So Georg and his wife Tanya (with whom I am still in contact) came to the house and I sort of interviewed him. I asked him what he thought of Bruckner and how he would interpret the symphonies, and he impressed me so much. He struck me as being a man of the utmost sincerity when he talked about Bruckner. He had a saintly demeanour. I think he was anything but saintly in some areas, but he was a vegan and he was wearing nothing made from animal skin – in some ways he was quite radical! But he really impressed me as a human being and I felt that a man like that could do Bruckner justice. Of course, I also did a little bit of checking and it all matched, so I agreed to give the symphony cycle a try.
It didn’t get off to a particularly good start. Tintner had been in New Zealand for a while after the war and had a reputation there, so the cycle started with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. It was not a good time for them. They were in turmoil, and when the Ninth Symphony was planned the first chairs refused to participate. A recording was made but not released. The Sixth had been finished before the trouble started; and although some players complained about Tintner’s conducting style, his head buried in the score, that recording (released in 1998) was unquestionably fine and received very good reviews. But Heymann decided to shift the project elsewhere, recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland (introduced to Naxos by David Denton) and was happy with the results. ‘I think it is one of the best Bruckner cycles in the world today.’
The decision to record with orchestras that were particularly suitable for certain repertoire was made possible by the easing of commercial constraints. British musicians were – and remain – the finest sight-readers in the world, so although they may have been slightly more expensive, the economies of time were often a greater factor. Higher expectations of quality also dictated a more careful choice of orchestra. David Denton opened the way for further Naxos associations with various groups, including the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Other regional UK orchestras followed, especially those who had musicians on full-time contracts and needed engagements when the concert life was quiet. Concurrently the early-music programme was gaining pace.
When David introduced the Oxford Camerata to me I asked Jeremy Summerly to make a recording plan for early choral music. He produced fifteen programmes, and we did them. I do listen to people, though I also check. Similarly with Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel who did Charpentier, Lully and other French Baroque composers for us: I said to him, ‘Make a plan!’
But not all these new ventures went well. Quite a few were started, ate up a considerable amount of investment which they never recouped, and were then stopped or slowed down. Heymann is adept at putting a positive spin on things and says that now, with the digital world and its long tail, almost all the recordings are serving some purpose or other. However, a lot of money from the Bose business (and, when Bose finished, Heymann’s personal fortune) went down various classical and non-classical drains, to be seen only much later!
Audiobooks took a long time to turn around; his world music and jazz labels never did.
Artistically the jazz label was extremely successful. But I did not know the business or the jazz environment and relied on the well-known Australian jazz pianist Mike Nock, who had all the contacts. It seemed to be just one branch of music but it was totally different. Composers were our headlines on our classical recordings, but it is the artists who headline a jazz record. That was a major difference I didn’t appreciate at the start. We also paid too much to produce the recordings.
The biggest surprise was that the largest jazz markets in the world – US, France and also Japan – do not buy much non-American jazz. It is as simple as that. We had gold-record awards in Finland and Sweden but couldn’t sell fifty copies in the US.
I wanted to have frontline jazz – the best available in Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, wherever we could find it (we had American jazz as well). But the simple fact was that our distributors knew how to sell classical music, not jazz; and it didn’t sell well in the bigger markets, only in the smaller ones. We also made the mistake of putting contemporary art on the cover and not pictures of the artists; and we sold at budget price, which was unnecessary. The reviews were fantastic; nevertheless it was a failure. I sometimes think I would like to get back into jazz, especially as our distributors have now learned how to sell it, but I would have to find a much more economical way of doing it.
Much the same thing was happening, simultaneously, with world music. Some very good recordings were made. One, a recording of sacred Tibetan chant by the monks of Sherab Ling Monastery, won a GRAMMY Award and still sells. A lot of money was spent on trying to make Naxos World, but the genre proved to be too different a culture for the label.
The story was repeated with ambient/new-age music and the label White Cloud. It was run by Jon Mark of Mark-Almond fame – one of the big rock bands of the 1970s.
Jon was a very creative guy and I think some of the music he produced on White Cloud was very beautiful. But it didn’t fit into the company and was also a failure, even if it is still online and we use it for compilations.
Historical recordings were a different story altogether. The company debated, in the early 1990s, whether to move into historical records. The received wisdom at the time was that there was a limited market for old recordings. Heymann felt that if Naxos were to go into this area it should be able to offer something unique, not simply produce the same things that others were trotting out. He started with a collection of original masters of live recordings that had been offered to him and had never been released. He called them ‘Immortal Performances’. That was in 1995. Then one of the recognised historical restorers, Mark Obert-Thorn, contacted Heymann and suggested a much wider range of great commercial recordings from the past to which he would apply the most up-to-date restoration technology, starting with Rachmaninov playing his own piano concertos. It was an immediate hit, selling tens of thousands of copies; the CDs still sell about 2,000 copies a year.
