In the forty-five years since its founding, Hyperion has grown to be one of the biggest and best-known classical recording labels in the world. It also became particularly acclaimed for the many ambitious series it undertook. Song was a particular strong point, with the groundbreaking complete Schubert Songs, followed by complete editions of the songs of Schumann, Brahms, Strauss, Liszt and Fauré; then there was Angela Hewitt’s complete Bach keyboard music and Leslie Howard’s complete Liszt piano music, at 99 CDs the largest of all. These were all ‘closed’ series covering a fixed body of works, but perhaps the most ambitious project—because it required both soloists and orchestra—was the Romantic Piano Concerto series, which grew to 87 volumes. This is the story of how it came about, how it developed and what landmarks and adventures there were on its three-decade journey.

Serendipity brings the birth of a series
Back in 1990 I had been working at Hyperion for two years and found myself, somewhat unexpectedly (to me at any rate), employed as their sales and marketing manager. If I may indulge in some personal background, I had discovered classical music as a listener aged about twelve, become an avid record buyer and then decided, rather late, to start playing the piano. The latter led to my musical interests being particularly fixated on pianists and piano repertoire, but still, this was all just a hobby. I was expected to do something ‘sensible’ at university but gradually I began to decide that, somehow, I would like to make my life in music and where better than the record industry? With only partially relevant qualifications (biochemistry doesn’t count!), I managed to take a post-graduate music degree which included a course in recording and producing and hoped that might lead somewhere. It didn’t really (no loss to the world—I don’t have the temperament or the ‘golden ears’ to be a great success in that field), but after some temporary work at the National Sound Archive, a job in Tower Records led to a ‘real’ job as classical label manager for a distribution company. Through that I met Ted Perry, the founder of Hyperion and already a record industry legend. A year or so later I was working for him as described above.

Ted quickly realized that I was a ‘piano nut’, and as his interests were much more towards song and choral music, he began to ask for my input when it came to pianists. One of the earliest instances was what became our recording of the complete Shostakovich Preludes & Fugues. Ted wanted to do them, but with who? He suggested Ronald Stevenson might be an interesting choice—he would have been, but he declined. I suggested trying to get hold of Tatiana Nikolayeva who had inspired the cycle and to whom it was dedicated. She had already recorded the work in the USSR, but these LPs were not available in the West. Though she had barely performed previously in the UK, we were able to arrange a recording which went on to win a Gramophone Award. A good start!

So back to 1990. I happened to be outside my office in the Hyperion warehouse (the warehouse was the only way to get between offices or to the front door) when in walked Hugh MacDonald. To me he was a university lecturer who had taught me music. Why was he here? He was as surprised to see me; he had no idea I worked at Hyperion. It turned out he was now in charge of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and had arranged to meet Ted with the idea of Hyperion making some recordings with the band. Ted quickly saw Hugh and I knew each other and said ‘well, you better come to lunch with us then’.

Over lunch it was clear Ted was ‘going through the motions’; orchestral recordings were expensive, and Hyperion was making its name in other directions—we tended to leave symphonic repertoire to our friendly rival, Chandos. There was also the fact that at this point the BBC Scottish had no commercial recording history and so was not a strong brand. What could we do with them that would look convincing to the record buyer? I had become quite a fan of the many forgotten nineteenth-century virtuoso piano concertos which had been championed by Vox and some other smaller labels, mainly in the 1970s, but these recordings were often frustratingly poor, both in performance and recording standards, and in addition they often contained cuts. I suggested this might be an interesting project: we could cover similar repertoire but do it to a much higher standard. There was also the advantage that the pianist would be the star, so usage of an orchestra little known to record buyers would not be a disadvantage. Somewhat to my surprise, this suggestion met with approval from both Ted and Hugh, and we came away with a plan to make three recordings and see how they went.

We decided to launch the series with two of the better-known ‘forgotten’ concertos, those by Moszkowski and Paderewski, both brimming with good tunes and virtuoso excitement. That the BBCSSO’s principal conductor at the time was the Pole Jerzy Maksymiuk made the choice all the more appropriate. For our first pianist I chose Piers Lane. I had recently heard him give a wonderful Queen Elizabeth Hall performance of the Strauss/Schulz-Evler ‘Arabesques on the Blue Danube’ and thought anyone who could bring that off was the right man for the job. Elsewhere, Piers recounts in detail another happy coincidence that sealed the deal. He went on to make nine volumes in total, the second biggest contributor.

