Great Artists Make Great Recordings – But Who Writes and Designs Great Booklets and Graphics?
Great Artists Make Great Recordings – But Who Writes and Designs Great Booklets and Graphics?
Kevin Wood holds a Masters Degree in Composition with Highest Honours from Southern Illinois University in the USA. His career has taken him from music publishing, where he was Production Editor for Galaxy Music in New York to BMG Classics and Direct Marketing, where he held the position as Director of A&R and Marketing for the BMG Classical Club, then the largest club for classical recordings in the USA. While at BMG, he introduced the 180 CD Philips Classics “Complete Mozart Edition” into the US market.
He joined Sony Classical in 1991 where he produced the critically acclaimed “Glenn Gould Edition” and marketed their classical video productions to a world-wide audience. Following the closing of Sony Classical in Germany, he re-joined BMG in Munich as classical marketing manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was here that he re-invigorated the firm`s early music recordings and developed a series of operetta classics recordings which went on to become best sellers in this region.
In the mid 1990s, he became General Manager of the Jena Philharmonic in Eastern Germany and later established his own marketing and consulting business, writing for record labels and translating for BMG and other major labels. In 2005, he returned to the USA as CEO of the Pottstown Symphony Orchestra near Philadelphia and founded the artist management firm, C&K Artists, which he sold in 2011.
His work has included booklet texts for major music labels as well as countless short stories and two books, one of which The Board is a study of the reasons for the avoidable decline and failure of the Pottstown Symphony in America and details ways to prevent this from recurring elsewhere.
Kevin Wood lectures in Music Business at Middlesex University and, from time to time, at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg, Germany. He is an accomplished German-English translator who speaks fluent German and Spanish in addition to English as his mother tongue.
Leonore Wienstrath studied graphic design at the Fachschule fuer angewandte Kunst in Berlin and has worked as typographer and trick camera assistant in that city. She has worked as graphic designer and Art Director at advertising agencies in Hamburg for internationally known Marketing firms. Her career has taken her to Vienna where she was photographer for the ORF TV production. She later embarked on a career as an independent graphic designer, working for important European firms in Wiesbaden, Hannover and in Hamburg.
Her work with the music industry began with her design of booklets and brochures for the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival and has also included working with major, German pop stars such as Wolf Biermann and Eva-Maria Hagen.
In recent years, she has worked with C&K Artists in the USA designing their web site as well as producing CD booklet design for the multi-CD recordings of the Complete Piano Sonatas of Beethoven with the legendary Sequeira Costa as well as several CDs for Claudio Records, the most notable of which is the US based Athens Guitar Duo’s premiere album on Claudio, Magellan`s Playlist.