At the time, most of the existing historical reissue labels put out old recordings at full price. We were committed to the best restorations possible so that we could offer a really high-quality historical label, at budget price. Sales rocketed and I wanted more, beyond the number Mark could do. So he brought Ward Marston, also widely known as a superb restorer, onto the team. We now had two of the best people in the business, which helped us with critics who were still opposed to Naxos. They could not but grudgingly respect the work that we were doing in the historical area. We were bringing out some of the greatest and most iconic recordings at budget price; and, they admitted, many of them sounded better than the versions released by the original labels.
Why did the major companies, including EMI, not release more historical recordings from their archives? Well, we found out why, because in the end it did not turn out to be such a good commercial business after all. The majors did not release all that music in their archives with good reason: they released only the big names because the others didn’t sell enough. It was as simple as that.
I found out from experience that with the exception of some people like Rachmaninov, only artists who had a career that reached into the second half of the twentieth century had sales appeal: Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, Maria Callas, Pablo Casals – and even with him, only the Bach solo suites. Walter Gieseking’s historical recordings sold in Germany because he was still playing there in the second half of the twentieth century. But Fritz Kreisler does not sell so well. The complete Benno Moiseiwitsch is a labour of love. Jussi Björling is a labour of love though he sells well in Sweden. So the majors knew what they were doing!
However, the historical label has done tremendously for our reputation as a label and is seen as providing an invaluable service to serious collectors. In that sense it has been a good investment, though not a profitable one. And the historical recordings have really come into their own on the digital platform.<
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The simplest way of creating revenue was to use existing recordings by licensing them to others in a way that would not affect CD sales. Heymann’s single ownership of all the recordings, and streamlined way of doing business, meant that instant decisions could be given to myriad other media organisations that needed classical music: advertisers, film makers, publishers and corporate bodies. Growing this revenue stream became a focus for Heymann and the Naxos distributors. In 1997 he formed an association with Isabel Gortázar, a Spanish publisher, businesswoman and writer, to expand licensing in Europe and elsewhere. Heymann granted her company (TEC, SL) exclusive rights in several European and all Spanish-speaking countries to license Naxos and Marco Polo recordings: for special editions, such as premium packages for promotions; and, particularly, for book publishers to sell in partworks, school material and other products distributed through non-retail channels. This involved the sales of millions of CDs through kiosks and other networks. It proved a lucrative venture.
The mid-1990s was generally a time of expansion, with Heymann keen to move into new areas. He formed Artaria Editions, a specialist publishing house that concentrated on contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart.
For nine years I ran a chamber music festival as a hobby in New Zealand, where I have my second home. The festival was an opportunity to meet my artists! While in Wellington in 1994 I met Allan Badley, who by profession is an academic – a musicologist specialising in the contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart, and especially Leopold Hofmann – but who also happened to run the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra.
We discussed recording Stamitz’s orchestral trios and then he started talking about many other composers from the period whom I had never heard of – François-Joseph Gossec, Franz Ignaz Beck and, of course, Leopold Hofmann. I said we could record some of these and he explained that there were no scores and parts available, but that the music was good. The performance material would have to be prepared from the original manuscripts.
It was the beginning of a new company. In 1995 we started a publishing business called Artaria Editions, named after Haydn’s Viennese publisher. It was a business I knew nothing about but over the years we published a lot of previously unavailable works and now we have over 500 titles. They are highly respected and universities all over the world subscribe to new publications. Artaria could do a lot better, but we have never had a business person actually running it as a business: Allan is a musicologist who goes into libraries, gets microfilms and edits them himself.
Nevertheless Artaria has given us a lot of unique repertoire: the Saint-Georges violin concertos, which Takako recorded; the concertos and symphonies by Vanhal and Pleyel; and the piano concertos by Ferdinand Ries, which have been quite a success commercially. Altogether we have done more than sixty CDs. Artaria has given us a unique repertoire so to a large extent we have succeeded, and, of course, we have gained experience in music publishing.
In 2004 Heymann gave the go-ahead for the Naxos AudioBooks team to develop a range of products for the book market. The audiobooks had a certain presence in the bookshops and it seemed that music books would be just a small sidestep within that. So Naxos Books produced biographies of composers: books with two CDs and a website. It also published the first general history of American classical music; and an important book of memoirs by the conductor Robert Craft, whose close association with Stravinsky had placed him in the centre of the post-war cultural milieu. Once again, distribution caused these artistic plans to falter: paper books and audiobooks went into different departments! Nevertheless there was some commercial success with two children’s books by the editorial manager of Naxos Books, Genevieve Helsby: Meet the Instruments of the Orchestra! and My First Classical Music Book. All these titles underscored Heymann’s keenness to develop educational projects.
