Concomitantly Naxos has developed its criteria for the selection of artists. It is no longer sufficient only to play well when the red light comes on. Naxos looks for talent, personality and an active concert career so that recordings are just one thread of the performing life.
What has it been like for these soloists to be Naxos artists? How did they come to join Naxos? How do they view the recording studio? There are hundreds of performers on Naxos, and the list grows. Here they are represented by a few, of differing age and background – musicians from different parts of Europe and the Far East who now live and play all over the world. It is a truly international selection, which reflects Naxos itself.
Takako Nishizaki – Violin
If any musician embodies the truly international provenance of Naxos and Marco Polo it is the Japanese-born Takako Nishizaki. The first pupil of Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the Suzuki Method, she went on to study at the leading American music school, Juilliard, principally with Joseph Fuchs. In 1964 she was one of four finalists in the Leventritt Competition (Itzhak Perlman won first prize that year) and in 1969 she won first prize in the Juilliard Concerto Competition, performing Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante with Nobuko Imai. After exhausting coast-to-coast tours of the USA she decided to return to Japan: it was a decision that led to a concert in Hong Kong in 1974, meeting and marrying Klaus Heymannn, and an unmatched recording career spanning more than thirty years. This remarkable union produced well over 100 recordings, a number rarely, if ever, matched by a classical violinist; certainly the breadth of music remains unchallenged.
Nishizaki may be best known in the West for having recorded much of the mainstream repertoire: all the principal concertos and sonatas for Naxos, many selling in their hundreds of thousands (her recording of The Four Seasons is the eighth bestselling classical CD of all time). She has also recorded numerous forgotten works for Marco Polo, ranging from concertos by Rubinstein to the complete Fritz Kreisler Edition in ten volumes (while at Juilliard she was awarded the Fritz Kreisler scholarship). But uniquely she is equally well known in China, where her recordings of the Chinese modern classic violin concerto The Butterfly Lovers have outsold all Chinese versions (more than three million copies have been bought in the Far East alone). She has performed the work countless times in most of the major Chinese cities in front of audiences numbering many thousands. It has been suggested that her performances and profile in China have contributed to the improved relations between Japan and China in the last quarter of the twentieth century, after decades of tension.
Nishizaki’s recording achievement is exceptional in any terms. Had she known beforehand the number and variety of works that she would go on to record between the late 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, possibly even she would have paled before the task. Yet her recordings reveal total commitment, whether she is playing Tchaikovsky’s Concerto and Mozart’s sonatas, bringing fresh attention to the concertos of Saint-Georges, or performing arrangements of traditional Chinese and Thai music.
Her success was made possible only by the confluence of a number of key factors: a supportive and musical family; a sound and virtuosic technique underpinned by a natural gift; a commitment to diligent preparation at all times; and, it must be said, a courageous and marathon-like ability to put up with the constant pressure of concerts, recordings, new works, travel and daily practice. It was surely stimulating to be married to a man of continuous energy and ambition who was always producing ideas for new recordings; but as a performer living on an artistic tightrope she must have felt under pressure to meet these demands.
It helped being Japanese, a nationality that respects discipline and hard work. Born in Nagoya, Takako Nishizaki was taught, from the age of three and a half, by her father Shinji, who worked with Shinichi Suzuki in developing the Suzuki Method; and she acknowledges as a key support her pianist mother Masako, who worked with her three times a day when she was a child and who sometimes fanned her when she had to practise on hot days. Nishizaki’s natural facility and relaxed posture was allowed to develop as she was taught initially by ear, only learning to read music when she was relatively advanced (aged six). She later studied with Broadus Erle (leader of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra at the time; he subsequently became a violin professor at Yale) and, after he left Japan, with Hideo Saito at the Toho School of Music.
