Although seemingly always ready to turn his hand to any promising business, by 1980 Heymann had largely narrowed down his enterprises to consumer and professional audio equipment, recording studio and sound reinforcement design and installation, and music. Having lost the Studer and Revox agency and, shortly after, gained the MCI agency, he restructured his business. He changed the name of Studer-Revox (HK) Ltd to Pacific Music Co. Ltd in order to reflect his increasing focus on music. At the same time, he established two new companies: Audio Consultants Ltd, to handle the recording studio design and installation side of the business; and Pacific Audio Supplies Ltd, to look after the Bose consumer and professional audio business and the design and installation of sound reinforcement systems. This was the state of play by the mid-1980s. In 1992 he sold Audio Consultants Ltd to his partner John Ho in order to focus on the Bose and the music businesses.
It was a crazy time. In the 1970s and 1980s all the Asian markets were pirate markets, even Singapore. But gradually they became more legitimate, first of all Hong Kong, then Singapore, and others followed gradually. I was in the right place at the right time. Piracy lasted longer in Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, but things changed as the big shops, first of all, went clean. It was very important because of the distribution businesses.
It was in the mid-1980s that change hit the whole recording industry worldwide. In 1983 the compact disc arrived, bringing digital technology and a huge commercial boost to records. Digital recording had already started to overtake analogue recording, so the move towards the complete digital path had begun. Heymann was in the perfect position. His studio and hi-fi businesses had put him right at the cutting edge of recording technology; his placement in Asia, a technology hot-house with a massive population keen to be early adopters, meant that he had early warning of the speed with which the new system would take over from the LP; and furthermore, his activities as a pop distributor gave him a far more encompassing overview of the record industry than that of other classical label owners. His personal commitment, however, was to classical music: Marco Polo had just started, and his reaction was to bring the new technology to classical recordings rather than to expand his recording activities to pop, where he had little experience. He began recording music for Marco Polo in the new digital format in 1983, producing the first CDs in 1984 and dropping LP production in 1985 (probably the first classical label to do so).
We started releasing Marco Polo recordings on CDs as soon as we could get capacity from the Japanese manufacturers, in particular JVC and Denon. The manufacturers throughout the world were quite ruthless and looked after their bigger customers first. I had no doubt that this was the future. There was talk in the hi-fi magazines and especially the classical industry that the sound of the 16-bit technology was inferior to the LP; but there was no doubt in my mind that this was the direction everything was going. My distributors were surprised – no, shocked – when I stopped pressing LPs! I could hear that the sound wasn’t as good as on vinyl but that was because we were getting used to working with the whole digital technology. We first started recording digitally on those huge old U-matic tape machines, and we had to adapt to it. But we were early adopters on Marco Polo because we were in Asia. Our Japanese producer had his own digital recording equipment and soon we bought a set of our own, so we did not have to rent the machine for every project. The pressing was expensive, too: we paid $3 for pressing a CD against $1 for an LP – a substantial difference. And mastering was also very costly. This was at a time when we were only charging $5 for an LP; we had to charge more for the CD but the market took it, for there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that, despite the greater production costs, the CD was the carrier of the future.
Six
Naxos: A Classical Revolution 1987–1994
By 1987 Marco Polo had a catalogue of around 150 titles. It was a comfortable business. The stream of new recordings had settled to around thirty a year, it was establishing itself with classical distributors around the world, and the change to CD had raised its profile. CD had now settled as the primary medium and the record industry was reaping the benefits of this shift in technology: people were buying CDs of their favourite music to replace their old – and in many cases scratched – LPs. CD factories were springing up all over the world and the pressure on capacity was beginning to ease. There was talk of the initial high launch price dropping in both manufacture and retail; and, in Korea in 1987, a butterfly flapped its wings for Klaus Heymann. His life and his work was about to change. Naxos was on the horizon.
