The Story of Naxos

by Nicolas Soames

  The first Naxos company to issue non-protected MP3 downloads was Naxos AudioBooks, through its dedicated website naxosaudiobooks.com in 2004. There was little evidence of piracy. By the time ClassicsOnline was underway, the battle over copy protection had largely been settled. The attention was now on pushing for growth in the digital arena.

  ClassicsOnline was slow to take off, but now it is in the top five of sites selling classical music. It can only grow. And the NML is also on a satisfactory growth curve. It was tough in the beginning because universities and school libraries still had their CD libraries and couldn’t always see the point. There was also the issue of librarians worried that they would lose their jobs. But now more and more libraries are switching to digital formats, so their patrons can access content from wherever they are. The province of Ontario bought the NML for every school library. Some provinces in Spain are buying it for all their schools. After all, which other library has a collection of over 50,000 CDs with 1,000 new ones added every month?

  Heymann’s ideal view of the worldwide market is one of international sales unhampered by trade barriers of any kind. The reality is not like that. Protectionism exists, even in the digital sphere. It was in the digital age that Heymann’s ambitious investment in historical recordings paid off. Moiseiwitsch may not have sold well on CD but collectors and students across the world could now access his recordings online. In that sense, the historical series made a handsome contribution to the range of digital content on the NML. But even there, uniquely (and ironically) in the case of historical recordings, it is necessary to observe territorial rights. It was the arcane world of these recordings that embroiled Naxos in expensive and time-consuming court cases.

  We had the first run-in concerning our historicals with The Metropolitan Opera, which sued us after we launched the ‘Immortal Performances’ series. When we announced our plans on our website we immediately got a letter from The Met, saying, ‘Don’t release it in the US.’ It was quite clear that Jonathan Wearn, who created the series for us, had licensed it for the States – and had the specific licence. We decided not to release them in the US because I didn’t want to get into a law suit there. I just wanted to go about my business. But people imported them anyway and then The Met sued us. In the end, that case was thrown out because we were sued in New York State and there weren’t any sales there. And The Met never came back.

  Before we launched Naxos Historical in the United States I went to the law firm that had represented us in the Met case for a legal opinion, to make sure there were no copyright issues. Our lawyers gave us the all-clear and we started releasing the series in the United States. But EMI, worried about what they saw as inroads into their heritage (pop as well as classical), sued, and we had a long, drawn-out court case. I came to know my lawyer’s telephone number in New York off by heart, which is a bad sign. We won the first round; EMI appealed and the Court of Appeals sent the case back to the District Court. We eventually settled and the case was never decided.

  EMI withdrew its case but I had to withdraw the product. I sued the lawyers, who had given me the bad opinion, for malpractice. I got some money back from them – not all of it, but a substantial proportion. Now we can sell our historical restorations in the rest of the world but not in the US. Because of free trade agreements with the US, Singapore and Australia extended copyright protection for sound recordings from fifty to seventy years. So there is now a gap: in Australia and Singapore anything after 1955 cannot be sold for another twenty years – some free trade!

  Of course, as a holder of many copyright recordings myself, my own archive benefits handsomely from this ruling! But as a collector, which I am still at heart, it pains me to know that the majors have perhaps 200,000 titles in their archives and only about 10 per cent of these are available in physical or digital form. It pains me that the majors buy catalogues which then disappear. But I also have to be realistic and understand that if they made available everything that they have recorded it would completely destroy the market for new recordings.

  I always say there are about one million classical collectors in the world who buy ten CDs a year. That is how I define a serious collector. There are about 100,000 titles available, physically or digitally, so it means that every title sells on average 100 times: 100 copies per title per year. So what happens if 200,000 titles become available: will the collectors buy twenty CDs? No, they will still buy ten. This means that average sales will drop to fifty – and that doesn’t work commercially.

  That is the conundrum for the whole industry. An enormous number of recordings are sitting in archives and could be accessed now (and, increasingly, they are). The BBC, the Norddeutsche Rundfunk, the Süddeutsche Rundfunk, Swedish Radio and all the other national broadcasters in Europe – they all have huge archives and keep producing hundreds of new recordings every year. Then there are the major record companies with their archives of more than 200,000 album-length masters. If all that stuff ever becomes available, who will buy it?

  So deletion is a process that the industry has to undergo. What does distress me is that so often the choices made of what to release and what to delete are indiscriminate. They are decided by people who really don’t know what is important. Key recordings are allowed to go out of the catalogue. In the end, crazy as it sounds, it is part of nature. People have to die and a new generation comes up – and the people who collect these recordings are dying out.