Her success at Juilliard, as well as an appearance on the American television programme The Bell Telephone Hour, ensured that she was inundated with concert offers, which at one point topped 100 concerts in a season. However, this unremitting schedule of concerts and travel was not the life she wanted and she returned to Japan to build a concert life there. This was just getting underway when she met Klaus Heymann. ‘At that time, I had no intention of having a boyfriend or getting married because I was going to have my own TV programme in Nagoya. The concept was for me to travel the world, visit all the important music cities, introduce musicians and orchestras in the cities, recommend restaurants and museums, and so on. I had also just started my own chamber orchestra in Nagoya and my father had built a new music room for me on our property. And I wanted to help my father teach his many students.’
She had already made recordings by this time (Grieg’s violin sonatas and Kreisler pieces for RCA, and Schubert and Franck for Balkanton) and had not been particularly drawn to the recording process. ‘In the beginning I didn’t like recordings because I was used to playing concerts. In a way, it was too easy to fix mistakes and the performances were not really all that natural. But eventually I got to enjoy recording and became very good at it. I understood that recording music had special requirements, different from the total spontaneity of a concert. For example, if it was necessary to do a retake, I had to do it in exactly the same tempo as before so that it could be edited in – though of course we always strive for long takes, and even whole movements!’
In 1979 her career took a new turn with the recording of Chen and He’s The Butterfly Lovers for solo violin and orchestra, one of the most popular modern Chinese works. It was a move that brought together various strands in her husband’s business enterprises and their Hong Kong life, and it launched her popularity in China. To house the recording Klaus Heymann created a new label, called simply ‘HK’, and in so doing he started a highly successful Chinese music series. Some thirty-five years later she was still playing this work in the public eye of the largest nation on earth: she performed The Butterfly Lovers at a televised concert in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing in 2009 that was broadcast to millions. These kinds of concert demands from the Far East generally and China in particular have certainly affected the number of concerts she has given in the West during the course of her career. She had returned to Japan from the USA because she was reluctant to spend her life alone in airports, and, even when her name became well known in Europe and the USA from the Naxos recordings, she chose to restrict her travelling for the sake of her family and Asian commitments.
Her first recording for Marco Polo, in 1984, was Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano and Poema autunnale with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. ‘I had to learn the concerto specially for the recording but later I played it in concert quite often.’ It was the start of a series of forgotten violin concertos for this new label of Heymann’s, which was designed to present premiere recordings of Romantic and late Romantic repertoire. By definition these were obscure works, all of which she had to learn from scratch for the sessions.
‘I liked the Rubinstein Concerto a lot and played it in concert quite a few times after the first recording. The same goes for Spohr’s Concerto No. 7, which I later played at the Musikverein in Vienna. And the Respighi is a great piece, except for the ending where the composer tried to out-Paganini Paganini. It still amazes me why pieces like the Respighi, Joachim’s Third Concerto and the Rubinstein are not performed more often. Both the Joachim and the Rubinstein have gorgeous slow movements, but my recordings are still the only ones available today.
’ Nishizaki has continued to champion forgotten works for Naxos, recording concertos by Saint-Georges, Vanhal and Kraus.
Respighi’s Concerto was recorded in Singapore, but increasingly during the 1980s Nishizaki found herself in Europe – often in Bratislava, recording Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms or Bruch with the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra. This enabled her, on occasion, to use the time in Europe to give concerts. Of course she knew most of the major works and had played them in the US or the Far East. Now she had the enjoyable experience of playing them with a good European orchestra (although the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra was not particularly well known, its qualities were acknowledged by conductors such as Michael Halász). She remembers the sessions in Bratislava with affection … most of the time. ‘Generally they went very well. I was well prepared and there was normally enough time to work on details. Sometimes I had to push the producers to get the balance between the violin and the orchestra right but there were no major disagreements with the conductors about style and we always worked out any differences beforehand.’ Using a piano, Nishizaki and the conductor would go through the work before the recording session to settle their approach and tempi.
More troublesome was what happened outside the hall! ‘Occasionally, some of the external circumstances were challenging. The concert hall of the Slovak Philharmonic where I recorded most of the standard concertos was not soundproof and the sessions were frequently interrupted by the tram that passed in front of the hall and sometimes by bands playing on the riverboats on the nearby Danube. Very frustrating!’
