Peter Andry (10 March 1927 - 7 December 2010) was an German-born British record producer of classical music and former head of EMI's classical division.
Peter Edward Andry was born in Hamburg on March 10, 1927, the youngest of two brothers. His mother was a professional opera singer, his father a lawyer. He was eight when the family left for Australia, where he studied piano, composition and flute at Melbourne University. He cut his recording teeth at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (where he once played flute in Mahler under Otto Klemperer with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing), but yearned to perform professionally.
Armed with a British Council bursary for conducting, he arrived in London in 1953 to study with the composer William Lloyd Webber and work with Sir Adrian Boult.
In 1954 he went to work as an engineer for Decca Records and soon graduated to producer. But it was after his move to EMI in the late 1950s that he earned lasting fame as the producer for classical artists such as Maria Callas, Daniel Barenboim, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Placido Domingo, and Andre Previn.
Andry rose to prominence after the sudden departure of former EMI classical division chief Walter Legge and would soon replace Legge as division chief.
In 1988, Andry left EMI Classics to become president of Warner Classics. Among his notable productions was the Nonesuch recording of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No.3. That record became one of the biggest selling albums of classical music in the 1990s.
Andry retired from the record business in 1996. In 2008 his memoirs of his life in the classical recording industry, Inside The Recording Studio: Working With Callas, Rostropovich, Domingo And The Classical Elite, was published.
On December 7, 2010, Andry died in a hospice in England after struggling with cancer.