When I heard her play the Wieniawski I was very impressed: it was really good. She was a fabulous player. Then I went to the recital. She was a wonderful musician and performer with a terrific stage presence. After the concert and the recital she stayed in Hong Kong for a few more days; I managed to get invited to some dinners and met her again, and we clicked. Shortly afterwards I had to do a two-week business trip to Japan and I visited her at her family home in Nagoya. Her father was a highly respected music teacher who had co-founded the famous Suzuki Method with Shinichi Suzuki. I didn’t speak Japanese and they didn’t speak English, so Takako translated. Not long after, I asked her father for permission to marry her. He was quite shocked. He had just built an annex to the house as a music studio and Takako was supposed to take over his students. But he was happy that I liked classical music because when Takako’s sister married, her husband, a university professor, forbade her to give any more concerts although she was a very good pianist. Her father also said that he had been the person who kept Takako practising, but now I would be responsible for that!
They were married in January 1975. On 29 December 1976 their son was born. They named him Henryk after the composer Henryk Wieniawski, whose concerto had brought them together. Now known as Rick, he works in Naxos, responsible for Hong Kong and the rest of Southeast Asia.
While the studio and hi-fi activities were his central business, Heymann became increasingly involved in importing music and records. His distribution network in Hong Kong and the Far East was beginning to work well with the Eastern European labels and he became more ambitious. At one point he even started his own classical record shop in Hong Kong called Hong Kong Records, but it failed to make any money and after three years he closed it down.
It was more of a hobby and I had an idiosyncratic manager who wanted to stock what he liked, not what sold. The trouble was that I understood that! Also I got into trouble because we imported some boxed sets by the majors which I had found cheaper elsewhere without realising that I was breaking the parallel import laws. PolyGram took me to court and I had to eat humble pie.
He preferred to concentrate on distribution, a business which grew steadily throughout the 1970s since the first discussions with Michael Ponti regarding his Vox recordings. Heymann, both consciously and unconsciously, gained useful information for the future from this first-hand contact with a low-price label.
I approached George Mendelssohn [owner of Vox-Turnabout and Candide] and he said he didn’t have distribution in Hong Kong, so I started importing and distributing Vox-Turnabout and Candide. They were very interesting labels for collectors, but I had heard a lot about George and his business methods from Michael so I didn’t have many illusions. Michael told me that when he recorded his famous set of Scriabin sonatas (which on release became widely regarded as the finest on the market) it was on an upright piano; and that he wasn’t given any money for a hotel, so he slept on the floor of the studio! George also skimped on production values, using poor orchestras for too long and cheap pressings. It gave the labels a poor reputation. But you would never have guessed this from meeting the man himself. I met George when I went to New York on Bose business. He had an office on the Upper East Side, quite a nice neighbourhood, and he proved to be the perfect gentleman. He always assumed a rather aristocratic posture – he used to call himself George de Mendelssohn-Bartholdy! I learned from him certain things to observe when I started my labels: not to try to save money on production or pressings; and to treat artists with respect. That wasn’t so difficult – after all, I was married to one!
He wrote to Eurodisc, the classical wing of Bertelsmann (BMG), which had the pop label Ariola. He was offered distribution of not only Eurodisc but also Ariola itself and Hansa, which produced disco music. Heymann wasn’t sure – he didn’t know anything about this kind of music – but he spoke to his two Hong Kong salesmen and they were very pleased because they knew that pop music would be easier to get into the shops. Then came other classical labels, including Telefunken. At the same time, he spotted a gap in the Asian market for cheap classical cassettes and he formed his own label, Budget Classics, with fifty titles licensed from Hungaroton and Supraphon; it launched in 1977. It had the original logos of the two labels and the words ‘Budget Classics’, with a very basic design involving colour coding – green for Baroque music, pink for Classical and blue for Romantic. There were no pictures.
It was actually quite successful. I sold them for HK$10 each when at the time an LP cost around HK$40. Full-price cassettes sold for about the same price, so this was a novel approach. It became quite a big range, and, in many ways, was a precursor to Naxos. They were just for the Hong Kong market. We sold 2,000 to 3,000 of most titles and I kept them going until the arrival of Naxos.
In 1978 Heymann made his first trip to MIDEM, the annual music trade fair held every January in Cannes. It was a pivotal moment. Hong Kong and the Far East had a reputation for music piracy, but Heymann, with his company Studer-Revox (HK) Ltd, was clearly a legitimate operator. He became the licensee for Virgin Records and, having shown that he could get good results while providing clear and regular sales reports, began to pick up other important pop labels. He was joined by a young Englishman in Hong Kong, Steve Beaver, who was a pop specialist, and they soon signed up Chrysalis, Jive, Mute and others.
I remember being at MIDEM in 1980, and Steve was signing up labels one after another. He would come to me and say, ‘Klaus, I need a $10,000 advance to sign up Jive Records,’ or whatever it was, so I would write a cheque on the spot – that was the way it worked.