  For the classical recording world, the second decade of the twenty-first century is very different from the start of the CD era. Naxos itself has changed dramatically, maturing into the world’s leading collector’s label, issuing more recordings per month than any other. When he began, Heymann was quoted as saying he would only have one recording of each main work on the label, that he would not endlessly re-record the masterpieces. Standards rose, however, and he saw that better recordings needed to be made. Vasily Petrenko’s cycle of Shostakovich symphonies with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Marin Alsop’s Brahms symphonies with the London Philharmonic Orchestra are examples of this. They stand scrutiny with the very best. Similarly, Naxos is issuing more specialist works for the collector that are either premiere recordings or important new recordings of forgotten works. On both counts it would be justifiable to turn Naxos into a full-price label; but it will not happen.

  I went down the budget route because I could not sell the artists I had at full price. Now, we are reluctant to abandon the budget price even though 90 per cent of the things we do would qualify for full-price treatment. But we have our place at a certain price-point and I don’t think the Naxos buyer would accept such a change. I feel it with some reluctance because it gets tougher to keep the price down; and I feel increasing annoyance when I look at the full-price labels and see that we are doing things which are certainly equal and in many cases better. After all, quite a few artists who now regularly record for us have come from major labels. But we do not have a choice.

  If Naxos has been consistent in maintaining a budget price to its consumers, it has also been consistent in its relationship with its artists, even the ‘big-name’ artists. The equal-fee basis remains the same, as does the contractual basis. No artists can record for another label within one year of the final recording session, nor can they start a recording for Naxos within one year of finishing a session for another label. Heymann also makes it clear that if a Naxos artist does record for someone else, without asking for clearance, he or she will not be welcomed back to the label. This does not apply to chamber music, and there are exceptions (a conductor asked by a soloist to conduct a concerto, for example).

  We can really say that we do promote our artists well with our websites and our distribution. Now, being a Naxos artist is very prestigious. Ten years ago it was not. People are now identified with Naxos and Naxos is identified with them. Artists do ask to be allowed to record for other labels, and this is considered on a case-by-case basis. For example, I am not so concerned abo
ut a conductor recording a concerto disc for another label – especially if it is a label which we distribute. But on the whole, I don’t want Naxos artists appearing on other competing labels. If they choose to go, that is fine; it is their decision. But they can’t come back.

  In the early years, Naxos’s unconventional approach became a target for criticism from the establishment; now, it still finds itself occasionally a target, but perhaps because it has been so successful.

  In 2007 the English publisher Penguin launched a new book by the controversial English classical music journalist Norman Lebrecht called Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry. Although the Naxos section was not long – just five pages – it was littered with factual errors, showing the company and Klaus Heymann in a poor light and accusing Heymann of serious business malpractices. Heymann sued Lebrecht and Penguin in London’s High Court of Justice, pointing out fifteen statements that he claimed were inaccurate. The case concluded with Penguin publicly apologising, paying an undisclosed sum towards legal costs as well as damages, and agreeing to pull all unsold books off the shelves of bookshops in the UK. Penguin later reissued the book in the UK in 2008 without the offending passages.

  Heymann’s own view of Naxos is changing. It started as a budget label offering the core classics and then became a repertoire label. The company also expanded into a worldwide distribution network offering classical music in all its forms, at all price levels. As the second decade of the twenty-first century progresses, Heymann is moving towards a different vision: Naxos as a service provider for classical recording. Naxos now has a wider purpose, which is to enable recordings to happen, whether through the Naxos label or an artist’s own label. Heymann feels that the Naxos distributors worldwide can advise on the whole gamut of the industry: contracts, production, distribution, press and marketing, even label management. The company, he declares, has the experience in all these fields.

  Things are moving so fast that this book itself, perforce, offers an historical perspective on the company. The fact that it all stems from classical music may suggest that Naxos is really about music of the past; but from Klaus Heymann’s point of view, nothing could be further from the truth.

  Nine

  The Artists: Soloists and Chamber Musicians

  Traditionally the soloists, along with the conductors, play a crucial role – arguably the most crucial role of all – in any standard classical CD catalogue. They are the stars who reinterpret music that has been played for generations. It is their talent or their personalities, or both, which persuade the buyer to invest in that recording and affirm the label owner’s choice in selecting them to play that repertoire. The received wisdom is that the best soloists have something new to say about a Chopin piano concerto, or breathe fresh spirit into Beethoven or Rachmaninov, or effortlessly make Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto more thrilling than ever before. This, however, was not the raison d’être of Naxos, at least not in the early days. Klaus Heymann famously said, on many occasions, that he would record the great works of classical music only once, that he would not have multiple versions of Mozart or Beethoven in the Naxos catalogue. When he started the label his basic purpose was to provide good performances of the classics. Naxos was a repertoire label. On the CD covers, the composers – not the performers – were headline news. Photographs of the performers were not on the covers; they were not even on the back.

