Fly On The Wall is an independent record label, founded in 2026 by guitarist, filmmaker and producer Stewart French. It is the evolution of a recording practice that has, since 2015, produced more than three hundred classical music sessions, captured in audio and documented in film.
The qualities of what began as a small cultural enterprise were noticed early. At launch in 2015, the critic Norman Lebrecht reported on Slipped Disc on Fly On The Wall's first video, a “stunning account of Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances” by Cédric Tiberghien. Within a year, Classic FM had taken Fly On The Wall as a featured series, describing French as one of the “visual wizards” capturing the “biggest names in classical music.” French, then aged 34, had trained as a classical guitarist at the Royal Academy of Music, where he received the highest postgraduate guitar recital mark in the institution's history, and recorded as a performer for Harmonia Mundi USA, Naxos and Universal. He had become intensely preoccupied with the great recordings of Gould, Kempff, Perahia, Brendel and David Russell, and with the Decca catalogue and the sessions from which it had been built. From 2010 he had worked alongside the producer Andrew Keener and the engineer Simon Eadon, learning the precision and focus of the highest standard in classical recording. The catalogue included multiple albums for Marc-André Hamelin and Boris Giltburg (Hyperion/Naxos), several BBC Music Magazine Albums of the Month, and an NPR Top 10 Album of 2016. He now started to record artist sessions himself, capturing each performance complete and on film.
From the first session, the methodology has been the same: complete musical performances, captured by carefully placed microphones, with a single handheld camera filming alongside. Sessions with Steven Isserlis, Marc-André Hamelin, Angela Hewitt, Alina Ibragimova, Richard Goode, Boris Giltburg, Pavel Kolesnikov, Cédric Tiberghien, the Doric Quartet, the King's Singers and the Colin Currie Group established Fly On The Wall as a body of work. By the late 2010s the practice was being commissioned at increasing scale: the Beethoven32 complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas with Boris Giltburg for Naxos, the Live at the V&A film with Viktoria Mullova and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and projects for the British Library, the Science Museum, Apple Music, the London Chamber Orchestra and Bechstein. In 2025 the body of work was curated as The Collection (2015–25), an online exhibition presenting fifty-six sessions selected from more than three hundred.
Across that decade, the editorial position of Fly On The Wall was gradually recognised in the classical music press. Reviewing The Collection (2015–25) for Classical Music magazine, the critic Stephen Pritchard pinpointed what the practice had been attempting throughout: “It feels almost as though we have intruded into a private, sacred space, and yet we are allowed to stay, to observe and to share in this glorious music.” For The Times, Geoff Brown found that watching the filmed Beethoven32 sessions on YouTube changed his hearing of the audio recordings: “What had previously seemed careful and deliberate now appeared dappled with tender feelings. Was I now hearing more through my eyes than my ears?” Gramophone described The Collection as “a vivid portrait of classical music in the UK and Europe today.”
The label is the natural destination of this work. Fly On The Wall launches in 2026 with three releases, the first instalments of a small, editorially curated catalogue. The label exists to do for audio what the films have done for the moving image: to preserve real, complete musical performances, presented with the editorial care they deserve.
There is no one-size-fits-all Fly On The Wall sound. Each recording is attuned to the music and the space in which it was made. As Stewart French has put it: “Each project is conceived as both an event and a record — an attempt to capture what it truly felt like for musicians and audiences to be present when the music happened.”