Philip Traugott: The Odyssey of a Recording Producer, Part I
Philip Traugott
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A recording producer can make them sound great forever.
Philip Traugott is both.
Former senior producer for BMG Classics (which closed in 2000), Traugott is a busy independent producer living in New York City.
Artists and ensembles he has produced for include Renee Fleming, Thomas Hampson, Ben Heppner, Marilyn Horne, Steven Hough, Kristjan, Neeme and Paavo Järvi, Sir Neville Marriner, Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman, Andre Previn, Peter Serkin, Andras Schiff, Leonard Slatkin, Richard Stoltzman, Pinchas Zukerman, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, the London, Houston and St. Louis Symphonies, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Absolute Ensemble and the Orion and Tokyo String Quartets. He has recorded under the Red Seal, ECM, Conifer, Catalyst and other worldwide labels and has been active in film and television.
One of his most recent projects is the complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies with Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (RCA Red Seal).
Traugott, 53, is also a conductor and a violinist, having earned degrees in both, and he has studied conducting with James Levine, Jorge Mester and Leonid Grin. He was principal second violinist of the Caracas Philharmonic Orchestra (Venezuela) and has performed extensively as a free lance violinist, both in New York and on tour. He once served as music director of the Doctor’s Orchestral Society of New York.
He is passionate about music and always has been. A first generation American and native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Germany, Traugott grew up listening to classical radio station WQXR and LP records.
“My parents tell me that since I was two, I was sitting by the speakers, head in hand, fascinated by everything I heard on the radio or on the recordings they were playing. It was everything from Bach to Mozart to Shostakovich, Wagner and Strauss. I had quite a repertoire that I was listening to from a very early age. It completely spoke to me, even some of the more complicated music. I listen to it today and I still recognize that I remember it from that time. I remember when it was funny and when it was sad and everything in between. What’s interesting is that that really hasn’t changed after all these years, except that I have a greater understanding of why it’s funny or why it’s anything in between.”
Traugott (German Jewish for “trust God”) attended Music and Art High School in Manhattan, an hour-and-a-half commute by subway from his home in Forest Hills, Queens. “It was two or three trains every day in each direction, but for me it was completely, totally worth it and necessary. I didn’t think twice about it.”
On the way, he liked to stop at the Lincoln Center Library where he would spend the afternoon looking at scores. He played violin “seven days a week,” even cutting gym and lunch at school to play string quartets. On weekends, he played with the All-City Orchestra (concertmaster) and the Youth Symphony Orchestra of New York, followed by more string quartets.
Traugott attended the Aaron Copland School at Queens College, “which was very good in the theoretical and analytical aspects of music, which I really loved.” He was one of the few students who did, he said. “Apparently, I annoyed the other students, because I was good at it and liked it and they hated it. They just wanted to play their instruments.
“About two years after that, I went to the State University of New York at Purchase. That was also a very heavily theoretical school. One of the teachers I had there was Robert Levin, the noted musicologist/Mozart scholar and pianist/fortepianist. After I left Purchase with my degree (bachelor of music in conducting and violin), I remained in contact with him. I took private lessons with him in music -- not violin, not piano, I just sat down with him for an hour to talk about various issues in music, and I absolutely loved it. Although I was a performer, I really loved this whole other side of things.”
Little did he know it, but as Traugott was pursuing his muse, she was preparing him to become a recording producer. “I wouldn’t exactly have known what that was at the time,” he said.
Traugott -- who spoke with Music in Cincinnati just preceding the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s February 15 concert at Carnegie Hall led by his friend Paavo Järvi -- always thought that he might pursue conducting “at some point.” But after college, with setting up an apartment in New York and getting on with his career, the need to earn a buck became a priority. A friend said, ‘Hey, Phil, there’s an orchestra that’s filling positions and paying very well.’ So I moved down to Venezuela for a couple of years (1980-82). It was a great experience because it was my first professional job as a violinist and we did really great repertoire.” Back in New York, he re-joined the free lance scene and “by sheer coincidence” met James Levine at a party.