Our first release sold very well and received excellent reviews; meanwhile two more were in production. Next to be recorded was a disc of Mendelssohn’s pair of concertos for two pianos which he wrote as a precocious teenager. These proved the point about cuts in earlier recordings—based on previous timings I expected there to be room for a ‘filler’ and our pianists prepared the unusual ‘Duo concertant’ for two pianos and orchestra jointly composed by Mendelssohn and Moscheles. When it came to the recording sessions it turned out the uncut versions of the Mendelssohn concertos were so long there was no room for anything else.

The third of our recordings proved difficult. Medtner’s Piano Concertos Nos 2 & 3 were given to our recently signed pianist Nikolai Demidenko. He was passionate about the composer, and these are certainly two of the most significant works in our series. None of the orchestra’s regular Glasgow venues was available and in desperation we booked Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, a venue new to both the orchestra and our recording team. Balancing the sound was time consuming and the acoustic meant players had difficulty hearing each other. We completed the recording, but stressfully, and at one point Nikolai decided he wanted to veto the issue. This was out of the question with the investment we had already made and our limited means, and in any case, we were pretty happy with the results. Because the repertoire was stronger, we issued this as volume two, before the Mendelssohn, and the recording went on to win a Gramophone Award. The series was well and truly established!

Pianists and repertoire
From now on there was no question over whether the project would continue; we averaged about three recordings per year for some thirty years and through the next decade the series only increased in reputation. Each release was guaranteed to be one of our best sellers as more and more enthusiasts began to collect every volume as they were issued.

Looking back, it’s surprising how different times were then. The 1990s were boom years for the recording industry, driven by the rise of the CD and with the digital distribution of music still a distant fantasy. Hyperion grew from a small English label to one of the world’s leading independents and with that growth we could invest in new talent and more ambitious projects. The Romantic Piano Concerto series was to play its part in this. We needed a good supply of pianists to share the load of learning so much new repertoire, but this also meant we could introduce pianists through the series and then work with them on further projects. Almost all the pianists associated with the label went through this ‘rite of passage’ and in return Hyperion has built up a stable of some of the finest pianists recording today.

It’s now time to introduce Marc-André Hamelin, who has become one of Hyperion’s biggest artists and an international star. As I write, he features as cover artist on Gramophone magazine. Marc was little known in the early ’90s, just starting out on his career, but he had made a Godowsky LP for CBC Records which I had been impressed by, and I’d also been tipped off by our Canadian distributor that he was ‘one to watch’. My first chance to meet him was when he came over as part of a duo with the Canadian cellist Sophie Rolland, so on 16 March 1991 I found myself in a small venue in Bromley, introducing myself after the concert and arranging to meet him the next day for a chat. I explained the concept of the series and proposed that he record the Henselt concerto. This concerto is notorious for its extreme difficulty—of a type that is not always immediately apparent to the listener. Marc, of course, knew it, but he seemed rather reticent about the proposal, not because of the repertoire, but rather, I suspect, because he was a bit suspicious that some stranger should suddenly appear and offer him an orchestral recording. Anyway, it did come to pass as volume 7, and Marc has gone on to make five discs in the series including the longest and most demanding concerto of them all, the Busoni.

It seems appropriate to mention here that Marc was not the first to be offered the Henselt. It was originally to have been recorded by the Dutch pianist Rian de Waal, who had already made a very fine Godowsky recital for us, and indeed the concerto was scheduled for an August 1992 session with the BBC Scottish. Poor Rian, however, developed focal dystonia, an affliction which has sadly affected several pianists, and had to cancel. His career never really recovered, though he did return to playing for a short while before being struck down by cancer. That 1992 session was rescued by Stephen Coombs who agreed to learn concertos by Bortkiewicz and Arensky at very short notice. In a way, that session also rescued Stephen as he had been making his career as a duo pianist with Christopher Scott and we had planned a series of recordings with them. However, no sooner had this been agreed than Christopher decided he wanted to abandon playing professionally, leaving Stephen high and dry. He did some duo work with Ian Munro, as in the aforementioned Mendelssohn, but his first solo concerto disc led to three others in the series and some further solo piano discs and chamber music.

