That blaze of D major

I was one of those appalling children born with the demeanour and sensibilities of a 50-year-old.

Only work saved me from a lifetime of 'fogeydom'; at 16 I turned up for my first day at work at the hi-fi company Linn Products, in my three-piece suit, eager to learn more about the intimate secrets of loudspeakers.

I was given a tub of bitumen and a brush.

Twenty-odd years later I'm still there, which may demonstrate a staggering lack of enterprise, but I like to think it is more because I was lucky enough to find myself in a business that was prepared to let its people go where their ideas took them. So when in the late 1980s I thought I might try to make some recordings, the question was not why, but how?

It was worth it in the end: we were Gramophone's Label of the Year for 2010-2011, a huge honour, while between them Linn Records and Linn Products are rapidly building a new market for streamed high resolution Studio Masters. Business has never been better.

The road not taken

I was born and brought up just outside Glasgow, which conveniently is also where Linn is based. However, I've lived on the road for most of my career. One of the curious realities of recording classical music is just how few really good places there are to do it. Apart from the obvious prerequisite of an excellent acoustic, the number of places which are actually immune to the global infection of traffic and aircraft noise is vanishingly small. You have to go to where the halls are.

However, there are compensations. I write from the control room of Potton Hall, in deepest Suffolk, quite a long way from the madding crowd and on the edge of the Minsmere Nature Reserve. From my window I have my own personal version of Autumnwatch, with the creature-count for the last hour standing at two Red Deer, innumerable rabbits and a beautiful Green Woodpecker. Breathless commentary is provided not by Kate Humble but by the magnificent Kate Royal, delivering another ravishing take of Duparc's Extase. Please remember that this constitutes work.

Gilbert, Sullivan and Hobbs

There was music all around me when I was growing up. My dad is still active in the local Gilbert and Sullivan society. I maintain a passing interest in this myself. It has proved surprisingly useful; if you can detect Gilbertian sympathies in those around you, then there is no end to what you can get away with. Dear and much-lamented Sir Charles, of Pineapple Poll, among so much else, was a case in point: any growing irritation with violin balance could easily be diverted, if not entirely assuaged, by 'if one of us must destroy the other, let it be me!'.

A small epiphany occurred when I was ten, in York, ostensibly to visit my grandmother, but more importantly making a pilgrimage to Banks, in those days the most splendid music shop on earth. A labyrinth of tiny rooms and musty cardboard files on the corner of Medieval Stonegate, Banks had its own house elves who had traded any contact with daylight for a ferocious knowledge of sheet music and a splendidly Yorkshire-camp solicitude. The place felt like a bizarre amalgam of Diagon Alley and the Fast Show's 'suits you' outfitters, but I loved it and would spend hours there, rummaging.

That blaze of D major

There I found a slightly tatty box set of Harnoncourt's Weihnachtsoratorium. I had no idea what this was and certainly couldn't pronounce it, but it was obviously monumental, and surprisingly cheap. It took me about a month to get beyond the first chorus. As with so many things in life, it is impossible to un-know something, but I wish I could repeat the thrill of first hearing that blaze of D major when the chorus comes in with the first full 'Jauchzet'. I was astonished by the work, but the longer I spent with the recording the more I was drawn into the sound-world, where you could hear individual voices and where each line had real character.

This was authentic performance: original instruments, smaller, focused forces, tuning based on ancient temperaments. I was fascinated by the technology and archaeology of it all. I loved the purity of tone and clarity of line of these recordings, since it seemed to me that you really could hear far more clearly what was unfolding in the music. The thing I found utterly addictive was the sound. I've always been fascinated not just by music but, as Beecham would have it, 'by the noise it makes', and I found that these textures and colours were just more brightly painted.

A soundtrack to study

I worked my way through the rest of the Cantatawerk with enthusiasm, but other voices soon came into view. I found two Classics for Pleasure albums, both now genuinely commonplace: The Clerkes of Oxenford's recording of Spem in Alium and the original Tallis Scholars' Allegri miserere. They are still a fascinating pair, showing how in just a few years David Wulstan's pioneering work on pitch and vibrato-free voice production was then carried forward by Peter Phillips's meticulous attention to ensemble and intonation. The amazing thing was that they were on sale in the corner of every Woolworths in the country.

The Tallis Scholars were the background to all my school revision, on an ancient Walkman, whose batteries were so suspect that by the end of a couple of hours the pitch was down by about a fourth. A few years later I had the great good fortune to start making recordings with Phillips and Steve Smith, his producer, a relationship which continues and which I still relish. Most of my early recordings for them were done in the lovely church in Salle in Norfolk, but these recordings never had the magic of the Allegri recording.

The sound of buildings

Then in 1998 we made a 'live' recording in Merton Chapel, Oxford, and suddenly 'that sound' came back. I've just been there recording the complete Byrd viol music with Phantasm. No matter how much technology you throw at the problem, the building is as much part of the performance as any other aspect. Some of them have very distinct personalities, which become very familiar over time.

One of the best is St Jude-on-the-Hill, Lutyens's great cathedral in the miniature New Delhi at the top of Hampstead Garden Suburb. It has a wonderful acoustic, which you will know from any number of recordings, from St Hildegard of Hyperion's 'Feather on the Breath of God' through to Ian Bostridge's new 'Three Baroque Tenors'. Many of the great Academy of Ancient Music recordings were made there and, in particular, its 'Foundling Hospital' version of Messiah, which I played to death.

Arrival

It has many virtues, and it was impossible not to have it at the back of my mind when working on the Dunedin Consort's 1742 version. For me the greatest marvel of the AAM recording was the string sound. Decca's engineering is beautifully warm and clear, but the sound of gut strings in St Jude's is one of the most expensive you will ever hear.

Twenty years later I got to record it for myself. There are few real moments of 'arrival' in this line of work, since it is mostly about making sure that artists are able to perform to their best, but the first time I opened the fader in St Jude's with a Baroque orchestra at the other end was one of the best of them.

By Philip Hobbs from Linn Records

(First published in International Record Review as 'Too many records' and reproduced with their kind permission).