The Story of Naxos

by Nicolas Soames

  Eventually I was getting tired of the EuroBeat business. We were making a lot of money from it, but somehow it was embarrassing because most of the music was electronic garbage and when Steve Beaver offered me a fair price for my share of Beaver Records in 1992 I accepted it. Now I could concentrate on the Bose business, Marco Polo and Naxos. Whatever money I made in Bose I put into Naxos. I ploughed all my money into that. I didn’t make a real profit from the recordings for years, but making a success of Naxos became an important goal. I could have sold it and lived a comfortable life, but as the years went on I found I was surviving in an industry I loved to be in, and I managed to make money in other ways to fund the growth of the label.

  Those funds were sorely needed because the number of CDs that Naxos and Marco Polo were now recording annually was beginning to run into three figures, and some of them were very expensive. In 1990 Heymann took another big step with Naxos, recording his first complete opera. When he had started the label, and for some years afterwards, he had never even thought of recording opera, a ruinously expensive business (‘the most expensive noise known to man’, according to Molière). But by the turn of the decade he felt the time was right for selling digitally recorded standard opera at budget price. The first one was Così fan tutte recorded early in 1990 in Bratislava with singers from the Vienna State Opera, the Slovak Philharmonic Chorus and Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Johannes Wildner. Its moderate size made it a good initial step into opera recording. But even before its release, Heymann was sufficiently encouraged to move ahead with a much bolder project – Carmen, one of the ten most frequently performed and recorded operas of all time.

  At the time, I didn’t know good singers in Europe who could be entrusted with such a key project. I turned to Alexander Rahbari, the Persian-born conductor who was the principal conductor of the Belgian Radio and Television Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1989 the BRT Philharmonic had become our house orchestra for some of the more demanding repertoire – Debussy, Brahms symphonies and many other things. Rahbari wanted to do opera and he lived in Vienna and found singers. So we recorded Carmen in Bratislava in July 1990. It cost $50,000, which for a two-CD set being sold at budget price was a great risk. But it sold like hot cakes: 300,000 copies in a short time. So we went ahead with La Bohème, Rigoletto and others. They all made money because there was no budget opera on the market and certainly no new recordings at that price. Even now I think the musical performances are pretty good, and we had singers that were later to go on and be big names: Giorgio Lamberti in Carmen and Tosca, with Nelly Miricioiu as Tosca, and Luba Orgonášová as Mimì in La Bohème. Once again, there was a lot of good talent around in provincial opera houses – singers who had no chance of being recorded by major record labels and were glad to record for us.

  In 1990 a leading English critic, Edward Greenfield of the Guardian, wrote a major article in that newspaper, acknowledging the work and achievements of Naxos. It was a key turning point. The first recommendations for Naxos recordings appeared in The Penguin Guide to Classical Music, and by the mid-1990s there were well over 100. Even Gramophone, the prestigious UK classical record magazine, started to take notice, with its first unqualified praise going to a recording of Haydn’s quartets played by the Kodály Quartet. There was confidence in the label, confidence in the company.

  Seven

  Naxos: A World Force 1994–2000

  The opera recordings and the stream of orchestral and chamber music that now far surpassed the confines of ‘popular’ repertoire had made an impact, and serious collectors and the classical establishment had begun to accept that here was a significant label.

  In 1994 we were an important label, selling seven to eight million CDs a year. We made more profit in the early years because most of the repertoire we recorded was in the public domain, so there was not much copyright to pay. In the late 1980s CD manufacturing prices were quite high, but as more factories opened there was increased capacity and in the early 1990s prices dropped; but our selling price didn’t drop and Naxos became a better business. Even after they stopped falling, we were making about $1.50 per disc profit. The export price was about $2.00 and manufacturing was 50c, so we made $1.50. That was when the CD was retailing at $5.99 in the US. I had consciously tried to fix the price of a Naxos CD to the consumer at the lowest bank note of the country. It was £4.99 in the UK, DM9.99 in Germany, KR49 in Sweden. That was what we were aiming for. Unfortunately, it didn’t work in the US. But the idea was there, and it was only very reluctantly that we changed, as the financial situation dictated. The price gradually crept up in all markets, though in retrospect the increases were relatively small. And even with a profit of $1.50 it was quite a challenge to recoup all the recording and design costs. Some CDs sold in large numbers but many did not, and when we started doing music in copyright – Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Sibelius and many others – margins shrank. For many years I tried to persuade our distributors to adopt a two-tier price structure – one for public-domain music and one for music with copyright – which made commercial sense but did not make sense to the consumer, who is not aware of factors such as mechanical copyright.

  Heymann’s expansionist, entrepreneurial temperament made him an habitual investor in new ideas and new products. This and his readiness to take risks in a spontaneous manner have been at the core of his success. It was in 1994 that he expanded the range of Naxos beyond the classical music sphere, moving into spoken-word recordings with Naxos AudioBooks.