There was also the issue of travel during the communist era, which Nishizaki remembers only too clearly. ‘Conditions were tough. Klaus and I travelled on the very cheapest airlines, and hotels at the time in Bratislava were very basic. Sometimes we had to wait at the border between Austria and Slovakia for two hours or more. Often I had to start recording the following day.’
In addition to this, she was a mother. Her son, Rick, was six when Marco Polo started and approaching twelve when Naxos first made its impact. So Nishizaki had to balance the roles of musician and mother, which was particularly difficult when so much travel was involved.
These were far from ideal conditions, but even now she is happy with these early recordings, if not with every detail. She acknowledges that she is less comfortable in the Baroque period, which is why, despite the Four Seasons recording being her single bestseller of Western repertoire, it is the central Classical and Romantic concertos (Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky et al.) that are her touchstones. ‘I was quite lucky to have had Kenneth Jean and Stephen Gunzenhauser conducting for the most important concertos. Those sessions always went smoothly. Of course, I would have liked to record some of the concertos again, not because there was anything wrong with the original recordings but because I would have liked to do some of the concertos differently and over the years I had learned more about the recording process and how to get the best possible results.’
Chamber music has always been a part of her performing career, especially when she was at Juilliard, and the opportunity to record many of the works that were central to her musical life was one she particularly appreciated. She chose her chamber music partners carefully and developed a particular rapport with the pianist Jen Jandó. ‘He’s a wonderful musician and we had an easy understanding. When we prepared for the sessions there were very few discussions. We easily agreed on the style of the pieces and only had to work on a few details and on ensemble.’
The Beethoven and Mozart violin sonata cycles were all recorded in Budapest. ‘I knew the Mozart concertos (except Nos. 1 and 2 which very few artists get to play in concert) but I had to learn a few of the Mozart and Beethoven sonatas specially for the recordings.’ The persuasive requests by her husband for complete cycles did ensure that she always had music new to her on her stand at home. Her partners for much of the ten-volume Kreisler Edition (originally recorded in the late 1970s for Telefunken and Camerata and released on LP before being collected together and reissued on Marco Polo) were Wolf Harden and Michael Ponti.
Behind her rapidly expanding recording career were a few changes of instruments. During her student life and early concert career she played on an early eighteenth-century Italian instrument by Lorenzo Ventapane, bought for her by her father. By the time she started recording the major concertos for Naxos she had chosen a Guarneri. It was sold to her by a wealthy Japanese doctor who had bought it from a Japanese violin dealer. It had an exceptional sound but turned out to be a fake (noticed by a visiting German violin expert). Fortunately the violin dealer replaced it with a genuine Stradivari which she subsequently sold, buying an early Guarneri del Gesù. This she later traded for the 1732 Guarneri she has now: appropriately it was an instrument owned by Fritz Kreisler (and, before him, by Tivadar Nachéz). However, she explains that most of the time she plays on a copy of this instrument made for her by Joseph Curtin, one of the finest American instrument makers. This is particularly the case if she is playing in a televised concert where the sound will be amplified anyway and the lights are hot.
Recording violin music may have been Nishizaki’s public contribution to the growth of Naxos and Marco Polo, but she played an equally influential role behind the scenes. Living with a husband totally absorbed in business and music meant that work rarely stopped. Not being a trained musician, Heymann has always relied on his wife for musical advice and comment. On most evenings, after supper at home in Hong Kong or New Zealand, they would settle down to listen to the latest batch of first edits or masters (originally on DATs; later on CDs) sent from recording centres around the world for approval. ‘For the first ten years I listened to all the most important recordings. By and large, there were no serious problems but I sometimes insisted on ensemble and intonation being corrected. Only in very rare cases did I have to tell Klaus that we should not release a recording because it was not of an acceptable standard.’
