The TEL of Telarc
In 2005, Bob Woods and Jack Renner sold their interests in Telarc to the Concord Music Group. Woods continued on as an employee of Concord for several years. Renner retired from the company, handing over the duties of Chief Engineer to Michael Bishop. He continued to engineer recordings until shortly before his death in 2019 at the age of 84. Woods continued on as an employee of Concord for several years.
In December 2009, Concord shuttered the production department of Telarc as part of a corporate restructuring that included laying off twenty-seven Telarc employees.1 Bob Woods and Elaine Martone formed a new company under the name Sonarc. Woods embarked on an extensive program of archival restoration with the Atlanta Symphony and is now retired from active production work. Martone continues to produce recordings for various labels, and recently won the 2024 and 2025 Grammy Awards for Producer of the Year, Classical.
Producer Erica Brenner is now working independently. She was the producer for the 2019 Grammy-winning recording Songs of Orpheus by Cleveland-based baroque ensemble Apollo’s Fire, as well as earning a 2025 nomination for Producer of the Year, Classical.
Engineers Michael Bishop and Rob Friedrich, producer Thom Moore, and assistant engineer Bill McKinney formed Five/Four Productions to continue their work together. They utilized Telarc’s equipment and continued to make recordings for Telarc/Concord as well as other labels. McKinney left the company a short time later, but the other three continued until 2021 when Michael Bishop passed away unexpectedly in March of that year. The following October, Thom Moore also passed away after a brief battle with cancer. Rob Friedrich continues to engineer recordings as well as serving as Audio Preservation Specialist at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA.
As of 2024, only one artist is still releasing new recordings under the Telarc label. Jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, known professionally as Hiromi, has asked Concord to continue using the Telarc name and logo for her new releases.2 Concord continues to sell the many recordings in the Telarc catalog but is no longer producing new Telarc recordings.
Last updated on February 13th, 2025 at 09:11 pm
- The departure of Telarc’s production team was widely noted in the recording world, See “Once Telarc, Now Five/Four,” Stereophile, February 2009, and Harry Pearson, “The Last Days of Telarc”, posted April 13, 2009 and retrieved from the Wayback Machine. ↩︎
- Kajo Paukert (Concord Music Group), conversation with the author, January 2024 ↩︎