  I was at the Naxos distribution supper at MIDEM, sitting next to the music journalist Nicolas Soames. He had interviewed me for various newspapers and magazines, and we also distributed a small label he had, Clarinet Classics. Right at the end of the evening he mentioned he was going to start a new spoken-word line of abridged classic literature on cassette, which was the dominant spoken-word medium at the time. The idea was to make ‘difficult’ writers such as Homer, Milton, Dante and Joyce more accessible and bring them to a wider audience, with the productions enhanced by classical music. I was interested in the idea but thought that for the project to become successful it needed unique selling points. Music was one, and releasing all titles on CD as well as cassette – at a time when the audiobook departments in bookstores were still called ‘books on tape’ – was another. I called along my UK, US and Australian distributors who were on the next table and explained the idea. I also said that I thought we could use the audiobooks as door-openers to bookstores. They said they weren’t particularly interested in the spoken word but they agreed that it could enable them to go into bookshops with these recordings and pull Naxos classical CDs out of their back pockets, so to speak. They envisioned Naxos spinners in main bookshops. Ideal! So I turned back to Nicolas and suggested we do it together. I proposed terms, and that he should record twenty-five releases to be out on the market from September to December, with a further fifty releases in 1995. We shook hands on the deal. It was 11 p.m., the time for the formal end of the supper, and I left for my hotel room to prepare for the morning.

  It was a rather typical piece of fast Klaus Heymann decisionmaking but the ensuing Naxos AudioBooks story was not quite so simple. Within eighteen months it won awards for James Joyce, Dickens and poetry, and developed a reputation for top-class productions with outstanding actors. It carried the Naxos brand into a new area. However, it took a decade of faith and investment to turn it into a commercial success. The problem was the knotty one of distribution: although these were recordings, the principal area for selling audiobooks was bookshops, and bookshops were not where the Naxos strengths lay. So it took some years to establish a reasonable network in the English-speaking countries. Creating the audiobook wing nevertheless gave Naxos an expertise in making and publishing books, which was to bear fruit later.

  This enterprise demonstrated once again the importance of distribution. The strength of Naxos’s classical distribution in key countries enabled each of the subsidiaries to start a local recording programme, s
o that the Naxos name was not only a global brand but had a local connotation too. It was started in the UK in the mid-1990s by David Denton, responsible for UK Naxos promotion and marketing. He introduced Jeremy Summerly and the Oxford Camerata to the label, which by now really needed a strand of early choral music. Denton also initiated the programmes of English music, beginning with the orchestral music of Bax. Over the next decade and more, Naxos built a reputation for recordings of English music which could rival that of the full-price labels such as Hyperion and Chandos. This was continued by Anthony Anderson when he left Hong Kong and returned to England to run Select Music, after Heymann had bought out Haysom and Lawlor in 1997. Select Music was the first distribution company in the West owned fully by Heymann and it formed the template for others – part of which was the commitment to local recordings. These were not vanity projects: they had to be commercially viable, and it was challenging because often, by their very nature, they were not an easy worldwide sale. With margins quite slim for budget labels, exacerbated by copyright payments, it was touch and go. But Anderson showed that it could work and, in that sense, paved the way for similar projects elsewhere, particularly in America.

  We tried to do only local repertoire that we could sell elsewhere, one of the exceptions being the ‘Japanese Classics’ series which came much later. English music sells in all the former colonies, Australia, New Zealand and North America as well as the UK: it is a very multinational repertoire. And ‘American Classics’, which became one of our strongest sublabels, was a conscious effort finally to establish Naxos on the American market. And it worked. The label had never really been very successful there until then. We sold ‘American Classics’ in reasonable quantities but its real importance was that it put the label on the map in the world’s biggest music market. And America had never really had a label that recorded its own music and distributed it worldwide. Columbia issued quite a lot of American music – they did Bernstein and others – but there wasn’t a comprehensive project to record American music for both the home and the export market. With ‘American Classics’ there was, for the first time, an international record company making recordings of substantial chunks of American music that were instantly available around the globe. The range included symphonies by Roy Harris and William Schuman, as well as Bernstein. We recorded the complete orchestral works of Samuel Barber and the complete John Philip Sousa, which, astoundingly, had never been done. I must admit that I had never heard of William Schuman or Roy Harris before we started. As before, I started reading histories and catalogues. And I had American repertoire advisors, in the beginning Victor and Marina Ledin and later a formal editorial board that included the writer Joseph Horowitz and the musicologists Wiley Hitchcock and Wayne Shirley. They gave the American Classics’ series the gravitas it deserved.

  The series was launched in 2002, Naxos’s fifteenth anniversary year, and brought the label exceptional press recognition. Heymann was pleasantly surprised by the sales, too, some of the Barber achieving nearly 30,000 copies worldwide. Even for composers like Harris and Schuman who were not so well known abroad, one third of the sales came from outside the US. Heymann began the Barber series with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra because its principal guest conductor was the fiery and talented Marin Alsop, a Bernstein protégée; and also because the strictly unionised American orchestras were simply too expensive even to contemplate. That was soon to change, but initially American music was recorded in Scotland. At the same time, there came French music from France, Spanish music from Spain, Polish music from Poland, and so on. With the Bose business generating funds, Heymann could afford to be eclectic and take risks. (However, it must be said that Bose was not an infallible cash cow. There were many times when cash flow was tight and he had to consider cutting his ambitious recording and development plans; but he always managed somehow to get finance from around the world and continue with the expansion of the label.)