Well, to be honest, it was purely accidental. I wish I could say I had the foresight to realise that classical budget CDs were going to be big and so on, but the true story is this. For many years I had a very good business in Korea, licensing classical content to companies selling cassette or LP packages door to door. They were big packages – forty or fifty cassettes in a box. I licensed Supraphon, Melodiya, all those things we had the rights for. It was a bit of a strange business. A record company would put together the package but it would be sold through special companies with specialised salesmen. It was high-pressure selling. Some packages were sold to salarymen who were drunk in a bar at night; but most were door-to-door sales. Sales happened everywhere except in the normal music shops, and record companies left it to these special organisations to operate the market. One day, I think in late 1986, I got a call from Mr Lee at SRB Records (I had sold them material for many packages in recent years). He said, ‘Mr Heymann, we would like to be the first company to sell classical music in thirty CD packages door to door.’ He insisted on original digital recordings, not analogue transfers to digital. I said, ‘Mr Lee, I don’t have any digital recordings but I’ll see what I can find.’ I called Ivan Marton, my contact in Bratislava, and said, ‘Do you know of anybody?’ He explained that yes, there was a company that had digital masters of popular classical works. They had recorded them digitally, but then they couldn’t release them on CD because they couldn’t get capacity at the plants. As a result, they got into financial difficulties. Ivan said that a Slovak gentleman in Paris could get me the rights. I contacted the man and said we would like the licences of the masters for a package in Korea, but could I buy the rights for the Far East. I bought them for the price of $500 per master – buyout. No termination date. I paid for them and received the masters in Hong Kong.
Then I rang Mr Lee and said, ‘I have the masters, can I send them to you?’ He replied, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, we made our calculation, the mastering and the pressing costs: we cannot go through with the project.’ We hung up and I thought, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ These were recordings by the Slovak Philharmonic, Capella Istropolitana – good musicians but unknown artists and conductors. So I talked to my guys and said, ‘You know I’m stuck with these thirty masters – what are we going to do? We can sell them, but because they are unknown musicians we cannot sell them at full price.’ Now, at the time, the price of a CD was about $25 and LPs were selling at about $5–6 each. I said, ‘Guys, let’s sell them for the price of an LP.’ And that was the crucial decision.
So we released the first five titles in Hong Kong on the ‘Naxos’ label at HK$50 each, which was about US$6.25. Almost the day after, the telephones started ringing: people had heard about the first budget CD label. The telephone continued ringing and I realised I had a business on my hands. I called my contact in Paris and said, ‘I want to have a licence for the rest of the world.’ So I got a licence for the rest of the world, and we started.
That licence was royalty-based and more complicated; but Heymann now had thirty masters which he could use worldwide. He manufactured them in Japan, with Denon, and the first big customer was the Hong Kong buying agent for French hypermarkets, Fargo. They placed the first orders of 50,000 and 100,000 pieces (3,000 to 5,000 per title) – numbers very rare in the classical industry. But as worldwide manufacturing capacity grew, and the manufacturing price dropped, the original licensor sold the sam
e recordings to other labels and it became a bit of a mess. By early 1988 the European market was being flooded with these budget CDs on many different labels and they started being shipped into the Asian market from Europe. The bubble had lasted eight months but now it had burst and become a dogfight.
Then I was faced with the decision of whether to continue or to throw in the towel. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve had one good year so should I say, “That’s it”, or should I invest in this business?’ So because I was already producing recordings in Hungary and Slovakia for Marco Polo, and I knew how to do it, I said, ‘Ok, we will use those production facilities to record our own masters of standard repertoire.’ Actually, I had already started recording a few titles for Naxos in 1987. When I saw how well those thirty digital titles were selling, I wanted to expand the repertoire because there were a lot of things I didn’t have. So by 1988 I already had some new recordings of my own coming through, though not at a great pace because I had those thirty in the catalogue. Having taken the decision that I was going to invest in recordings for the budget market, I immediately started re-recording those original thirty titles in order to build a proper catalogue from scratch.