Unlike Marc-André, when Stephen Hough joined the series, and Hyperion, he was already a star. Stephen had won a Gramophone Award with his 1987 Chandos recording of Hummel concertos and had gone on to have a major recording career with Virgin Classics, but when that label was subsumed into EMI the inevitable rationalization of artists led to him being left without a label. I think he too had slight reservations about joining Hyperion. Virgin, with its lavish budget, had almost been seen as a ‘major’ (and indeed had become one as part of EMI). In 1994, joining Hyperion perhaps looked like a backward step. Nevertheless, Stephen did commit and his first Hyperion recording became one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful in the whole catalogue.

Stephen was already fully steeped in the kind of pianism which abounds in the typical nineteenth-century concerto. He was renowned for his brilliance and pianistic colour which harked back to the great virtuosos of the ‘golden age’. His two Piano Albums for Virgin Classics consisted of virtuoso encores which epitomized this period and, of course, his Hummel concertos confirmed he was just as happy in the early nineteenth-century repertoire. Stephen had strong ideas about how he would like to contribute to our series. His number one request was that he would like to record Xaver Scharwenka’s Concerto No 4, a work never previously recorded. That was fine with me, but normally I planned out our releases such that they were ‘sensibly’ coupled—one-composer discs if possible, or if a composer had only written one concerto, then couple that with a contemporary work from another composer who had also only written one concerto. We were creating a library edition after all, and that’s the kind of programming that appeals to record collectors. But Stephen didn’t want to record any of the other Scharwenka concertos and to make matters worse, he proposed as a coupling the first concerto by Emil von Sauer, a composer who had written two concertos! In the end Stephen got his way, and the resulting recording was so sensational that all considerations of coupling became irrelevant.

We had hoped that this might be a special event and had ‘pushed the boat out’ in hiring the CBSO, a more prestigious and expensive orchestra than those we had previously used. I well remember the sessions, and it was very clear we were making something special: excitement was in the air, and everyone was giving their all. The last movement of the Scharwenka is a coruscatingly virtuosic tarantella with an even faster coda (Stephen said he found the work more difficult even than Rachmaninov 3). It contains a fiendishly difficult upward arpeggio in right-hand octaves with leaps in the left-hand, which gave even Stephen trouble. We were just about done when Stephen decided to run the movement again for that extra bit of adrenalin. Not only did he have us on the edge of our seats in excitement, but he nailed the arpeggio, and quite a cheer went round the control room at that moment.

The disc won not only ‘Best Concerto Recording’ in the 1996 Gramophone Awards but was made ‘Record of the Year’. It went on to become Hyperion’s second-best selling record of all time. Amazingly, Stephen was to repeat the feat of winning both ‘Concerto’ and ‘Record of the Year’ awards in 2002 with his double album of the complete works for piano and orchestra by Saint-Saëns.

Steven Osborne is now one of Hyperion’s most important artists with an impressive discography and many awards to his credit, but he was certainly the most reluctant participant in the series! As a fellow Scot, I had watched Steven’s progress since hearing him at St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh when he was eleven. He went on to win the Clara Haskil competition in 1991 and the Naumburg competition in 1997. I was keen to have him join the label and, of course, to introduce him through the Romantic Piano Concerto series. He had even performed a relevant concerto—the Edinburgh Festival had invited him to perform Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s ‘Scottish’ Concerto in 1992. Steven has many strengths—Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, even Rachmaninov—but he is not a fan of music he sees as superficial and this included much nineteenth-century virtuoso repertoire. It turned out he didn’t much like the Mackenzie, and even if he was to record it, what coupling would be both appropriate and to Steven’s liking? In the end a solution was found in the shape of the unrecorded Tovey Piano Concerto. Donald Francis Tovey was a serious, Brahmsian composer and an academic who spent most of his career as professor at Edinburgh University. Steven found the work acceptable, and with some persuasion from his agent (who told him he would be an idiot to turn down the offer of a concerto recording …) the disc was made. It’s an excellent one which shows no signs of Steven’s doubts about the Mackenzie. And as a bonus, the Edinburgh Festival, no doubt being alerted to the work by our recording, programmed the Tovey in their 1998 event, giving Steven another chance to perform it. And if anyone has ever wondered about the tartan featuring on the colour panel of our booklet design, it is the Mackenzie tartan!

