The past thirty or so years that I've worked as a recording producer have certainly formed my view on the relationship between music, recording and interpretation. Perhaps most of all, I have come to see how important it is for producers – themselves a form of musical catalyst – actively to engage with repertoire rather than contenting themselves only with performance. The longer I work in recording, the more convinced I become that composers rather than performers provide our music. The crisis the ‘business’ is now experiencing is due to the lack of platforms available to composers who have something to say to an intelligent, receptive, paying public. In a world where audiences have the freedom to choose what they wish to hear, it cannot be enough to rely on tax-payers to provide whatever meagre exposure composers have as their only means of dissemination. All my observations on performance and interpretation must therefore be taken in the context of an environment offering a surfeit of different musical views on a relatively static number of works. Indeed, discussing whether the studio adds or detracts to someone's performance of a Beethoven sonata recorded hundreds of times already is akin to calculating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin during the Grand Inquisition. Pop music has stolen the initiative, told us what people are prepared to buy and left intelligent music lovers with less choice than before. If we were dealing with the written word, we would be living in a world of comic books with literature inhabiting the margins and virtually nothing in between except ungratifying verses by some worthy, publicly financed poets.