A few months ago I was contacted by Clarinetist and conductor Joan Lluna to shoot the CD cover for his recording of the Weber clarinet concerti with the Berlin Camerata. The original brief was a little complicated to say the least as he was to be both playing the solo clarinet part and conducting the orchestra, plus conducting two Weber symphonies as well. The cover had to say: clarinet, Weber, conductor via a portrait of Joan, but also he wanted it to look modern and using olive green tones as the colour reminded him of the composer. And he needed the images like yesterday, so no time to order a specific coloured backdrop - I had to think quickly! We toyed with a few possibly cheesy ideas of him holding both a conductors baton and a clarinet but that seemed too obvious to me. Eventually we hit upon the idea of him holding an image of Weber on his ipad whilst giving a subtle cheeky nod to him by copying his pose. The back cover was able to bring in the idea of both the clarinet and the baton as a sort of coda to the cd in a still life of the two objects. I found some darker forest green material which I thought suited the skin tones better than olive green so we used that as a backdrop, then used a simple gridded beauty dish to create the spot light effect. All in all I was very happy with the results and the recording itself is extraordinarily beautiful in both the performance and interpretation.
The cd can be downloaded or ordered straight from the website here:
http://ibsclassical.es/product/weber-symphonies-concertos/