Tony Harrison died on 4th September 2012 after a battle with cancer. He was married to the painter Karina Paulen and lived with her and their two young boys outside Bergen. He was 55.

 

The violinist Tom Bowes writes:

 

Tony Harrison was an extraordinary producer. His sense of the meaning in music and of the line and timing of events was so unusually acute that he was for the most part over-qualified for the role that most situations demanded. It would be a mistake though to say that his demands on artists were in any way rigid or pre-determined; on the contrary, it was his hyper-sensitivity to the artists' deepest wishes (often not even clear to them) that made things happen. His disappointment was only that so few situations allowed this really creative and fluid process to flower, and that often vanity or other concerns made us, those making the sounds, believe less in the musical and human possibilities he could hear. Anathema to him was vertical ensemble and any kind of fixed pre-determination of events, and especially the separation of character into easily editable chunks. He would have been the ideal partner to a Furtwangler or a Kleiber and it was to his disadvantage that so much of the music-making in recording studios of his lifetime was geared to a process in the opposite direction.

 

Tony Harrison joined EMI at Abbey Road studios in 1986 in the world famous historic restoration department. He was soon invited to be an assistant producer for EMI and it was in that capacity that he worked on a number of international recordings among them the now historic Sir Simon Rattle recording of Gershwin's Opera Porgy and Bess, where he was both assistant producer and editor.

 

He left EMI in 1989 and joined Floating Earth Ltd as senior producer and head of post production. His special association with Norway began soon after leaving EMI when he met the young pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and became, for the next ten years, his producer at Virgin Classics and later EMI. As well as working internationally with artists that included Christian Tetzlaff, Heinrich Schiff, Mikhail Pletnev, Paavo Berglund, David Atherton, Sir Richard Hickox, Paavo Järvi, Michail Jurowski. Tadaki Otaka and Phantasm, Tony Harrison worked with many of Norways most prominent artists: Truls Mørk, Solveig Kringlebotn, Randi Stene, Henning Kraggerud and Sigurd Slåttebrekk, the Oslo Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. He won the coveted Spelleman prize ten times.

 

In 2010 Tony collaborated with the Norwegian pianist Sigurd Slåttebrekk on recreating the 1906 acoustic recordings of Grieg playing his own music. It was a monumental achievement, both musically and technically, culminating in the CD “Chasing the Butterfly”. Tony believed passionately that much had been lost in performance styles over the course of the 20th century, and much could be learnt by exploring these old recordings. The project has already caused some ripples; it is to be greatly regretted that Tony will not see the waves that are to come. He leaves unfinished a project recreating the performances of Mahler's piano rolls and making orchestral performances based on them.