There’s no space here to discuss all the many pianists who participated in the series, there are 27 of them in total, but special mention should be made of five more who not only contributed several volumes each but went on to make other recordings for the label. Jonathan Plowright joined the team in 2001 for volume 28, the concertos of Zygmunt Stojowski, and he became our Polish repertoire specialist with four further recordings featuring that country’s composers. Just behind his in number of contributions is Martin Roscoe with four. Not only did he record the Dohnányi concertos early in the series, but he went on to record the composer’s complete solo piano music. A good example of how one thing often led to another. Seta Tanyel, Hamish Milne and Markus Becker, with three volumes each are the next most prolific contributors. But I have left the pianist who has contributed most to last.

The return of Mr Shelley
Howard Shelley had been the first pianist to record for Hyperion and that disc (CDA66009) turned out to be the first in another landmark Hyperion cycle, Rachmaninov’s complete solo piano music. One of the earliest meetings with an artist which Ted took me to was with Howard; it must have been in early 1989. We met in the Royal Festival Hall for a coffee and Howard wanted to let us know he had an offer from Chandos to record the Rachmaninov concertos. He didn’t just want to jump ship and asked if Hyperion might also be interested in the same project. At that time Hyperion had barely made any orchestral recordings, and for the then small label the costs would have been prohibitive. Ted had to decline and graciously accepted that Howard would go to Chandos where he not only recorded the Rachmaninov works but many other concertos as well.

Howard also conducted, and in classical and early romantic concertos, would conduct from the keyboard. At Chandos he had recorded five discs this way to complete a cycle of Hummel concertos (the first disc of which was the one already mentioned, recorded by Stephen Hough!) and the results were spectacular. Hummel’s concertos cross the border between classical and romantic and are primarily from the 1830s—they could easily have fitted in the Hyperion series. The concerto genre fell out of fashion for the following two decades, but in that decade, they were standard fare for virtuosos of the time. Herz, Kalkbrenner and Moscheles, to name but three, churned out twenty between them and Hyperion had not yet begun to tackle these. Howard was keen to do more of this genre and Chandos were not, so twelve years after leaving he returned to Hyperion to participate in our series. He focused on this early repertoire that he could also conduct and has become by far the most recorded pianist in the series with 23 volumes to his name. His dual role brought new orchestras to the series, particularly the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, where Howard was long-standing guest conductor. They have now contributed to 18 volumes.

Howard has a unique ability to assimilate these demanding scores very quickly and seems to have no technical limitations. I don’t think there’s another pianist in the world who could have done what he has, and with these works, as he conducts from the keyboard, it’s not just about piano playing; it’s also deciphering hand-written orchestral scores and editing parts for the orchestral players. He seems to know exactly how to bring these early nineteenth-century concertos, with their roots in the classical period, to life. As I wrote of his first Chandos Hummel disc back in 1999 in International Piano Quarterly when asked to choose a record of the year:

Shelley is a natural Mozartean with a Rachmaninov-encompassing technique—just what’s needed to subsume the mountainous passagework into the elegant decoration it pertains to be.

Behind the scenes
We now had something akin to a production line, producing concerto recordings several times a year. What did that entail?

Generally, projects were repertoire driven and the earliest volumes featured concertos which had been recorded previously and were not hard to schedule, but as the series expanded, we covered more uncharted territory and investigating scores and evaluating them became a significant part of the process. Once again, I am reminded of how different things were back in the 1990s. Nowadays anyone can go online to IMSLP and find and download scores of most of the repertoire we recorded, but that didn’t exist thirty years ago. Back then it was very much a question of visiting libraries or buying out-of-print scores from antiquarian book dealers. I was already an inveterate score collector so for me this was a very appealing part of the process.