He also decided to continue with the name ‘Naxos’. It had started to gain a profile of its own, and he felt he could develop it. In truth, this name had come through happenstance.
I wanted to buy a condominium. In Hong Kong some people purchase a condominium through a shelf company for tax advantages. I called my lawyer and said, ‘Look, I want to buy a shelf company, what can you offer?’ And I guess they have people who come up with ideas for these companies, and register them, and some guy had gone through all the Greek islands. So my lawyer offered me Crete Ltd, Rhodes Ltd, Lesbos Ltd and I said, ‘No, thank you.’ But I liked Naxos Ltd, partly because of Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera. So I bought Naxos Ltd and Naxos Ltd bought the apartment. That was in 1985. Then in 1987, there I was, stuck with those masters and looking for a label name, and I said, ‘Well, I own Naxos Ltd, let’s call it Naxos.’
It turned out to be one of the best and worst decisions. It’s a great label name but in many countries you cannot register a place name as a trademark. If a Manchester cloth-merchant, when Manchester cloth was a sign of quality, had been able to register that place as a trademark, all the other Manchester cloth-merchants would have gone out of business. Like Sheffield steel. But anyway, stupidly I didn’t think, so I used ‘Naxos’ as a logo. On the other hand, it’s a great name, easy to pronounce in almost every language. There’s the classical reference and the classical music connotation Ariadne auf Naxos, so not only the Greek myth but also opera. I designed the logo myself – the columns with the name in the middle – and I then gave it to the artist to do it professionally. ‘This is what I want, the columns, Naxos in there,’ and so on. I don’t like serif typefaces but I had to accept that a sans serif typeface with those pillars and the capitals would not have looked good.
For the covers, we followed the house style devised for Marco Polo. I decided on the fine-art approach, then famous paintings out of copyright. On our slim margins I had to watch the costs. We didn’t put the artists on the cover for the same reasons: the artists weren’t famous, and good portrait photo shoots cost money. You don’t want artist pictures looking like mug shots from the police albums.
The serif typography was very simple to start with. I decided that white would become the trademark – blue on white or black on white, as I learned at Braun. It was also my idea to have blurbs on the back, to explain to people what the music was like, and I introduced those later. Most Naxos recordings still have this, and I am surprised it has not been adopted by many other labels. We could probably get away without blurbs today, but I still think it is helpful for specialist repertoire.
I decided not to skimp on the liner notes. I wanted proper notes, and I was very fortunate to come across Keith Anderson, who from the beginning wrote them all. He was a music lecturer in Hong Kong, and in a way he became one of the fathers of Naxos. He had been writing notes for Marco Polo and started to write all the Naxos notes. He was very knowledgeable and very meticulous and I am proud of the fact that, in the history of the label, we have never been caught out with wrong facts. We did the notes in English mainly, though we decided that if the artists or the composers came from a specific country and were likely to sell in that country, we would add another language (other than German composers – there were so many, and Germans can read English!).
Over the years I have had so many distributors come up to me and say what a wonderful label Naxos is, but that so much more could be done to make the design attractive and interesting. They have all missed the point. Part of the success can be put down to the fact that it is very straightforward and instantly recognisable. You get what you see on the cover.
Heymann recalls that the repertoire on the first thirty recordings was, on the whole, solid, but key things were missing. After they had been released and had started to appear on other labels, Heymann sat down with record catalogues to plan his recording schedule. He marked all the works that had been recorded more than ten times, and that is how the first master plan came about.
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was not there: that was the first new recording that we made in Bratislava for Naxos. Takako had it in her repertoire, of course; and in Bratislava was the excellent chamber orchestra Capella Istropolitana, formed from some of the best players in Slovakia. At that time, in the communist era, Bratislava was amazing – a city of 300,000 with five orchestras: the Slovak Philharmonic, the Radio Symphony Orchestra, the National Opera Orchestra, the Slovak Chamber Orchestra and the Capella Istropolitana. And there was a big band as well.
