Audio producer is Milwaukee Symphony’s lifeline to audience
During the coronavirus pandemic, with public performances suspended indefinitely, the chief lifeline between the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and its loyal audience is a guy and his computers.
Symphony president and executive director Mark Niehaus described audio and video producer Jeremy Tusz as an unsung hero for keeping the orchestra in listeners’ ears and minds.
His most spectacular effort was a performance of Elgar’s “Nimrod,” recorded by 65 orchestra musicians individually in their homes and masterfully edited by Tusz into a stirring video.
Tusz also prepares the MSO’s weekly “Musical Journeys” series, combining archived concert audio with fresh commentary and interviews conducted by music director Ken-David Masur. New episodes post each Friday for free listening. For example, in episode 9, Masur interviews his predecessor, music director laureate Edo de Waart, in introducing an all-Beethoven program conducted by the latter — the MSO’s equivalent of Capt. Kirk and Capt. Picard getting together for a chat.
Tusz joined the MSO in 2015 after years as an audio engineer in Canada, working primarily on classical music, with more than 200 album credits as engineer, editor or producer, including recordings by the Montreal Symphony, violinist Lara St. John and cellists Matt Haimovitz and Truls Mørk. When Tusz first visited Milwaukee, the orchestra impressed him.
“Immediately, I got the sense that it was a very happy, functional orchestra, you know, good communication between the administration and the musicians,” he said.
Even then, excitement was building for the symphony’s future new home, now known as Bradley Symphony Center. Tusz was attracted to the opportunity to be part of planning new studio and recording facilities in the hall.
Tusz believes that no one, not even conductors, spends as much time listening to MSO performances as he does. When he records a program for the symphony’s radio series, syndicated by Chicago’s WFMT, he records the dress rehearsal and all performances. Afterward, he often speaks with conductors and guest artists about the performances to choose one as the base.
“I then go through and edit in bits from the other performances to patch imperfections or noises. If I do my job well, nobody notices my work,” he wrote in an email response to my question.
One approach to recording an orchestra is to put microphones out for everybody, with the engineer and producer ultimately creating the balance. Another approach is to record with two microphones in the perfect positions. But that requires the perfect acoustic, he pointed out.
Wanted: clarity of sound
Tusz would love to use as few microphones as possible. In Uihlein Hall, he starts with three omni-directional microphones above the conductor, with a wider pair of microphones “further back and further apart to capture a blend of the orchestra and hall acoustics.” He uses outrigger microphones for the strings, and spot microphones to pick up instruments toward the back of the orchestra, such as timpani, brass and woodwinds. There are primarily for clarity of sound.
For simpler works like a Mozart symphony, he might use 12 mics. For a big Mahler symphony with chorus and soloists, it could be 50 or more.
The brand of the mics is less important than where they are, he said. “What determines the quality of the sound is where that microphone is positioned.” That means he’s closely acquainted with catwalks high above the stage.
When the MSO begins performing in the new Bradley Symphony Center, Tusz looks forward to “a lot of experimentation and listening in order to come up with a basic sound signature for the orchestra.”
Asked which of his MSO recordings he would send to the Library of Congress for posterity to hear, Tusz thought for several beats and then responded with questions. “Am I doing it for the repertoire or for the work that I put into it? Or … the sound of the orchestra?”
He chose the semi-staged “Marriage of Figaro” that de Waart conducted in 2016. Often, he said, opera is recorded with the orchestra in the pit, “which is a really compromised position for an orchestra to be in” acoustically. But for the Milwaukee semistaged concerts, the orchestra was more in the open, which led to better sound. “The performance was wonderful, too,” he said. As if to confirm his judgment, de Waart told Masur in their podcast interview that his semistaged Mozart opera performances were his finest accomplishments in Milwaukee.
Tusz particularly enjoys recording new music that hasn’t been recorded before, helping to ensure that people in the future will have a chance to hear it.
As symphony leaders plan and prepare for eventual return to public performances, Tusz expects there will be some form of streaming or online option for people unable or not ready to sit in a theater. “Anything we can do to allow them to enjoy it at home is sort of like extending the walls of the concert hall into people’s living rooms,” he said, echoing a theme of broadening the MSO’s reach that Masur has sounded before.
But in the meantime, “one thing that hasn’t stopped with the shutdown is learning,” he said, referring to himself as well as the orchestra musicians. Tusz, who will slave over sonic details for hours, learned something from the process of assembling “Nimrod,” piecing it together from iPhone, Android and laptop videos shot by the musicians themselves in their homes.
“What we put together from all these little iPhone recordings still moves people,” he said. “So it’s kind of a nice reminder that you don’t always need to have the fanciest equipment and the ideal recording situations to create something that’s special to people.”