A SOUND PHILOSOPHY Ivor Humphreys talks to Robert von Babr, founder and ou'ner ofBIS Records

Robert von Bahr, left, with Alfred Schnittke [photo: B/S

IT MEANS Encore in French and Italian, it was the pen-name of a famous Finnish music critic and it's the name of one of the most highly regarded 'small' record labels in the world: BIS. Really, the word small won't do any more for this Swedish company which has grown from very humble origins in 1973 to support a current catalogue of well over 500 titles, a good half of which contain repertoire otherwise unrepresented on record. It is also substantially the achievement of one man, Robert von Bahr, who for the first 13 years of the label's existence organized, produced, recorded and distributed his catalogue virtually single handed, assisted only by his wife.

Von Bahr is a man of strong and firmly argued views about how recordings should be made. He insists that a recording should be essentially transparent to the listener, that it should reflect as accurately as possible the sound of the performance in a hall and emphatically that it should not add to, or in any other way 'recreate', the event. The result is a series of widely admired recordings, one of which—the coupling of Tubin's Third and Fifth Symphonies (with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Järvi on CD CD342, 9/89), but it could have been one of many more—won the Engineering category of last year's GRAMOPHONE awards.

"We are always aiming to find a locality which is suitable for the music in question. We don't want to 'produce' a sound, we want to record the sound that is actually there. That sound necessarily then has to be beautiful and it can only be beautiful if you go to a recording locality which is suitable for the music in question. All kinds of artists and instrument combinations require different localities, different acoustics. When you do find a venue that is as near ideal as it can be for the recording you are going to make, then you have the advantage of not having to elaborate on the microphone technique; you just basically put up two microphones where the music sounds best and that's it. Also, if the artists are positioned in a hall with lovely acoustics, where they feel at home, where the music 'sounds' properly, where the instruments come alive under their hands, or their voices come alive, then they will perform much better, musically speaking. This is for me an axiom. Why should the recording interfere? Our task is simply to take what the musicians are creating and bring it to the public."

Von Bahr was very quick to recognize the potential of digital recording in helping him realize these ideals, and indeed he regards Compact Discs as a fundamental breakthrough. "For the first time I could really offer the listener what I was experiencing while recording. Before that there had always been all sorts of compromises. I'm a purist in that respect; I want to deliver as good a result as possible and before CD, for technical reasons, I couldn't achieve it." Dynamic range was one aspect of this and indeed several of BIS's early CDs actually carried a prominent front cover warning about risk of damage to domestic replay equipment if a sensible replay level was not adhered to. "As a matter of fact that warning sign saved me from a couple of litigations in America and one in Australia! The first record I actually brought out on CD was the Kroumata Percussion Ensemble [CD CD232, 1/841 and that record is really explosive, even by today's standards. I remember that in Australia some radio commentator was experimenting by broadcasting the complete dynamics, without compression, and he read out our warning in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner beforehand. Afterwards he got complaints from two or three listeners that their hi-fl equipment had been wrecked, that the loudspeakers were destroyed by the dynamics in one of the pieces!"

In all of their recordings, BIS are careful to preserve the hall ambience between movements and indeed for some seconds beyond the end of a work. "In a concert you don't turn a deaf ear here and there. I mean there is always some noise in every hail, regardless of where it's situated—an atmosphere of sound. Why should that be taken away in between tracks, between works, or even after them? It has to end at some point of course but we make sure there is at the very minimum 20 seconds of atmosphere at the end of the record. I think that if you have a performance worth having and if you have a listener worth having (because I think also that the listener has to participate in the whole experience by listening actively—I'm not making records of background music), when the music ends you should have time to Sit there. Otherwise it destroys the atmosphere completely. Take one of Schnittke's works, because almost all of his works end not with a bang but with with a long drawn-out diminuendo: you really don't know where the music stops. At one point it's not there any more but you can't say that 'this' moment is the end of the piece; you don't hear that. And you don't want to know that the end of the piece is when the player's mechanism starts whirring? This point is extremely important for me."

Another special thing about the BIS catalogue is that it keeps growing; no releases are deleted. "That's an absolute principle with me. If you want to be in this business I think that you have to have some moral standards as well. And as I'm paying my artists, basically, by royalties and more than 50 per cent of my records (I think it's 60 per cent even), I have repertoire that is not to be found on any other sound carrier anywhere in the world; I think I would really let them down terribly if I didn't at least have it available. Of course my auditor says that I should start deleting and I'm sure I'm financially stupid to do what I'm doing. But I will continue regardless of whether I can afford it or not, because it's one of the basic principles of the company. Everything that I have will remain available in one form or another; but it doesn't necessarily have to be CD and LP and cassette, just any one of them."

Robert von Bahr dçscribes himself as a compulsive collector when asked about his penchant for undertaking 'complete' cycles, for he has any number of these either finished or underway. The list is certainly impressive and adventurous and includes Bach and Messiaen organ works, the piano music of Grieg and Valen, Mozart string quartets and quintets, the symphonies of Gade, MartinO and Svendsen, the complete orchestral and piano music of Tubin, complete works of Nielsen, Sibelius and Alfred Schnittke and the major non-operatic works of Britten. The Sibelius is a truly mammoth project comprising around 60 releases, including many works which have previously been withheld. The Schnittke undertaking, too, is remarkably ambitious. Will it really be complete? "Certainly, yes, although there may be a problem with his new film scores; he doesn't really know himself whether he wants me to take those on. There are five symphonies now; the Fifth was premièred in November last year with the Concertgebouw. He's currently writing a sixth for the Leipzig Gewandhaus and No. 7 will be completed for the Stockholm Philharmonic. Then there are the ballets The Labyrinth and Yellow Sound and the latest, Peer Gym, and an enormous amount of chamber and vocal music. And concerti grossi, not by the dozen but four of them! And of course the Viola Concerto." [The BIS recordings of the Third and Fifth Symphonies and of the Viola Concerto are reviewed on pages 381 and 382].

And Britten? "Basically, yes, I want to do everything, except the operas. I don't think from where! am that I can do the operas better than they have been done before, and if I can't do something better or at least as well I shan't do it at all. But as far as the orchestral works, the choral works, the chamber music and so on, yes I'm planning to go through it. He's got a tonal language all of his own. What a composer, what a musician!"

Robert von Bahr (whose greatgrandfather was, by the way, the music critic mentioned at the start) was joined by Englishman Andrew Barnett in 1986 as his Production Manager to run the office and take care of sleeve production, and by a German tonmeister Siegbert Ernst in 1988 as Technical manager. Ernst now works in conjunction with von Bahr as engineer and independently as producer of some of the more recent chamber and instrumental recordings. The three men's wives are also an integral part of the team, assisting with such aspects as typesetting, photography and translation. Recently, another Englishman, William Jewson, has joined the company.

Von Bahr has come a very long way in the last 17 years. A trained lawyer, he also studied music history, statistics and economics at Stockholm University, then worked as a taxi driver (something he has in common with Ted Perry of Hyperion when he started his company), a door-to-door book salesman and a recording technician for the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra before establishing BIS "in a room which was only about 210 square feet and which held my stock, office and everything. I found out that if I took the records in a pram I could go free of charge on the subway, whereas if I took them in a suitcase I would have to pay for it. is didn't say anywhere in the regulations that there had to be a baby in the pram, only that prams are free, so I used it as a distribution wagon around Stockholm." Humble beginnings indeed!