There were some excellent books, translated into various languages, and though we didn’t see an immediate profit some did quite well in the end. We also learned how to publish and sell books, e-texts and apps, expanding the expertise within the company.
The Naxos label began with new technology – the CD – and innovation has been a constant theme of the company, and a constant challenge. It has not always been easy to spot the next big technological development.
No one really likes having to maintain an inventory in different formats and I tried to keep it to a minimum. Naxos was designed as a CD label but there was some demand still for cassettes, so we introduced a limited range of Naxos cassettes. Then came minidisk and we released a few of those; and the various ‘improved’ CD formats, DVD-Audio and SACD. At one point we were the only company releasing suitable titles in three different formats: CD, DVD-Audio and SACD. I made the wrong call with DVD-Audio, and SACD won, though that is declining too. Now we are also releasing some Blu-ray audio discs.
And then there was the temptation of video – on VHS and Laserdisc, and finally DVD. I was approached by someone who said that there would be TV stations all over the world who would buy simple travel programmes with music to take the place of what were then called ‘test cards’ – when the station was not broadcasting programmes. We bought the equipment and made programmes of many of the major world cities (from Helsinki to Venice, from Vienna to London), taking some nice footage to illustrate the music. The shoots were planned in a way which allowed the footage to be edited in synch with the music. It was, and is still, pleasant watching though it was not commercially successful on video tape. I was doing too many things and I didn’t go systematically to TV companies to sell the stuff. In any case, it wasn’t really something we could have done ourselves: to sell to television stations one has to go through specialist marketing companies who sell a wide range of productions. And we didn’t have the right carrier. If we had had DVD then, it might have been different; they are all out on DVD now and doing quite well, and there is the online revenue stream. We get a small annual income of around €40,000 a year. But I invested around $4 million in our musical journeys which I doubt I will ever recoup fully.
Typically Heymann turned that ‘failure’ experience into a ‘learning’ experience and then into a commercial success. He began to understand the video business and it sharpened his eye on this aspect of the classical music business. He was ready to act when DVD became the standard format.
There had been scepticism about the demand for classical concerts as well as opera on video but it was clear that we were turning increasingly into a visual culture. One only had to look at the success of MTV. The digital medium played an important part, but there were other factors. It was clear that if people bought an opera on DVD often for less money than a two-CD or three-CD music set, and could also play it just as a sound recording if they wanted, DVD must have a strong future. And if so, there were strategic reasons why we needed to be there.
It began for us in Germany. One day in early 2000 I got a call from Chris Voll, the CEO of Naxos Germany. He told me about a new classical DVD label called Arthaus and that he had been offered the distribution of the label for Germany. I told him on the spot to try to get the worldwide distribution of the label for us. And Arthaus did go with us for the world and has been with us ever since. Next came Opus Arte, with whom Anthony Anderson had established contact: they had seen what we had done for Arthaus and wanted to join our distribution network. We reached the classical collectors whom they had identified as their core customer. They felt their product needed to be in specialist classical outlets rather than being in racks beside the latest blockbuster films. Our subsidiaries and third-party distributors had to step out of their comfort zone. But we proved we could do this, and now we are the leading distributors of classical DVDs in the world.
By the turn of the century the classical record industry was undergoing serious changes. The majors were doing less and less, and more was coming to Naxos – in terms of both repertoire and musicians. The major companies were shedding their contracted artists who realised that the only way they were going to get their recor
dings out on the market was through independents: through Naxos. Even Heymann was surprised by some of the musicians with strong international reputations who were now beginning to appear on his label. The greatest change was the drop in CD sales: from being a boom industry, music on CD (especially pop) was going into decline. This was prompted by the growth of music on the web, and the culture of illegally downloading pop music. Classical music was scarcely affected at first, but the lifeblood of the whole chain of recorded music began to suffer some serious body blows and classical could not escape.
The 1990s had seen Naxos change gradually from a budget label with a toe in the specialist water to a classical label offering exceptional value (with its low price and improving quality) and an unprecedented range of releases. When the major companies were cutting back on classical releases Naxos was expanding, re-recording core works where it was evident that improvements could be made. It was aiming increasingly at offering complete cycles of composers as well as a range of specialist repertoire almost unmatched in classical recording history. In the first decade of the new millennium, the monthly release schedule would often top twenty or thirty recordings, with scarcely a reissue.
The early years of the twenty-first century also saw Naxos finally appreciated for what it was: a major player in classical recording and not just a budget label.
The Story of Naxos Page 11