Studying with Levine was transforming, he said. “He taught me things I will never forget that form the basis of looking and listening to music and of ways to work with people as a conductor. Rehearsing in a polo shirt, for instance, so that the orchestra can see all the joints working, “from the elbow to the wrist to communicate as much information as possible that’s already there without saying a word.” Levine also stressed that “when you start a rehearsal with an orchestra, play the piece first. Don’t say anything to them. Hear and listen to what they are doing before you start making comments.”
Levine advised him that one need not study a score in a purely linear fashion. “Even though scores go from measure one to the end, that isn’t necessarily the way to get to know a piece. He said just browse through the score and see if there’s something on a page that strikes you – a rhythmical or harmonic element or orchestration aspect –something that might provide a key into the music. From there you see the patterns, you begin to link the piece together and start filling in the dots. I have used this all the time in terms of my work producing.”
Levine also told Traugott that his voice would be a great asset to his work. "He thought my voice had a kind of command to it and a quality that would be very helpful with an orchestra."
During this time, Traugott also studied conducting with Jorge Mester, then teaching at Juilliard, and with Russian émigré Leonid Grin (Järvi also studied with Grin, but he and Traugott did not meet until later). “Probably the longest time was with Leonid Grin. He was a wonderful teacher, a very sensitive musician. Paavo and I both look back and think very fondly of him because he gave us a really solid foundation in terms of stick technique and the way you approach a score and study it.”
It was while working with the Doctor’s Orchestra (the oldest community orchestra in the U.S., said Traugott) that he took his first steps to becoming a producer.
“I was living in the lower east side in Manhattan and a neighbor took note of the fact that I had music and scores with me as I was going to and fro, or a violin. We struck up a friendship and he asked at one point whether I would do quality control at BMG Classics. In those days, CDs were flying out the door, many if not most of them being reissues. They were tapping into these vast catalogs and many mistakes were going out on CD. The reason for this was that when you open up an old can – they went to the masters of these recordings – sometimes the original edits would literally fall apart because the tape between them had disintegrated in the course of 20, 30, 40 years. The producers would sometimes put them back together in a rush and not realize they had left out two or three bars -- or sometimes something more subtle, an eighth note, whatever -- not because they were necessarily poor musicians, but because of the quality of the record. They needed someone to check and make sure the CD was perfect.”
BMG had found its man. Traugott became a spectacular “proof hearer,” finding 400 serious errors in over 2,000 recordings. “I was told by the man who hired me (John Pfeiffer, producer for Horowitz and Heifetz, among others) that if I saved one record from going out with a mistake in it, I paid my salary for the year.” (Listening to 2,000 RCA records was actually quite “fascinating,” Traugott added.)
Another producer gave him Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” a piece Traugott had known since childhood. “My parents took me to all the great Bach works; they were great lovers of this music.” One of the things Traugott knew was the way Bach had positioned the double chorus and double orchestra, with one group on the left and the other on the right, the lines between them forming a cross. That was not what he heard on the cassettes, however (he worked with copies of the masters on cassette).
“I was curious that every time I flipped a side of the cassette, the orchestra and chorus would flip sides. I said, 'that’s probably just the cassette, but I’ll call them just in case.' As it turned out, somehow in the process of making the masters, they had made these errors, and on every CD, the choruses were flipping sides. They were able to correct it before setting up 15,000 copies on a four-CD set.”
That incident “kind of sent ripples around RCA,” said Traugott. He was hired by yet another producer to edit his tapes, and both the producer (Jay David Saks) and his artists were very pleased with the results. “He started to take me to some of his sessions and eventually, he gave me credit as an associate producer. Finally, he said ‘Take the session yourself, it’s yours.’ The first artist who agreed to that was Pinchas Zukerman. One day in a session I thought to myself, ‘I guess I’m a producer.’”
“Little by little,” said Traugott, he realized that he had to make a decision: “Did I want to conduct an amateur orchestra
in hopes of eventually finding my way up the ladder? Or did I want to continue working with the
likes of Christoph Eschenbach, Peter Serkin and Andre Previn? I
thought, ‘You know what? I’m
going to stick with them.’ I was
learning so much from them. That was the
key.”
(To be continued.)