User:Problembär/Peter Andry

Peter Andry (record producer)

Peter Andry (born 1927 - December 7, 2010) was an Australian-born British record producer of classical music and former head of EMI's classical division.

Andry began his career as a flute player in Australia, though he became interested in becoming a conductor. He moved to England to study conducting under Sir Adrian Boult.

In 1954 he went to work as an engineer for Decca Records and soon graduated to producer. But it was after his move to EMI in the late 1950s that he earned lasting fame as the producer for classical artists such as Maria Callas, Daniel Baremboim, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Placido Domingo, and Andre Previn.

Andry rose to prominence after the sudden departure of former EMI classical division chief Walter Legge and would soon replace Legge as division chief.

In 1988, Andry left EMI Classics to become president of Warner Classics. Among his notable productions there was the Nonesuch recording of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No.3. That record became one of the biggest selling albums of classical music in the 1990s.

Andry retired from the record business in 1996. In 2008 his memoirs of his life in the classical recording industry, Inside The Recording Studio: Working With Callas, Rostropovich, Domingo And The Classical Elite, was published.

On December 7, 2010, Andry died in a hospice in England after struggling with cancer.