Jen Jandó – Piano
For a man who is one of the most recorded classical musicians in history Jen Jandó presents a surprisingly modest figure. Sitting in the green room of Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy of Music – where Bartók, Kodály, Dohnányi and many other great performers (including Jandó himself!) have warmed up before giving recitals in the Art Nouveau hall – it is difficult to match the man and his music-making. White hair, white beard, slight – a man perhaps more comfortable on a piano stool than a sofa.
It is difficult to prove, but there are probably more CDs available of Jandó than of any other single pianist. He may also hold the classical pianist’s record for the sheer number of CD sales: many of his early recordings have sold in excess of 500,000 units. Naxos CDs on which Jandó features number a stupendous 400. About half of those are special compilations – Chill with Mozart, Bach for Meditation, Night Music, Music to Die For – but they should not be discounted (and he doesn’t mind them). After all, they probably take him into more homes around the world than do the original recordings! They also demonstrate the extent to which Jandó’s pianism is one of the central pillars of the core Naxos catalogue.
The most concise way of putting it is that Jandó has recorded for Naxos the major piano works of the Classical and Romantic periods – and much more. This does exaggerate a bit, since there are plenty of works which were not undertaken by him (Chopin’s piano works or all Liszt, for example); but he did record all of Haydn’s piano sonatas, most of Mozart’s piano music (all the piano concertos and sonatas), all of Beethoven’s sonatas and all the piano music of Schubert. The big concertos entrusted to him by Klaus Heymann include those of Brahms, Grieg, Dvoák and Rachmaninov, not to mention all three of Bartók’s (as well as all of Bartók’s solo piano music and even Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition).
There is also all the chamber music of the same period. This includes Mozart’s and Beethoven’s violin sonatas with Takako Nishizaki (a Naxos partnership highly valued by both musicians) and other works recorded with the Hungarian colleagues and friends whom he gathered together (Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet, Beethoven’s cello sonatas with Csaba Onczay, as well as Brahms’s clarinet sonatas, his Trio and Quintet). Then, quite late in a career which is as long as Naxos is old, came Bach’s Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues. ‘It was a marvellous task,’ he declares. ‘Incredible. You can find everything in The Well-Tempered Clavier. It is a jewellery box and all that is inside is beautiful.’
Jandó’s discography is a remarkable testament to an exceptional talent. It would not appear such an achievement were Jandó more of a known personality in the classical world – an Alfred Brendel or an Evgeny Kissin. He isn’t. His own story is more unusual in that a leading record company continued to give a pianist, relatively unknown in the major international concert halls, so many central piano works. In two and a half decades of recording, as he charged through the repertoire with often ten discs or more per year and maintained a busy concert career, he just did what came naturally.
He would set off in the morning to the Italian Institute in central Budapest, where many of the early recordings took place, to record some more sonatas by Haydn, or maybe a Mozart piano concerto. He would have a morning cup of coffee and a cigarette (one of many that day) and chat a little with Ibolya Tóth – producer, friend, and key Naxos figure in Hungary for many years. In the hall would be his own piano, a Steinway Model C, chosen because Jandó prefers what he calls ‘its clearer bass’ for recording. Then, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., or sometimes 4 p.m., he would record.
Even now, Jandó continues to follow a simple recording pattern. ‘I always play the whole movement, and then do a few retakes. Sometimes I have to repeat because my throat is very loud when I am playing – it is an ugly sound, but less than Glen Gould!’ On occasions, he has been persuaded to put an unlit cigarette in his mouth to prevent him from humming along too vigorously with the music. He does take scores to the recording but his considerable memory means that most of the time the music is laid to one side.
When he and his producer know they have covered all the details, he will often play it once more ‘as if in concert’. It may be a day for delicacy of touch in a charming, effortlessly captivating Haydn sonata; or for bravura in Liszt’s B minor Sonata – clarity partnered by fireworks; or for dexterity and composure in a four-part fugue by Bach. After decades Jandó is totally at ease in front of the microphone, and somehow he always manages to produce a sense of concert excitement.
His first recording for Naxos was the collection of three popular Beethoven sonatas: ‘Pathétique’, ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Appassionata’. It was made at the Italian Institute in Budapest, 21–23 April 1987; it was the first year of Naxos, though the disc was actually released in March 1988. Heymann, having previously worked with the Hungarian national record label Hungaroton for other recordings, had asked for a recommendation of a good pianist who could potentially record all of Beethoven’s sonatas. They suggested Jandó. So this first recording, though he was unaware of it, was effectively a trial disc.