  The local recording projects often had another effect: they gave Naxos such a strong reputation in the local territories that other labels wanted to join in. It was counter-intuitive – after all, they were supposed to be rivals – but results soon showed that there were many advantages in competing classical labels being distributed and sold together. They strengthened the position of the Naxos distribution. The concept started in the UK.

  It was not easy at the start to persuade key independent labels to join our distribution network. In some ways, we seemed to be everything they didn’t like and our success was threatening. Were we undermining their business? Understandably they were also concerned that they would be regarded as second to Naxos when our salesmen visited shops. But we showed that this was not the case. The first major label to come to us was Hyperion in the UK, and that surprised everyone because Ted Perry’s label was one of the most respected in the UK and the world. It helped that our UK company was called ‘Select’ not ‘Naxos’ – Graham Haysom’s idea – though in the end it worked just as well in Sweden and the USA where we kept the name Naxos, and where labels came to us without worrying about what we were called. Select Music became a model for others and, to tell the truth, we needed the labels as much as they needed us: it gave us the market power and the higher turnover to engage more salesmen and grow.

  America was a tough nut to crack because there were other established classical distributors which had many of the main European labels. CPO came to us early on and gradually others joined us. For years I had to inject cash into the US to keep it going. This was the case elsewhere, too – from time to time I have had to prop up our distribution subsidiaries. It took fifteen years to establish a strong and stable distribution network. But ultimately it was the strength of the worldwide distribution network that turned Naxos into a real force in the world of classical music.

  In 1995 there was another critical development that would affect Naxos considerably: the start of the in-house recording, editing and mastering facilities of K&A (Klaus and Andrew) Productions. For over a decade, since the start of Marco Polo in 1982, Heymann had relied on a bank of freelance producers and engineers to make the recordings. All of them were funnelled through a German editing and recording operation run by the Dutchman Teije van Geest. It had worked reasonably well, but it could not be said that Naxos or Marco Polo had state-of-the-art recordings. It was the purpose of an in-house production and editing department to match the audio standards to the growing international reputation. Consistency was the first target. David Denton found Andrew Walton, a violinist with the English Chamber Orchestra who was already making a name for himself as a recording engineer and editor. K&A Productions, based in Potters Bar just north of London, rapidly became the hub of the production wheel.

  In 1994 we were making around 120 recordings, but it was beginning to get out of hand. One year we recorded as many as 300, and we had masters stacking up! Some years we had a backlog of 600 masters waiting for release, which was a huge investment just sitting there and not recouping. It became even more crucial to have a process of quality control, and this K&A provided. It began checking, editing and mastering the backlog. Then it took on a considerable amount of the recording, not just in the UK but in Europe and the US as well. As its reputation grew, other labels started to come to it for high-standard recording as well, so K&A became a leading classical production company in its own right.

  The quantity of work in all its aspects now going through the Naxos portals was staggering.

  The trouble was that in some ways we were becoming too successful. The original idea was that we would make one recording of everything that had ten recordings in the record catalogues. That was my definition of popular! At the start, it never crossed my mind we would do so many Haydn quartets, and certainly not C.P.E. Bach. Now we are even considering the complete C.P.E. Bach with a modern C.P.E. edition! But once we had survived the first five years, the plan changed. I wanted Naxos to become a virtual encyclopedia of classical music on CD, and throughout the 1990s we diver
sified into many different areas of the repertoire. We needed to have a strong new-release programme, and our customers were clamouring for more. Naxos may have started by producing popular classics for supermarket customers, but now the central classical music buyers were scouring the lists to see what we were bringing out next. So I wanted to have everything and invested constantly, and that approach is paying off today.

  But I didn’t rush into everything, even core repertoire. Shostakovich symphonies were offered to me by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in a very good deal. The symphonies were conducted by the veteran Ladislav Slovák, who had been present at the first performances of several of the symphonies in Russia. The interpretations were terrific but the orchestra, of course, had its limitations. My own musical parameters and criteria were changing. It was not enough to get recordings out onto the market which would be acceptable at budget price: they had to be first class and compete directly with the full-price labels. From the mid-1990s onwards I was beginning to get sick and tired of Naxos being regarded just as ‘a budget label’ with recordings suiting the price. The critics weren’t listening. They were judging us on past perceptions of Naxos.

  I really took my time over the Bruckner symphonies. For me, Bruckner was the ultimate composer and I loved the symphonies from when I was a young man. I knew Horenstein’s recording of Symphony No. 9 on Vox which is still one of the finest. So I decided to wait until I felt we were ready to do something special. One day in October 1994 I got a phone-call from Anthony Camden, the English oboist [former principal of the London Symphony Orchestra] who was the dean of music at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. He said, ‘Georg Tintner is in town.’ I had never heard of him. ‘He is the greatest living Bruckner conductor and maybe you would like to talk to him.’