In 1987, after a chance meeting with Murray Thom, ex head of CBS records, he and Murray decided to record a piano album. This became the first of the best selling Piano By Candlelight series, and it entered the charts at number one in its first week.
Eight more albums in the series were recorded over the next twelve years, the second (Piano By Candlelight 2) establishing a record for most copies sold in New Zealand of a locally recorded album.
In 1992, Murray Thom licensed the first three albums to Time Life Music in America. The resulting 2-CD set became one of their best sellers ever, selling in excess of one million copies in the USA alone, and giving Carl the distinction of being the only New Zealand solo artist to have a certified platinum album in the USA. The albums have also sold in large quantities in most European countries, the Far East, South America and Canada.
Besides producing his own albums, Carl has also found time to arrange and produce many CDs for some of Australasia's most famous performers, perhaps the most notable of these being Derek Metzger, Rob Guest, Tina Cross and Sir Howard Morrison. He was also arranger and musical director of Kiri Te Kanawa's "Maori Songs", another platinum album. Dame Kiri sang his arrangement of "E Te Tarakihi" live from Gisborne in the first live broadcast of the New Millennium, to a television audience of over a hundred million people.
Other recent production successes are the two Espresso Guitar albums, featuring Martin Winch. Carl arranged, produced and recorded these at his studio in Auckland's North Shore. Both were platinum sellers.
In the year 2000, Carl was commissioned to write the music for Buzz & Poppy, a 52-episode childrens' 3-D animated series. This is now showing in twenty countries and won Carl the award for best original music at the TV Guide TV Awards in 2002.
For the first two years of the Millennium, his major project was to re-record the tracks that were on the first Candlelight albums. These were originally recorded using sampled instruments, as there wasn't a budget for real instruments in those early years. Now they have been digitally re-recorded with members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and compiled into a ten CD set entitled "together". The production of this collection is one of the high points of Carl's thirty-five years as a professional musician.
Oprah Winfrey featured the collection nationwide in the USA on "Oprah's Favorite Things" in 2002. She told her TV audience that "together" was "her favorite of all the favorites". You can find details of "together" and also listen to some tracks on www.togethercollection.com
In the second half of 2004, Carl produced and arranged the debut album for Sony/BMG artist Yulia. Attaining 4x platinum sales in New Zealand, "Into the West" is due for release in Australia and Japan September 2005.
May to July 2005, he was Musical Director for the Television New Zealand season of "Dancing With The Stars", which was the rating sensation of the year.
Carl is still composing and recording under Kathy's watchful eye and more CDs are in the pipeline!
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