When the DAT copy reached Hong Kong it sounded excellent, but it still took a leap of faith for Heymann to entrust all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas to a man he had never met. It was not Jandó’s first CD (he had recorded some of Liszt’s transcriptions for Hungaroton) and he had won competitions; but he was already in his early thirties with a steady, not spectacular, playing career. He came from a generation of fine Hungarian pianists – András Schiff and Zoltán Kocsis had been at the Liszt Academy with him – but his concert life was mainly within Hungary and Eastern Europe. This one Beethoven disc changed his life. Heymann called him from Hong Kong and asked if he would like to do the cycle. The terms were clear if unusually straightforward for the time: payment by disc. He would like Jandó to record them as soon as possible but certainly within three years. Jandó had no doubts. About half of them were in his repertoire but he knew he was a quick learner. He completed them six months early.
Even now he remembers certain sessions: ‘Especially Opus 110. I think it was my best. And I am also very proud of the D minor Sonata, the ‘Tempest’, because it is there, on disc, without any edits! I had learned this piece very carefully under the supervision of the composer Pál Kadosa at the Academy, and when I came to record it, I just played it. One take.’
A year into the Beethoven cycle, Jandó received another call. ‘We were in the middle of this great and difficult project and Mr Heymann asked me to record all the Mozart concertos.’ Jandó knew and played about ten of them so had to learn the rest. The main challenge for him was in making decisions about some of the cadenzas. ‘Mozart didn’t write cadenzas for all the concertos, especially not for the early ones. If they were available I used the Hummel cadenzas, but on occasions I decided to shorten them. Mozart had a shorter keyboard than Hummel, so I adjusted Hummel’s range to make it suit the smaller piano that Mozart would have written for. I didn’t want to play out of Mozart’s style.’
He recorded the cycle with the chamber orchestra Concentus Hungaricus, which was full of his Hungarian musical friends, many of whom had been with him at the Liszt Academy. It was also this Mozart cycle that gave rise to his association with the producer Ibolya Tóth, who was also a fellow student at the Liszt Academy. The project took three years, but Tóth was with him as support and advisor throughout. In fact she has produced the vast majority of the discs that he has since recorded for Naxos, including the journeys through Haydn, Schubert and Bartók. Such an enduring link between musician and producer has unquestionably contributed to the substance of the Jandó discography. From 1995 Tóth’s recording sessions were located in her purpose-built recording studio (Phoenix Studio) in Diósd on the outskirts of Budapest.
Although Jandó has recorded individual works from other eras, the truth is that he always felt particularly at home in the Viennese milieu, with cycles of music by a single composer. ‘You change your view of a composer when you do s
o many of his pieces.’ Mozart was followed by Schubert, and then it was back to Haydn. ‘They are all connected to each other and it is interesting to experience the Classical world like that. Schubert is a different challenge. He is more difficult than Beethoven because his music is harder to grasp. Beethoven can take many different approaches but Schubert is more fragile. I think you can put more personal views into Beethoven, but with Schubert you have to be just Schubert. I only hope that my character is close to Schubert’s character because I am Aquarius and Mozart and Schubert were both Aquarius.’ He smiles with a hint of self-deprecation.
To chamber music he takes an intuitive approach. His rehearsals for the recordings of the Mozart and Beethoven violin sonatas with Nishizaki, he remembers, involved very little discussion. ‘First you have to read the notes correctly and study the whole piece. If you are good musicians you don’t need to talk. You have to be very sensitive and feel the approach of the other person, and you can hear if you feel it in the same way. That is the basis of chamber music. If you cannot find the vibration of the other, or the view is very different, you cannot play together.’
Recording for Naxos became a regular theme to his musical life but he was also busy giving concerts. His recordings opened the door to more appearances outside Europe – in Japan, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. The effect was particularly felt in Japan, where concerts were always followed by CD signings. His stamina is legendary. He is known for being able to record in the morning and give a concert in the evening. On a few occasions he has stepped in to save a concert, playing the work from memory despite having recorded something completely different only hours earlier.
The years passed quickly, but there seemed to be no end to the requests from Naxos. It was Jandó’s own wish to do the Haydn sonatas, but generally the impetus came from Heymann. Even now, Jandó is surprised at the way in which Naxos developed and the works that came in his direction: Liszt’s B minor Sonata, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, even Dohnányi (who may be viewed primarily as a Classicist, but his range is much wider). It was a risk for the label to rely so heavily on one pianist but it seems to have worked. Naxos’s twenty-fifth anniversary falls in Jandó’s sixtieth year. There are a few works he would still like to record, including those which would complete the Bartók cycle; but with an almost unrivalled discography he is certainly content with what he has done.
Idil Biret – Piano
In 1989 Klaus Heymann met the Turkish-born pianist Idil Biret in Brussels. It was two years into Naxos and he was looking for a musician to undertake a landmark in recording history: the first time that one pianist would put on disc the complete piano works by Chopin, both the solo works and the concertos. Biret’s reputation as a remarkable performer – child prodigy, student of Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Cortot – was already established, and reinforced by her existing recordings of Liszt’s piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s nine symphonies.
