The Story of Naxos

by Nicolas Soames

  Hong Kong had a good concert hall for recordings. The Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in Bratislava had some very fine musicians but, as in Singapore, the concert hall was not soundproof. There was also a tram stop right in front of it. Everyone had to learn to work with traffic noise, not stopping just because the tram trundled by but continuing to play and then patching afterwards. Fortunately, during the communist era, it was generally quite quiet in the evenings so it was decided to start recording at 7 p.m. and go through to five minutes before midnight, which allowed just enough time for the musicians to pack up and catch the last tram home. That was the pattern for many years. It was an economy package from the start: flying economy class (not comfortable if you are Heymann’s 1.93m in height) to communist countries where the hotels and general facilities were basic. Heymann would be up early on the phone, dealing with a flood of telexes (the forerunner of faxes) and ensuring that his businesses back in Hong Kong were going smoothly; Nishizaki would be practising in the hotel during the day; then they would record at night in difficult circumstances. But it was a package that suited everyone, and the fee – suggested by the orchestra, not by Heymann – was reasonable.

  We paid a flat fee per minute of recorded time per musician: DM2 per minute per musician. Therefore, a sixty-minute work which required eighty musicians cost DM9,600. They were paid in foreign currency which they loved because there was a thriving black market for changing German marks into local currency. It was a good deal for both sides. They were not such fast sight-readers as English orchestral musicians but there were some good players in the orchestra and we got some good recordings. I also agreed a flat fee per recording for the conductors and the producers. To be honest, I didn’t do break-even budgets for the recordings. I just did the recordings in the most economical way I could, and I knew what it would cost, plus or minus 10 per cent. I also made a guess of the number I could sell.

  The contract was clear and relatively simple, and has, in essence, carried on through the decades. No artist was brought under contract to the label: the artist was contracted for a particular project or series; there might be further recordings or not, depending on both parties. A clear, non-royalty fee structure was also developed for soloists. It was based on a buy-out fee of $1,000 for a solo recording, with a duo getting $1,500, a trio $1,800 and a quartet $2,000.

  Anything below would have been an insult and anything above would have been unaffordable. I also felt it was important that everyone got the same – I didn’t want to make any exceptions because I know artists talk to each other. A lot of independent labels work on this basis and pay upfront in order to own the recordings. It is a risk for the company, but only the independent labels that can’t afford the initial investment pay royalties.

  In the closing years of the LP era, when royalties were expected, some soloists baulked at the buy-out, but many acknowledged that actually it was a better deal: they were paid in advance rather than getting money in dribs and drabs years later (or never, if the records failed to sell sufficiently – for they were only due payment once the labels had recouped their recording costs). Remembering Michael Ponti’s experience, Heymann also ensured that the Marco Polo (and, later, Naxos) contracts included travel, hotel expenses and per diems.

  In these early days we were not recording with artists whose names would sell many more copies, so there was no reason to pay royalties. We wanted to give a fair deal, but that is all. I have always felt it is an open market. If an artist wanted to be paid more, and could get the increased fee from someone else, he or she was free to go elsewhere. Of course, I understood!

  Parallel to this contractual system was a clear process for the cover design of those first LPs – a concept which is still continued on both Marco Polo and Naxos nearly three decades later.

  I established a simple but direct design format which could be carried over easily from one disc to another. It was clear to me that the composer should be at the top, then the work and then the artist. It doesn’t mean that the artist is unimportant, but these were not ‘name’ artists, so why stress them?

  Of course, recording was only the beginning. Just as important to the success of a classical label is distribution. Heymann knew how to distribute in the Far East but he had no experience of distributing in the West; and he knew that Marco Polo, by its very nature, was primarily a label for the West, not Asia.

  We were not recording for the Hong Kong classical market: it was too small and Marco Polo was too specialist. I had to aim for the world market. I actually wanted to make money from it, or at least not to lose money. I needed distributors in the major classical markets in Europe and the US, and I found that because it was interesting repertoire played by respectable orchestras, distributors did take it. It was very busy at MIDEM in those first years – running up and down the aisles looking for distributors in various territories. When back in Hong Kong, I sent samples to distributors all over the world. When I travelled to countries on other business, I would take samples of LPs – which were a lot bigger than CDs! – and visit classical shops and distributors.

  One of the first places that he visited was the main classical record shop in Vienna, Gramola, owned and run by Richard Winter. Winter still remembers today a tall stranger turning up at his counter one day in 1983 and pulling out of a big case the first five discs of a new label, Marco Polo. Heymann knows first hand what it is like to be a record sales rep – an experience which has enabled him to speak, cajole, persuade reps all over the world to go out and sell his classical recordings. And Marco Polo worked.

  I never lost money on Marco Polo. It was funded by the profits from the Bose audio business but I think I can say that we always recouped our investment. Everything sold, probably because we concentrated on rarities – for a long time, at any rate, if it wasn’t a world premiere we didn’t do it. We did occasionally do some works as fillers because we wanted to offer good recording times, but for many years every LP or CD had ‘world premiere’ on the cover.

