Founder & Editor, AudioDaily
I am a pianist, music critic and recording producer whose professional life has been centred on music, broadcasting, recording and audio technology. I founded AudioDaily in late 2025 as a personal journal of continuing musical discovery, and as a way to recommend exceptional recordings to other listeners who share my curiosity about classical and concert music.
My involvement in music criticism goes back to the 1970s, when I began writing professionally about music and recordings. That experience as a critic has remained an important part of the way I listen: interested not only in whether a performance succeeds, but in what an interpreter is doing, how a recording relates to other performances of the work, and why one musical experience may prove more compelling than another.
CBC Radio
During the 1980s I worked at CBC Radio, where I was a national executive producer of orchestral and classical music programming. My responsibilities included Mostly Music, CBC’s daily national classical music program, as well as the commissioning, recording and production of live performances by Canada’s major orchestras and other classical artists for national broadcast.
It was an unusually rich vantage point from which to experience musical performance. The work involved close collaboration with conductors, soloists, orchestral musicians, composers, producers and engineers, while also requiring decisions about how performances should be recorded and presented to a national radio audience.
The Banff Centre
In the 1990s I joined the Banff Centre for the Arts, where I served as Program Director of its Audio programs and the New Media Research project, exploring the nascent field of virtual reality.
The Banff Centre brought together musicians, composers, recording producers, engineers and emerging technologies in an environment devoted to both artistic practice and experimentation. My work there deepened an interest that had already become central during my CBC years: the relationship between musical performance and the technology through which we hear it.
Recording technique, music production, digital audio, computer-based control, and new approaches to sound were developing rapidly during this period. That experience continues to shape the way I listen to recordings today.
Listening to recordings
AudioDaily draws on all of these strands of my background.
I listen first as a musician and music lover, but also as someone who has spent much of a professional lifetime around performers, microphones, control rooms, recording sessions and broadcast production. For me, interpretation and recorded sound are closely connected. A recording is both a musical performance and a production — an attempt to preserve and communicate an experience through technology.
That is why AudioDaily ranges freely between performance criticism, recording history and questions of sound. Depending on the recording, I may be interested in phrasing, tempo and interpretation; in repertoire or historical context; or in microphone perspective, engineering, mastering, surround sound, Dolby Atmos and spatial audio.
I am particularly interested in recordings that reward curiosity: remarkable new performances, overlooked catalogue releases, unfamiliar repertoire, historically important recordings, and sometimes performances that challenge received ideas about how familiar music ought to sound.
AudioDaily
After retiring from full-time professional work, I created AudioDaily as a way of continuing the activity that has accompanied virtually every stage of my working life: listening closely to music and thinking about why particular performances matter.
AudioDaily is independently edited. The recordings I write about are selected according to my own interests and judgement, and the opinions expressed are my own.
The site is intended for active listeners. My hope is that an AudioDaily post ultimately leads to the most useful result a music review can have: someone hearing a recording they might otherwise have missed.