Takako recorded The Four Seasons conducted by the American conductor Stephen Gunzenhauser, chief conductor of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra. He was very good – he had done a recording for Marco Polo previously – and he became, for Naxos, one of the first conductors of the first hour, so to speak. We made the recording in the autumn of 1987 in two days, but the sessions were not without problems. We had to exchange the harpsichordist halfway through because she wasn’t up to it. We got another harpsichordist at short notice, and so the last concerto was not actually rehearsed. We had to do it in rehearse–record, rehearse–record method. And we were on a serious time limit because the musicians had to catch the last tram home at midnight. I remember, we finished the final bar and immediately they jumped up and rushed to get that tram. Then they recorded the Concerto alla rustica, the filler, a few days later.
Other key works followed with the Capella Istropolitana, including Handel’s Water Music and The Fireworks, and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. More and more musicians and ensembles were coming on board. The Hungarian pianist Jen Jandó, who was to prove a remarkable stalwart for the label, recording so much of the central piano repertoire, was one of the first. He was recommended by Hungaroton, who actually made the first recordings for Naxos. Jandó started with the popular Beethoven sonatas and when Nishizaki heard them she said, ‘That is a really wonderful pianist.’ He did other things, including Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and chamber music with Nishizaki, and soon Heymann entrusted him with the complete Beethoven piano sonatas.
One of the things I am most pleased with about Naxos is that it enabled people who were not well known, but still wonderful musicians, to shine. Jen Jandó won the Hungarian Radio Competition one year and András Schiff another. I think Jen (we call him ‘JJ’) is one of the finest pianists in the world today. People always ask how he could possibly have made so many recordings in a relatively short time. His answer is that once he had figured out the style and musical language of the composer, the rest was just technique – of which he had plenty. Perhaps he lacks a few social graces, which is maybe why he didn’t make a career before and doesn’t have the career, even today, that he deserves. But he is a wonderful musician. I know when he and Takako recorded the Beethoven sonatas they hardly talked before the
sessions: there was complete agreement on musical things – perfect harmony.
Jandó was delighted to find himself recording almost full time for Naxos, often at the Italian Institute in Budapest. The only complaint that he had in the early days was that Naxos did not spell his name correctly, with two accents on the ‘o’ in ‘Jeno’ and one on the ‘o’ in ‘Jandó’. The Naxos CDs were designed with a simple computer programme which had diacritics but not the double accent which his name required: the strokes are long, unlike the two dots of an umlaut. These were later corrected!
In those early Naxos days Heymann was maintaining many businesses simultaneously – the Asian pop and classical distribution network, the hi-fi distribution business, Marco Polo and others – so it was not until two years after Jandó’s first Beethoven piano recording that they met, in Budapest. Heymann went to Bratislava as often as he could, but it was mainly when Nishizaki was recording there: dealing with his network was still not easy from a hotel room in communist Slovakia or Hungary and the phones were extremely expensive. In the first years of Naxos, therefore, it was inevitable that there were many Hong Kong connections to the recordings and that Heymann relied on recommendations by the Slovaks. Kenneth Schermerhorn, music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and a recipient of the Sibelius Medal from the Finnish government, went to Bratislava and conducted the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in Finlandia and other tone poems. Among the Slovak recommendations were the conductors Anthony Bramall (who made early orchestral recordings) and Peter Breiner (who later arranged a lot of music as well, including the world’s national anthems); and Hungaroton recommended the pianists István Székely and Péter Nagy, both of whom made many of the early Naxos recordings. The conductor Barry Wordsworth came on board, as did Wolf Harden, whom Heymann had known before Naxos. So the musicians of those early days arose from a variety of contacts. There was simply no time to consider very carefully, meet and audition musicians, not least because of the Hong Kong base. There was too much to do. In the first year of Naxos, Heymann recorded thirty new titles before re-recording the repertoire of the first thirty he had licensed, and they had to be brought out to the market extremely quickly. Of course, this was in addition to the Marco Polo programme. It was frenetic.
The Story of Naxos Page 8