When BMG, whose Ariola and Eurodisc labels he had been distributing, bought RCA, Heymann found himself with not only the RCA classical label but also the RCA, Arista and Motown pop and rock catalogues. By 1984, he owned the biggest record distribution company in Asia outside Japan, all thanks to these pop and rock labels. He even distributed the first recording of Whitney Houston. Yet classical remained his first musical commitment, and, of course, he was married to a top-class violinist so was keen to keep her busy and help her career. As early as 1978 he had begun to make recordings with her.
Takako had won the Fritz Kreisler Scholarship at Juilliard, and her father had always played Kreisler, so she grew up with his music and clearly had an affinity for it. There were no modern recordings of his music, so it was an obvious choice for Takako. She made ten LPs in all, some of which were released on Telefunken and some on Camerata, both labels which I distributed. They are all available digitally now. And then came the recording of The Butterfly Lovers, which had a huge impact on her playing career and made her one of the most well-known violinists in Asia.
Behind that recording was a story of conflict within the classical music circles of Hong Kong. Heymann did not run the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra for very long. He found that although he was doing all the work, he was supposed to take orders from a committee when it came to the choice of repertoire and artists. This is not his way of doing things, and they parted company. Not afraid to be combative, he became the orchestra’s main critic and also started his own music magazine: Hong Kong Hi-Fi and Music Review. In 1978 the orchestra decided that its standard was good enough to start recording and chose to begin principally with The Butterfly Lovers, the most popular work of ‘Western’ Chinese classical music, by the composers Chen Gang and He Zhanhao. Takako Nishizaki was not asked to play the solo part. Heymann took that as a challenge and immediately decided that he would record it with her himself. He persuaded her to learn it, and she grew to like it. He decided to record it in Nagoya with the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of the former music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Lim Kektjiang. They went to Nagoya but the first attempt at recording was beset with problems over union and management issues, and it was abandoned. They returned four months later to complete it, also recording Shande Ding’s Long March Symphony; in the end they recorded nearly four LPs of Chinese music. Initially the response of the Chinese co
mmentators was that Nishizaki was Japanese and could not play Chinese music with the appropriate Chinese expression. But it was the first modern recording of the piece with a good orchestra and a good sound, and it was a popular success, selling 60,000 copies in a short time in Hong Kong alone – a number unheard of for a classical music LP. It put the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s recording, which had come out first and been made with the German resident conductor, totally in the shade. It showed Heymann that not only could he take on the competition and win, but there was also a business here.
Takako played it as if it was the Tchaikovsky. She threw herself into it and treated the composition as if it was great music, which it can be. Even today the composer He Zhanhao says she plays it best of all. It came out in 1979 on the HK label that I started – so it was HK 1. It sold all over Asia where there were Chinese communities. We were not allowed to sell it in Taiwan because as mainland music it was forbidden: we sold it under its English name (the Chinese name being Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai, after the names of the two protagonists in the Chinese Opera on which the story is based) and it got through for a while, but when the authorities realised what it was they banned it. Then it was sold underground and pirated. We couldn’t sell our recordings in mainland China because the normal channels were not open. But we succeeded in licensing the recordings to Victor in Japan. We licensed the four discs we had made – that was our first big international success. Victor made a beautiful red box with a wonderful booklet and launched it with a big reception.
A few years later, Chen Gang came to Hong Kong and he said publicly that Takako didn’t understand the piece. He came to our house and she went through the piece with him bar by bar.
So Nishizaki made another recording, again in Japan but with a different Chinese conductor and a different Japanese orchestra (she has now recorded the work some seven times). When it was released the Hong Kong critics complained that it was not Chinese enough. However, the first two and the subsequent Butterfly Lovers recordings established her in China – and in her home town of Hong Kong – as the leading performer of Chinese violin music; she began playing to huge audiences at the Hong Kong Coliseum and toured for the next three decades. Heymann also commissioned violin concertos (one from Chen Gang and one from Du Mingxin, another of China’s well-known composers), which Nishizaki recorded. Both Nishizaki and Heymann feel that these recordings contributed considerably to Chinese and Japanese friendship in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Heymann has always said that having a world-class violinist as his wife was a spur to creating and establishing his record labels. He admired her as a musician and a performer from the first time he saw her play.
Takako has always had real charisma on the concert platform. She walks out on stage like a queen and people start clapping – it is a natural stage presence. And she really makes a good show when she plays.
Five
Marco Polo: An International Label 1982–1987
While Heymann continued to make recordings of classical Chinese music for his HK label (around fifty in total) he saw the opportunity to make recordings for the worldwide market. Relations with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra had healed following the arrival of a new manager, and the orchestra wanted to record. Heymann felt that it was inappropriate for it to record such mainstream composers as Mahler or Bruckner, but here was a chance for him to realise a long-held ambition to record rarities – music from the later years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had never been recorded. He wanted to establish a label that would release only world-premiere recordings, introducing new works to classical collectors. He named the label ‘HK Marco Polo’, which brought together both the label’s Chinese base and a sense of exploration. It was launched in 1982, selling at full price, and shortly afterwards the ‘HK’ prefix was dropped.
