de Francisco, Martha

Collaborators

Jul 17

Martha de Francisco is a record producer and recording engineer (Tonmeister) specializing in Classical music. She is a professor for Sound Recording at McGill University in Montreal.

An internationally acknowledged leader in the field of sound recording and record production, she has recorded with some of the greatest classical musicians of our time for the major record labels and in the best concert halls. She holds record production credits on nearly 500 recordings, mostly for worldwide release, many distinguished with the most prestigious awards in Europe and in North America.

A graduate from the renowned Tonmeister program at the Musikhochschule Detmold, Germany, de Francisco was one of the pioneers of digital recording and editing in Europe during the 1980s. On staff as producer/engineer/editor with Philips Classics in Europe between 1986 and 2003, she developed long lasting working relationships with many prominent artists.

Among the artists she has recorded are Claudio Arrau, the Beaux Arts Trio, Alfred Brendel, Christoph Eschenbach, Nelson Freire, John Eliot Gardiner, Matthias Goerne, Håkan Hardenberger, Heinz Holliger, Lang Lang, Gustav Leonhardt, Jan Lisiecki, Neville Marriner, Truls Mørk, Anne Sophie Mutter, Kent Nagano, Jessye Norman, Simon Rattle, Sviatoslav Richter, Lara St. John, Daniel Taylor, Franz Welser- Möst, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and many more.

De Francisco has recorded in a wide variety of venues throughout the world, including the Musikverein in Vienna, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Moscow Conservatoire, Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

She is fluent in six languages.

Martha de Francisco is appointed as Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University and a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology CIRMMT since 2003. Her research interests include music recording with virtual acoustics, critical listening studies and the aesthetics of recorded music. A leading researcher in the field of music recording and auditory analysis, her contributions are among the most cited when it come to a scientific approach to the art of recording classical music.

De Francisco is a frequent lecturer at international professional conferences and she has published book chapters and articles on music and recording issues. She is a regular judge at international student recording competitions, a treasured invited guest as a judge of music performance competitions, as well as a sought-after guest lecturer at leading schools for higher education in Audio in Europe, North and South America. She has acted as an expert witness in court in a legal case of suspected musical piracy in Canada, and her expertise in auditory analysis is appreciated in the context of international events and conferences on legal issues, copyright and intellectual property.

She has been elected Governor of the Audio Engineering Society for 2017-2019.