  His first challenge was to find outstanding musicians who could produce quality recordings. He knew that there were many soloists giving concerts whose performances matched those of artists taken up by the majors, but who, for one reason or another, were without a record company. Heymann was convinced that they would jump at the chance to perform the greatest works of classical music in the studio, just as they did, week after week, in concerts. They would be paid for the recording but receive no royalties; there would be a short biography and photo inside but not outside; they would record when he stipulated and with whom. This was so contrary to the accepted practice of the time, when soloists were fêted, that the musicians themselves had to make a leap of faith.

  The remarkable thing is that all this came together very quickly. Heymann discovered that there were many musicians out there who were indeed outstanding players, who matched the highly promoted stars of the major labels in technique and musicianship, yet did not have starry egos or expectations that were artificially raised. How he found these excellent musicians, one after another, was a combination of circumstance, shrewd choice and a bit of luck.

  Marco Polo had given him the experience of working with production teams as well as links with orchestras in Eastern Europe. It was ‘The Label of Discovery’, and as such was not expected, either by critics or collectors, to feature star artists on the recordings. Heymann had also been involved in concert promotion in Hong Kong, where good soloists came to perform – one of them being his future wife. So when the opportunity of Naxos arose he already knew musicians and he also knew people to ask for recommendations. Yet even now he smiles to himself when he thinks of his luck in finding certain musicians who laid the foundations of Naxos. He had asked Hungaroton early on to recommend a pianist for the popular Beethoven sonatas, and he was sitting at home in Hong Kong with his wife, Takako Nishizaki, when the listening DAT arrived. He put it on the machine and they were both astounded by the playing. Here was a real performance, full of character and purpose. It was Jen Jandó.

  Heymann came to rely on Jandó for a vast amount of central repertoire, from Mozart to Bartók. Few label owners would have assigned so much music to one pianist but Heymann has never regretted it. It was less surprising that all the main violin concertos and a lot of chamber music featured Nishizaki; but, as he had felt with Jandó, Heymann knew that here was a fine musician with a sound technique who came fully prepared to every recording – and could really perform when the red light came on. The cellist Maria Kliegel proved much the same kind of musician; she joined the Naxos family, fulfilling the role of solo cellist. The roster of Naxos house artists grew, but on a basis of mutual loyalty. It was a two-way contract. Unexpectedly perhaps, the resulting consistency became a positive factor for sales and marketing. Consumers, both classical collectors and new Naxos devotees, found that they could trust these names and did not seem to want variety for variety’s sake.

  After the first few years, during which Heymann had relied on just a few house artists to record most of the basic standard repertoire, the policy changed. More and more artists and orchestras were interested in recording for the label. Heymann decided the repertoire and then selected the artists most suitable for it, an approach most unlike that of the established companies, which signed artists first and then chose repertoire for the artists to record. As Naxos started to record more international repertoire he also decided that, where possible, recordings should have a national component. English repertoire was recorded with English artists and orchestras, or at least with an English conductor; French repertoire was similarly treated; and when it came to lieder and chansons, Heymann insisted on native German or Austrian singers for lieder and French singers for chansons.

  There came a time (surprisingly early) when Heymann found he could no longer maintain his stance of having only one recording of each work. There were a variety of reasons for this. Sometimes it was clear that the earlier recordings could be bettered for musical or technical reasons; sometimes there was a good marketing reason – perhaps an opportunity for a different coupling; and sometimes along came a young musician who was just so stunning that it would have been self-defeating to reject the opportunity. As Naxos matured, new recordings of works already in the catalogue became more frequent. Heymann was pressured by his distribution companies around the world to repeat popular pieces. A collector himself, he always wanted to bring new repertoire to Naxos rather than new performances; but his sales teams told him that they couldn’t sell a CD of an obscure composer, even if it was a
world-premiere recording, the way they could sell Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. He knows that no new recording of The Four Seasons will ever sell as many as did Nishizaki’s recording, but even Naxos has to ring the changes. There is now a new generation of performers on Naxos who are undeniably exciting, who do offer something fresh. What is heartening is that they themselves often want to do more than the core repertoire: playing Ferdinand Ries is a discovery for a youthful talent like Christopher Hinterhuber; Tianwa Yang actually asked to record the complete chamber music for violin and piano by Wolfgang Rihm.

  This shift in perspective coincided with a change in the commercial background to recording. Before the turn of the century, both classical and pop musicians looked to recording as an extra source of revenue. But as the Internet spread, with its creation of both opportunities and problems, recordings began to be seen as marketing tools rather than income streams. Of course for the megastars recordings remain lucrative. For the vast majority of performers, however, a recording is more a calling card, a personal connection with the audience or fan base. On this basis a growing number of musicians, even with fairly established names, have been prepared to record for very little to ensure that their work is available outside the concert hall. As digital delivery has grown, this continues to be true – in a way even more so. Now, with streaming and downloads, especially on the mature platforms offered by Naxos, musicians can really market themselves across the world.