  This was noticed early on by the critics because people like that enjoy having new things to write about. I remember that Takako’s first review in Gramophone (for Concerto gregoriano) was bad because the critic said that he couldn’t hear the soloist … but our producer thought the soloist should be embedded in the orchestra rather than playing up front. I remember how disappointed I was. I did think that the reviewer was right in this case, and I learned an important lesson from it. Generally, at a recording, classical producers listen at a very high level, on fancy monitor speakers. But this is not the way most people listen at home. I knew from my experience in recording studios that the pop producers always have a pair of little speakers to which they can switch and hear the music in a way that most people will hear it. In the best studio conditions you may hear the violin clearly, while at low, normal listening volume the balance is different and the violin can become submerged into the orchestra. A producer has to ensure that the balance is right at all levels.

  Marco Polo quickly developed into a dream label for collectors of Romantic and late Romantic music. The music itself was sometimes inconsistent in its achievements, but nearly every work released had something to offer – a good melody, a grand moment, even a genuine milestone in recording history. This was certainly the case with Havergal Brian’s Symphony No. 1 ‘The Gothic’, which Heymann decided to record in 1989.

  Sometime in 1988, the conductor Kenneth Jean told me about Brian’s ‘Gothic’ Symphony and said that this was one work which would never be recorded. The forces required were just so humungous: two orchestras, a male chorus, a children’s chorus – hundreds of people and it lasts for one hour forty minutes. I took that as a challenge and planned it. I decided to do it in 1989 in the concert hall of the Slovak Radio, Bratislava with the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ondrej Lenárd. It was, at the time, by far the biggest project we had ever undertaken, and the most expensive. It cost $75,000 and I was prett
y sure the money was never coming back. The recording seemed to go well, but when it was being edited we found that five bars were missing! Fortunately, it was only the a cappella chorus so we got the small choir back together again, recorded the missing bars, and edited them in.

  We were all amazed at how well it did. First of all, it put Marco Polo on the map. Everyone in classical music knew about it because ‘The Gothic’ Symphony is such a legendary work. But even better, it became by far the bestseller on the label, selling some 30,000 copies at full price within a few years and surprisingly recouping the investment. Even now that it is on Naxos it continues to sell regularly – as it should do, because it is a bargain at the Naxos price. Not surprisingly, no one else has ever even thought of doing it!

  ‘The Gothic’ Symphony was an atypical Marco Polo work in its size but typical in its adventure. The label brought so many forgotten or half-forgotten composers to the attention of classical music lovers. There was big orchestral music by Glazunov, Szymanowski, Rubinstein, Raff, Lachner, Kalinnikov and Myaskovsky, as well as chamber music by French composers such as Félicien David and Jacques Ibert, and piano music by Alkan, Erkel and Ciurlionis. At its height there were forty-five releases a year; some 900 titles have been made over two decades and more.

  It was within Marco Polo that Heymann began to develop his taste for complete cycles (often the financial ruin of the true collector). It was one thing to do the complete symphonies of Raff or orchestral music of Glazunov, but the complete waltzes, polkas and marches by Johann Strauss Junior and Senior, and Josef Strauss? That way madness lies, surely.

  This was a completely crazy idea, I admit. But it was not something that I just started and couldn’t stop. I started planning it in 1985, at first with the conductor Alfred Walter and then in association with the late Professor Franz Mailer, who was the world authority on the Strauss family. The first problem was finding the music because it wasn’t all in one place, so we started with what was available. Piece by piece, we gathered the rest. Professor Mailer got access to all the manuscripts and wrote out many of the scores and parts by hand. We recorded almost all with Slovak orchestras because they had the right feeling for the music: Bratislava is almost a suburb of Vienna. And we always used Viennese conductors. Johann Strauss the Younger took about ten years to do. It was fifty-two CDs. Then we started with Josef, which took about another five years and ran to twenty-six volumes; and then we turned to Johann I, which will amount to around twenty-four.

  Marco Polo remains, for Heymann, one of his most satisfying achievements. ‘I created a label but I did it in a way that made it become a brand.’ He says that it was largely unplanned at the start, with the right decisions made at key moments. The simple but effective design – you could always recognise a Marco Polo record with its deep blue (inherited from his Braun experience) and the Marco Polo name centred – in some ways presaged the Naxos look; and though at the start the choice of works may have been haphazard, method was quickly introduced. Certainly by the late 1980s he had compiled exhaustive lists of works that he planned to do. In 1988 Peter Bromley, who later became production manager of Naxos but was at the time working for the English label Gimell, wrote to Heymann, suggesting a series of neglected late Romantic Italian orchestral works. He was astounded to find, by return post from Hong Kong, a neat list of the principal Italian Novecento works scheduled for Marco Polo in the near future. At the time of writing, some have been re-released on Naxos but many are still waiting to be recorded: works by Casella, Pizzetti, Montemezzi, Martucci, Mascagni, Sinigaglia and many others. What was interesting was that the list was carefully typed out, with notes of publisher, length, date of composition, and likely place to find the score. This was an overview of just one corner of classical music, and it is an indication of the careful research that went into the creation of Marco Polo.