Even in those early days, the number of works and the variety was extraordinary. An evening’s listen could involve a symphony by Ludwig Spohr, Schubert piano trios, Palestrina, Szymanowski, a piano sonata by Mozart, or Suppé overtures. With hundreds of recordings being produced by the efficient Naxos and Marco Polo machines, there was simply no end to the listening tasks; and Heymann relied on his wife’s acute ears and critical musical taste.
This was nothing new to Nishizaki because she had always listened to the first edits of her own recordings and approved the final edit. It was a crucial part of raising the musical standards for Naxos and Marco Polo and was another indication of the extent to which both Heymann and Nishizaki were ‘hands-on’. They cared about the recordings going out, regardless of whether they were full-price Marco Polo or budget-price Naxos. They had to accept compromises, but the lessons learned in their drawing room, in front of their hi-fi (and with Heymann’s background in professional sound equipment, this was top of the range), had a direct effect on the quality and the process of future recordings – and on which musicians made them. He often says that his wife provided the ears for Naxos. At his request she has also listened to recordings of musicians who hope to make CDs for Naxos. ‘Klaus gets me to listen to every new artist and orchestra and I probably have the final say in who gets recorded. Klaus trusts my judgement. I am impressed by what I hear these days. Technically the standards are very high, so I always listen for musicality, a beautiful tone, a wide range of dynamics and expressive playing.’
Nishizaki’s life has taken a different route in the last few years. She still makes recordings, though rarely: concertos by Saint-Georges, Vanhal and Kraus are among her most recent. She has also enjoyed recording Peter Breiner’s arrangements, including operatic potpourris and popular collections such as Russian Romance, Chinese Pop Evergreens and Tchaikovsky: None but the Lonely Heart.
She now gives only about ten concerts per year, ‘though I could probably play The Butterfly Lovers somewhere in China every week!’ When she performs The Butter
fly Lovers in a bright concert dress to an audience of thousands in a major Chinese city, Takako Nishizaki is every inch the international virtuoso. In Hong Kong she is very much the leading musical celebrity, a recognised figure among not only classical audiences but also a wider public. Her popularity has given her a place in Hong Kong society, and when the couple attend functions Klaus Heymann is sometimes introduced as the husband of Takako Nishizaki. In the rest of the world she performs with grace the role of Mrs Heymann, violinist wife of a leading classical music entrepreneur.
She still practises daily, even though she gives few concerts. ‘I don’t feel good if I don’t practise every day.’ But she has turned her principal attention to teaching, having formed the Takako Nishizaki Violin Studio in 2005. If you phone the Heymann household in Hong Kong you can often hear in the background the sound of a violin lesson, and sometimes it is clearly a beginner. Nishizaki has adjudicated at leading international violin competitions, such as the Kreisler Competition in Vienna, and could take her pick of advanced students, but she prefers to work with children taking their first steps. ‘A white sheet,’ she calls it. Not surprisingly she works with the children and their mothers together: the Suzuki background is there, although she doesn’t follow the Method slavishly. ‘I use the best elements of the Suzuki Method and combine them with traditional teaching. I insist on a parent being involved from the beginning and I use the ten books of the Suzuki Violin School: it is still the most complete collection of well-graded study pieces, even though there’s too much Baroque music and nothing after Mozart. But my students have to learn to read music virtually from day one and they also have to do exercises.’
Prompted by her interest in teaching, Nishizaki has recently recorded all the Suzuki pieces in seven volumes of Suzuki Evergreens. ‘I really wanted to pass on to young people what I had learned from my father and from Mr Suzuki, and also what I have learned from teaching all these pieces myself for many years. I was also keen on adding the original versions of many arrangements so children realise that all of this is music and not just a collection of exercises which they have to complete.’ The project brought together, once again, the mutual interests of this husband-and-wife team that is perhaps unique in music. It must have been a salutary experience for Takako Nishizaki, after a life spent recording some of the greatest and most challenging music written for the violin, to pick up her Guarneri, watch for the red light, and play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.
The Story of Naxos Page 14