We began with a disc of overtures and marches by Wagner which, extraordinarily, had never been recorded before: it included Rule Britannia, Polonia and the Imperial March with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Another early recording was Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano and Poema autunnale played by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. I had begun to study the history of music, looking for unknown works by famous composers or the best-known works by unknown composers which had never been recorded before. Takako was also part of that and she had to learn lots of new music, starting with the Concerto gregoriano and then Spohr concertos and a lot more. Many of the Marco Polo recordings are still the only available versions of these works.
I started reading The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) and publishers’ catalogues. Actually the publishers were quite supportive and we didn’t have to pay a lot for rental material. I rang up the publishers myself – there was nobody in Hong Kong who could do this for me. That is one of the problems of being in Hong Kong, especially in those days – there was very little scholastic backup. We were very isolated. But the advantage was that I could do things my way. I didn’t have any bad precedents. I could do things economically. I would read the catalogues, select the music, arrange the timings into LP length. I even commissioned oil paintings from China to go on the covers. On a visit to Shanghai I met a painter called Chai Benshan at the Shanghai Conservatory. He looked at black-and-white drawings or paintings of these composers and reproduced his own versions. He continues to this day. He did Spohr, Wagner, Joachim, Respighi – and all the rare composers we recorded. People were quite surprised … they had never seen an oil painting of Joseph Joachim. And actually I think some of the paintings were really first class! We did this for the first recordings, but they all turned out to be men with beards. After Volume 50 we felt this couldn’t go on and we had to change.
It was a very exciting time. During the day I was running my various businesses – pop distribution, hi-fi sales and organising new studios – and in the evening I would go home and read publishers’ catalogues. I hadn’t heard any of this music because it had never been recorded, but there was just enough information in the catalogues to give me an idea of what to expect. We ordered scores and Takako would look at them and indicate which pieces she thought were good, or not worth doing.
My appreciation of music had changed since Takako came into my life. I had started to look at it more professionally when I began building programmes for the Hong Kong Philharmonic in the early 1970s, but then I began appreciating music from a musician’s perspective. Takako taught me how to listen, especially to chamber music. She taught me about intonation, ensemble, expression, and how to appreciate good music rather than what was loud and fast. That was a really very important time for me. And then I started to go to auditions of musicians for the orchestra, and attend rehearsals. I suppose I could say that after getting involved in concerts professionally I didn’t enjoy them so much because I now had a more critical ear, listening for what was wrong instead of just enjoying the music. But without Takako teaching me it would have been difficult to develop my musical awareness, which enabled me to guide these record labels. To this day she’s the main arbiter of who gets to record for us and who doesn’t. We often do blind tests – listen to this, listen to that – without her knowing who are the musicians.
The start of Marco Polo prompted, very early on, a major change: moving the recording activities to Europe. Distributing and licensing recordings from Hungaroton, Supraphon and Opus meant developing close connections with Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Shortly after the first Marco Polo discs came out, executives from Hungaroton and Slovart suggested that Heymann make recordings for the label in Hungary and Slovakia. Why not record in Bratislava and Budapest?
I said, ‘Fine!’ and we started in 1984. These orchestras cost no more than we paid in Hong Kong and Singapore, and worldwide they were much easier to sell. Many record buyers felt that recordings by the Hong Kong Philharmonic or the Singapore Symphony were probably pretty suspect. They had never heard of these orchestras. No recordings by Japanese orchestras w
ere available outside Japan, and I figured that the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra or the Budapest Radio Symphony Orchestra sounded much better on paper – and that’s how it turned out. But also it must be said that they were better recordings. The Slovak Philharmonic was and remains a very good orchestra, at the time actually much better than the Hong Kong Philharmonic or Singapore Symphony Orchestra who were themselves relying on imported players (many of them Czechs and Poles in the case of Singapore).
Heymann acknowledges that at the start there was no long-term planning for Marco Polo. He made up lists of works that he wanted to record and arranged them in programmes of around fifty minutes, which was an appropriate length for LPs. When an orchestra became free, and the parts were available, a recording took place. Between ten and fifteen LPs a year were released, so that by 1985, when the recordings were largely being made in Eastern Europe, it was a label approaching fifty titles. It was apparent that however worthwhile it was as an artistic enterprise – and there was no doubt that these discoveries were making an important contribution to classical recording – the recording process was not glamorous at all – it was more like hard graft. Nishizaki needed stamina, determination and concentration to deal with the challenges she faced. Heymann has never forgotten the punishing schedules of those early days.
We were still making recordings in the Far East when the right opportunities arose. We went to Singapore to record Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano. It is a wonderful piece, but suddenly it turns into really difficult Paganini! We were recording with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Victoria Concert Hall and it began to rain … and the hall was not soundproof. You could hear the rain. So we had to stop. Then when it stopped you could hear the traffic, so we had to start recording at night. It is a work full of the most beautiful Gregorian melodies (I can still sing them today) but Respighi goes crazy at the end. It is super, super difficult for the soloist. We were running very short of time and the orchestra had problems with the music; we were all tired and I was quite nervous. It was really very tense. But we finished it in the end. We were four days in Singapore getting that recording done. It was occasions like that which turned Takako into a very experienced recording artist, ready for the best and the worst.
The Story of Naxos Page 6