  There are many excellent pieces on Marco Polo. But when you look at these composers, I think the most common fault was that few of them seemed to know how to write a good ending. They would get lost in empty repetitions, or run dry of melodic invention. Often, the works are like a late Romantic movie show.

  Marco Polo continues to operate to this day, though in a reduced form. Recordings of light music continue and so do the operas of Siegfried Wagner, but the main target label for all new recordings is Naxos. Many important Marco Polo recordings have been deleted and reissued on Naxos itself, giving rare repertoire new life at budget price. Marco Polo CDs also dropped to mid-price, a shift requested by distribution companies though Heymann was not totally in favour of it.

  There is a lot more competition in the area of rarities now. Everyone is looking for unusual or forgotten works to record because they know they can’t make money out of standard repertoire. So we thought we could compete more ably by releasing new Marco Polo recordings at mid-price, though it hasn’t been a great success.

  Although Marco Polo and then Naxos represented the worldwide public persona of Heymann’s music enterprises, the financial engine room comprised the studio and hi-fi businesses. Without these successful ventures it would have been impossible to maintain the continued investment necessary to fund thousands of ambitious recordings. Heymann made money by standard commercial activity, and ploughed it back – sometimes even recklessly – into a raft of businesses: recordings, videos, books, music publishing, concert promotion, educational products and many more. He used his natural entrepreneurial instincts, supported by a strong competitive streak, to the full. He had found Hong Kong the perfect environment for his abilities. Essentially, it was his involvement in studios and hi-fi, which had begun after he left the newspaper business and turned to mail-order in 1970, that formed the basis of his fortune. It continued for more than thirty years to 2003, when his Bose distributorship in Hong Kong and China was finally terminated; but it wasn’t a clear path.

  A lot of my success has to do with Asia and the flavour of Hong Kong. It’s a wheeling, dealing place. My favourite saying is: ‘For the Chinese, if there is no way there is a way around.’ If there is an obstacle, there will always be a way around it, and even today that’s my thing: finding solutions to problems and connecting the dots. That is what I am good at: recognising the opportunity and going with it, and, when it is not smooth sailing, finding solutions.

  Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Heymann ran a number of businesses: when an opportunity came his way he simply couldn’t ignore it. Studios and hi-fi were the result of his search for a more sustainable business. He had sold Revox tape recorders to US military personnel during the Vietnam War, and had subsequently become the Revox distributor in Hong Kong. The company that manufactured the Revox machines also made the Studer range of professional tape recorders and had eventually appointed Heymann its distributor for Hong Kong and China. When those distributorships were revoked by the companies in circumstances he felt were unjust, he was determined to show that he could not be crushed. By good fortune, on the day he received the termination letter from the Studer-Revox people he also received a call from a representative of MCI (a major competitor to Studer in the studio business), who happened to be in Hong Kong. They met and Heymann was offered the distributorship of MCI for Southeast Asia and China.

  I wanted to show those people at Studer. I am not a quitter. I could have gotten out of the business but I didn’t. I had no idea how to supply complete recording studios, but I found a Japanese studio designer who designed everything and we started building studios. We turned the whole Chinese market from Studer to MCI equipment. In the very first month we sold five recording studios to Radio Television Brunei. And I took risks. In the winter of 1985, on pure speculation, I took a whole TV audio recording system to Tianjin for an exhibition at the TV station. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it if I couldn’t sell it. But I did – to China Central Television in Beijing. They played hardball for two weeks, and I just sat in my hotel room in Beijing working on price quotations; but they finally bought it. I knew they wanted it b
ecause it was the first modern TV audio recording studio in China. In that time I learned the basics of the business: not only how to install the equipment, but what each piece of equipment – the tape recorders, mixing consoles, reverb units, equalisers, microphones – would do in a professional recording studio. I had to know what I represented. I will never forget those weeks.

  We built that studio successfully and it established our reputation in China for quality work and good after-sales service. Over the following years we sold and built the first modern audio recording studios for China Central Broadcasting and China Records.

  At the same time as I was demonstrating and selling the equipment in Tianjin, I had an Englishman and an American engineer installing the studios in Brunei. The American came from Idaho and all he would eat was meat and potatoes, but you couldn’t get potatoes in Brunei and not much meat – it was seafood and rice – and he was very unhappy. In the middle of the second day of the exhibition in Tianjin I got a call from Brunei saying they had run out of shrink-wrap, the special plastic sheeting for cables that was applied with a torch. So here I am in China around Christmas time (they don’t celebrate Christmas in China, but they do where you buy shrink-wrap). It was the first time I had palpitations. I was so stressed out – and I had all the heavy drinking with the Chinese officials. Then it was straight back to the hotel and on the telephone: where can I find shrink-wrap? But I got them the shrink-wrap the day after Christmas. Those were the days! Before email, before fax: just telephone and telex.