It’s worth making a distinction here between piano scores and orchestral parts. Piano concertos are usually published in a two-piano format, with the orchestral contribution reduced to a second piano so that the pianist can learn the work easily (in early concertos it is often just the solo part without orchestral reduction). These are much more readily available than full scores, or orchestral parts, both of which are needed to make a recording. Indeed, for many concertos, only the piano part was ever published, and any performances would have been from manuscript copies of score and parts. It was locating this orchestral material which proved the most difficult task, though there were several invaluable sources who deserve our thanks here. Top of the list must be the Edwin A Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia, a wonderful source of mainly nineteenth-century orchestral sets. Various music conservatory libraries also proved excellent resources. The Royal Academy of Music in London, having a library dating back to the 1820s, proved very useful (and helpful), and who would have guessed that the Royal College of Music had manuscript full scores of Herz’s 5th, 7th and 8th concertos! And let’s not forget publishers—though not always helpful when it comes to long out-of-print works, quite a few did turn out to have preserved rare sets of scores and parts which saved us on several proposed projects.

A specific recording would usually start by matching repertoire to pianist. Often, I would have a project in mind and propose it to a specific pianist, who would either accept or decline, but with our regular contributors, such as Piers Lane or Howard Shelley, we would get together to play through possible repertoire and come to a joint decision on what to do next. Pianists seem endlessly curious, and I am still surprised how many were happy to take on the task of learning a disc’s worth of difficult repertoire they may never have the chance to play again.

The BBC Scottish became stalwarts of the series and in the end, at forty volumes, contributed to nearly half of it. Conductors were usually proposed by the orchestra from amongst those they regularly worked with. Martyn Brabbins, with seventeen discs to his credit, is the champion here. As time went on more orchestras became involved and we even went overseas, usually pairing country with composer, so we recorded Vianna da Motta in Portugal, Alnæs and Sinding in Norway, Stenhammar and Wiklund in Sweden and Reger, Strauss, Pfitzner, Braunfels, Draeseke and Jadassohn in Germany.

When a project was finally settled on it was then time to coordinate orchestra, soloist, producer, engineer and venue in the normal way. Like almost all labels, Hyperion uses freelance engineers and producers (though all are Hyperion regulars), so their availability was another factor in the mix. While many have contributed, special mention should go to Andrew Keener who has produced more volumes than anyone else. He is a perfectionist who leaves no stone unturned in getting the best results, even if that means some hair-raising finishes as he squeezes ‘one final take’ into the straitjacket of a three-hour orchestral session! I attended most of the recordings (though sadly not those in Tasmania!) as Hyperion representative and usually took on the task of page turner. It was a privilege to enjoy so much great pianism from that ringside seat.

All participants in the sessions were seasoned professionals who knew what they were doing, so generally everything went to plan but we did have our fair share of incidents, which in retrospect we can look back on with amusement. Here are just a few.

Back in the day when one could still legally smoke within public buildings, we were making a recording in Glasgow’s Henry Wood Hall using an engineer who tended to chain smoke. Despite the control room having ‘No Smoking’ signs prominently displayed, our engineer pursued his habit, seemingly without consequences, until sometime in the second session when the hall’s fire alarms went off. Cue evacuation of a whole orchestra mid-session combined with the arrival of three fire engines outside, whose occupants streamed inside to find the fire. It turned out our engineer’s cigarette smoke had set off the alarm in the control room! When each hour is costing you more than £1000, that’s not a good use of session time. In that same venue we were working with a Russian conductor who was new to us when the mixing desk developed some electronic problem that delayed proceedings. Rather than being sympathetic, the conductor railed that this would never happen in Russia and that we were a bunch of amateurs. We did lose some time but in the end the recording was completed, though the conductor made his contribution with very bad grace. Needless to say, we never worked with him again.

A problem of a different kind beset poor Piers Lane when in Bergen to record the Sinding piano concerto. I arrived to find him rather distressed; he had had a first rehearsal the previous day when he discovered that the version of the concerto he had learnt was very different to that in the full score and parts that the orchestra had, and this included major rewrites in the piano part. He spent the day frantically relearning the piece and thankfully all went well when sessions commenced the next day.

