The Recording

[For the curious, here are several sections I have put together describing our efforts in the monastery, as well as brief discussions of barometric pressure, regulation, and voicing of the piano. -- The Producer]

A wonderful Steinway was borrowed from a Brinkerhoff admirer and piano connoisseur, who had spent decades developing the instrument to its present sonority. The piano was then shrink-wrapped to prevent changes in humidity or temperature, crated, flown to Khatmandu over a two-week period, and helicoptered successfully to Brinkerhoff's remote location in the Himalayas.

    Here follows a brief technical list of the gear involved, for those of a mind to notice. Others may simply skip this paragraph. We recorded Brinkerhoff's marathon session through vintage tube microphones (Neumann M50 No. 228, M250s Nos. 3256 and 562, M58s), Gefell M296s Nos. 150 and 154, and Sennheiser MkH20s running some 20 feet into a Grace mic preamp and immediately converted after a foot through a dCS 902 ADC to 24 bits at a 96 kilohertz sampling rate, then dumped via Apogee Wydeeye A-110 AES cable to a Macintosh G3 powerbook sporting Rorke hard drives, and ultimately to Exabyte tape.

    We monitored through Stax SRD-7 Professional headphones, which have their own additional amplifier. Cardas cable was used throughout. No recording console was used, partly because of the cost of transporting it to so remote a locale, but the advantage is that the sound remains uncompromised by further bends, loops or simply increased length in the console cabling.

    Each piece was recorded with different microphones in differing positions.

    Nature, as large as it is in the Himalayas, had to be viewed as an accomplice if we were to get anything done. If you have a sensitive stereo system, it may produce rain and thunder, fortuitous accomplices always. The distant wash of the river half a mile below, echoing in the deep gorges, somewhat reduced to hisses and splashes in the far background, may emerge if you turn the volume up high enough.

    If you can hear that deadly sibilance, beware. Out of that sinuous and sinister void, known technically as the digital noise floor, if gorges, moraines, and cataracts can be called floors, the sudden explosion of Chopin might prove more of a challenge than your system anticipates. Should you desire to traverse the breech and enter the roiling landscape crouching behind the music, pick a soft passage!

    All such sounds occurred during our less than ideal recording session surrounded by extreme conditions: the days saw temperatures of over eighty degrees, while the nights fell to minus thirty. Heat was provided by sunlight by day and only by the insulation of the monastery walls at night, stone over three feet thick. To ask a piano or a microphone to endure such extremes is asking for trouble, and we got it. It would have been difficult to remove the infelicities of sound resulting from such abuse without altering the otherwise wonderful sense of place.

    We were recording not in the usual creaky college auditorium with its rattling radiators or screaming outside buses, but in a stony mausoleum encased in impenetrable mountains, surrounded by immense boulders, arching cliffs, vast drops, often looming thunderheads, snow squalls, and occasional distant avalanches.

    An unfamiliar incense and the unnerving ambiance of a strange culture clung to every note. We suspended prayer flags and Buddhist tapestries (thankas) from ropes in an attempt to deaden the overbearing echoes in the huge room, so in fact adding any sort of reverberation after the fact has proven unnecessary. No equalization or other enhancement was added.

    Despite the hardship of the situation, the sound of the piano seemed to hang timelessly against the walls, as colored as they were in faded hues not often seen by Western eyes.

    Only occasionally does a recorded performance convey the reality of an absolutely still moment, when listeners stop breathing. Such moments have been documented on Cecilia Bartoli's video concert, Bergman's Magic Flute, Scofield's Lear, Olivier's Othello, Cacoyannis' Iphigenia, Lipatti's records. You can't make such a moment happen.

    Operas run their course every night, essentially the same notation, the same timing, but only once in a while does the room stand still. Actors act the same play night in and out, but only here and there does something happen which seems unplanned, breathless.

    And how much harder is it to achieve such a feeling in a premeditated, recording session, where the final takes are snatched in a frenzy of exhaustion, desperation, and annoyance. It is a miracle that great recordings exist at all. You have to control all the details to emerge uncontrolled. I cannot claim to have succeeded as well as those great moments, and of course I can always lay the blame at the foot of the dehydrated pianist. But I would like instead to take the blame for any intrusions of technology on what was in the flesh an often enthralling night, filled, as any night, with small errors of the memory or the fingers, which I have left intact, in the hopes of conveying the entire mood.