be recorded in stereo: instead, he "planned it down to the last detail", and passed his detailed instructions to Erik Smith, who produced the recording. Among the works Culshaw himself recorded with Britten were the operas Albert Herring (1964), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1967), and Billy Budd (1968). Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music." Culshaw thought of all his recordings, that of Britten's War Requiem was the finest. Culshaw produced many of the conductor Herbert von Karajan's best known operatic and orchestral sets, which remain in the catalogues five decades later. The opera sets include Tosca, Carmen, Aida, Die Fledermaus and Otello; among the orchestral sets were Holst's The Planets and several Richard Strauss works including the then rarely heard Also sprach Zarathustra. In the late 1950s Decca entered into a commercial partnership with RCA, by which Decca teams recorded classical works in European venues on RCA's behalf. Among the recordings supervised by Culshaw for RCA were Sir Thomas Beecham's lavishly re orchestrated version of Handel's Messiah. Other artists with whom he worked for Decca and RCA included pianists such as Wilhelm Backhaus, Arthur Rubinstein and Julius Katchen; conductors including Karl Böhm, Sir Adrian Boult, Pierre Monteux, Fritz Reiner, and George Szell; and singers such as Carlo Bergonzi, Jussi Björling, Lisa Della Casa, Leontyne Price, and Renata Tebaldi.

By 1967 Culshaw wished for a change. He was growing disenchanted with the top management of Decca, which he believed had lost its pioneering enthusiasm. Culshaw also screened more formal concerts, including Klemperer's 1970 Beethoven symphony cycle from the Royal Festival Hall. In 1973 he organised for BBC television to broadcast a complete performance of Wagner's Siegfried conducted by Reginald Goodall, but the project never happened. In 1974 Verdi's Un ballo in maschera was broadcast from the Covent Garden. Culshaw also set up BBC studio productions of The Marriage of Figaro, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Flying Dutchman and La traviata. Culshaw commissioned Britten's opera Owen Wingrave, written expressly for television. He also persuaded Britten to conduct television productions of Peter Grimes and Mozart's Idomeneo, and to accompany Pears in Schubert's Winterreise. Britten and Pears invited him to Snape, not far from their base at Aldeburgh in Suffolk and he encouraged them to transform the Snape Maltings into a concert hall. He took time off from the BBC to return to the recording studio, rejoining his old Decca engineering team in 1971 to produce Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. In 1975, Culshaw left the BBC and worked freelance as a record and stage producer, writer and broadcaster. He was invited to serve on the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975 and was chairman of its music panel from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 he became a senior fellow in the creative arts at the University of Western Australia, and was visiting professor at the University of Houston, the University of Southern California and the University of Melbourne. He also took on the responsibility for the annual United Nations concert in New York, and acted as a music consultant to the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Culshaw died in London in 1980, at the age of 55, from a rare form of hepatitis. He was unmarried. His unfinished autobiography, Putting the Record Straight, was published after his death. Among the honours given to Culshaw, The Times listed "eight Grands Prix des Disques, numerous Grammys and in 1966 an OBE", and the Vienna Philharmonic's Nicolai Medal in 1959 and its Schalk Medal in 1967. Culshaw himself later observed, "as a political thriller it was short on thrills and naïve on politics. "|group= n It was chosen by The Observer as one of its books of the year in 1950. At the time of its publication he was working on a second novel. He gave it the title A Harder Thing, but was persuaded by his publisher to change it to A Place of Stone. It was published in 1951. Culshaw's musical books were: Sergei Rachmaninov, 1948; The Concerto, 1949; A Century of Music, 1951; Ring Resounding: The Recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1967; Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", 1976; Wagner: The Man and His Music, 1978; and Putting the Record Straight: The Autobiography of John Culshaw, 1981.