Musicians to record all 205 Olympic anthems

How do you play a six-and-half-minute anthem in one minute? That’s what Philip Sheppard has been trying to figure out. Philip is a composer, conductor and cellist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which is planning to record the national anthems of the 205 countries taking part in the 2012 Olympics.

Philip has been working on the anthems since October and says that each anthem must be about a minute long. “Uruguay is about six-and-a-half minutes long. We have to chop it down without offending the country. But Uganda is only nine bars so I had to come up with a way of making it longer without becoming repetitive."

The orchestra's musicians will spend about 50 hours at London’s Abbey Road Studios this month making the recordings, which will be played at next summer’s Olympics in London.