Raeburn was educated at
Charterhouse School and
Oxford where his contemporaries included
Robert Layton,
Peter Branscombe and
Andrew Porter. including the production of
Dido and Aeneas with
Kirsten Flagstad and
Arda Mandikian. He took a position with
Decca Records in 1954. He took a leave of absence from Decca for a
Leverhulme Scholarship to do research on
Der Schauspieldirektor and other stage works by
Mozart in Vienna, He was a Vienna reviewer for
Opera magazine (sometimes using a nom de plume) during his time in that city. Raeburn worked with
Vladimir Ashkenazy and
András Schiff, and produced
Hans Hotter's last lieder recitals. His last recording was made with
Cecilia Bartoli, whom he had signed with Decca in 1986, for her 2007 Decca tribute CD of music associated with
Maria Malibran. Raeburn stated that he always strove to achieve a 'theatrical' atmosphere in the opera recordings that he produced. However, by 1996 he reflected that sometimes there was the concern that people were moving just for the sake of it and that too many stage noises were being added. "Nowadays I want singers to stay centre-stage throughout an aria, not move about. There's no point in starting them half-left and moving them half-right merely to show you can do that. You should use movement for recitative and action but not for arias." In relation to live recording he explained that, "however many performances of a run you record, artists tend to tire at the same places in each. Then you have to have patch sessions, but then it's no longer strictly a live recording". For this reason he preferred optimum studio conditions. Raeburn's recognitions included the
Franz Schalk Gold Medal from the
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1988, the
Midem Lifetime Achievement, and
Gramophone magazine's Special Achievement Award for his "unswerving honesty, integrity and expertise". Raeburn took speaking parts (under the pseudonym
Omar Godknow) in the audio recordings of
Giuditta,
Die Fledermaus and
Il segreto di Susanna which he produced. He was twice married and divorced; the godparents of his three daughters were
Leontyne Price,
Tom Krause and
Marilyn Horne. ==See also==