Finally, which concerto recording utilizes two different pianos? Answer, Litolff’s Concerto symphonique No 5; and the intended piano plays only one chord, the very first of the piano’s opening entry. I shall explain. Unless we know there is a perfect instrument that our pianist is happy with in a venue, we will hire a piano (usually from Steinway) that our artist has chosen. In this instance we were recording the BBC Scottish in the Caird Hall, Dundee (their regular Glasgow venue being closed for refurbishment), and the piano was due to be delivered the day prior to recording. Unfortunately, the piano arrived too late from London to be delivered into the hall, so it sat in the van over a cold wintery night. When it was brought in just before the session it did not sound good at all, being far too cold, and it was also not holding its tuning. Nevertheless, we commenced the recording hoping it would settle down. It didn’t, and in desperation we tried to find another solution. Hidden backstage we found the Caird Hall’s resident piano, and it turned out to be an excellent Steinway D which Peter Donohoe was happy with. We swapped pianos and that’s the piano that appears on the recording. Except for that first chord. We had already recorded the long opening tutti that leads to the piano’s first entry with the hire instrument, and it turned out we couldn’t edit in the new piano on that chord because of the orchestra’s overhanging ambience. So, there you have it!

There are many more tales, but I hope these give a flavour of the complexities and pitfalls that can beset an orchestral recording.

In conclusion
Back in 2010 as we celebrated the release of our fiftieth volume, Stephen Hough’s recording of the complete works for piano and orchestra by Tchaikovsky, I wrote the following:

In our wildest dreams, none of us involved then could ever have imagined that the series would still be going strong twenty years later, and with fifty volumes to its credit …

What has made this series such a success with our public? Broadly, I think, two things: first, the music, and secondly, the performances of it which we have managed to capture on disc.

Looking first at the music, it is no secret that the language of the nineteenth century is still the most popular with lovers of classical music—this was also the heyday of the piano concerto. And there is another bonus; the virtuoso display element of a concerto can mean that a work can be satisfying without being profound. Put crudely, a less than ‘great’ symphony is likely to be dull, whereas a concerto need not aspire to greatness to be, at least, entertaining. This simple fact is the key to the enjoyment of the many concertos written by virtuosi who had no ambition to be the next Beethoven.

But of course, without the highest standards of performance even the greatest music can sound dull. From the outset we have always tried to create an environment where inspiration can flourish—unknown works are given rehearsal time (and, frequently, public performances as well), we use the best producers and engineers in the best venues, and most of all, we work with orchestras, conductors and pianists who have shown time and again that they are fully committed to these projects. The results speak for themselves.

I still think this stands up well today as a summary, and the series was to continue for another ten years.

But all good things come to an end. There is not an endless supply of forgotten concertos, and by the time we passed volume 60 there were few undiscovered works whose recording could be regarded as a major event. Recording concertos is also expensive, with an orchestra, soloist and piano hire to be added to the standard costs of engineer, producer and venue. This did not sit well with the rise of streaming in the 2010s which meant that income was not what it had been in the boom years of the 1990s. I also left Hyperion in 2014. The last session I attended was the Różycki, though I was particularly pleased to have arranged the recording of the following volume, the recently discovered unpublished concerto which Moszkowski had written in his youth. Several further releases which had been tentatively planned did appear, along with some others that had been suggested by the various pianists Hyperion was working with, but in the end, it has proved best to stop while ahead.

That’s not quite the end of the story though. Not all piano concertos which Hyperion recorded ended up in the Romantic Concerto series and indeed it was the most popular ones, such as those of Chopin, Grieg, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Rachmaninov, all recorded by our most important artists, which we had excluded on the grounds that including them in such a specialist series might have constrained their sales. So those of you buying the 100 CDs contained in these two boxes will not just find the Romantic Piano Concerto series but every other great concerto from that period there is!

The Romantic Concerto Series includes 235 works for piano and orchestra, 170 of which are titled ‘Concerto’, the remainder being generally shorter single-movement works or sets of variations. 121 of these works were premiere recordings and many of the other featured works have only been recorded once before, often in clearly inferior versions and frequently cut.

A further 22 works, of which 15 are concertos, are included from recordings outwith the series, giving a grand total across the two boxes of 257 works for piano and orchestra of which 185 are concertos. I think it’s safe to say there will never be a more comprehensive survey of this repertoire.