Curiously, despite having played a wide range of music, memorising most of Brahms’s works before she was a teenager and recording a lot of contemporary repertoire (including Boulez’s Sonata No. 2), she had played relatively little Chopin. ‘I had listened to very bad and sentimental Chopin performances during my childhood. In some circles Chopin had become the synonym of teary, sentimental music. It was sad that a musician who composed, in Classical perfection, the least self-complacent works had become so misunderstood.’ Studies with Kempff gave her a very different view of the composer, and this was underlined, strangely, by her love for the music of Scriabin. ‘In my search for the origins of his inspiration, I found Chopin.’ For Biret the Nocturnes and Mazurkas were no longer sentimental, slightly gloomy and moonstruck – a view which was then properly banished by further studies with Alfred Cortot.
Chopin began to feature in her recital programmes more frequently, and Heymann’s appearance and offer happened at just the right time. Nevertheless it still came as a surprise, largely because it was accompanied by the request that the project be completed as soon as possible, ideally within two years. Biret’s stamina and natural talent were legendary but she faced quite a task. Living in both Brussels and Istanbul, she immersed herself in Chopin, studying scores, listening to historic recordings and reading essays on Chopin interpretation. Between March 1990 and February 1992, in the Clara Wieck Auditorium, Heidelberg (then West Germany) and the House of Arts, Košice (Slovakia), she recorded the complete works. She started and finished with the studies, completing the cycle with Trois Nouvelles Études. The Naxos release schedule tried to keep pace, putting out individual CDs; eventually the complete cycle comprised fifteen CDs containing seventeen hours of Chopin, with notes for every work. The set won the Grand Prix du Disque Frédéric Chopin in 1995; and twelve years later the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, presented Idil Biret with the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland at the Polish Embassy in Ankara during a state visit on 23 January 2007, ‘for her outstanding efforts in spreading the music of Chopin throughout the world with her recordings and performances of the composer’s works’.
In the middle of those two busy years of Chopin, Biret also started recording complete cycles of Brahms and Rachmaninov for Naxos. In fact the first Biret disc released on Naxos contained Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 4 by Saint-Saëns with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by James Loughran (a recording she had originally intended for Vox). Then came Chopin, Brahms and Rachmaninov.
Contemporary music had always been a strong part of Biret’s performance and recording life before Naxos; she had recorded many works for Atlantic/Finnadar, including Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2. So when Yves Riesel, the Naxos label manager in France, suggested that she record all three of Boulez’s piano sonatas for Naxos she was delighted. ‘Klaus and I had developed a good relationship, and I said this would be very good for the label. But I knew it wasn’t Klaus’s kind of music and he was very sceptical that it would sell, and at first he was very reluctant to agree to it.’ In the end, he did agree, and in typical fashion he wanted it quickly. ‘I knew the Second Sonata but not the other two. This was now December 1994 and Klaus wanted me to record them in January and February 1995, at a studio in Radio France. It was a great challenge for me. I had to work very intensively for a month, but when I came to record them they seemed to go very well, with few problems.’ The sales figures surprised everyone and continue to astonish Heymann: over 40,000 CDs have been sold worldwide to date.
Biret admires the works themselves. ‘They are great works. For me the Boulez piano sonatas are classics of the twentieth century. They hold together, they are very logical, and they have meaning. I think they are among the few works of that period which will remain in the repertoire in the future. Actually, we were all very surprised how well they sold. It proves that people have curiosity. And when, six years later, I suggested to Klaus that I record Ligeti’s Études (another work which, like Boulez’s sonatas, stands on very solid ground), he agreed. I had played them in concert a lot.’ Since their release in 2003, these have sold well over 20,000 CDs.
Biret throws a wide purview over music for the piano. She has also recorded Bach transcriptions – not by Busoni but by her teacher Wilhelm Kempff. ‘They are wonderful. I prefer them to Busoni’s. They are simpler and more in the spirit of this religious music.’ The most recent recording that Idil Biret made for Naxos was Stravinsky’s own (1910) piano transcription of The Firebird. ‘I heard a piano roll of Stravinsky himself playing it. It was beautiful and I wanted to do it.’ To date, her recordings on Naxos – the Chopin, Brahms and Rachmaninov cycles alone cover thirty-seven CDs – have sold in excess of two million discs.
Her enterprise has now taken her in a new direction. She has always wanted to record the Beethoven sonata cycle, as well as many other works, including more Liszt transcriptions (Harold in Italy for viola and piano, as well as Symphonie fantastique for piano). To this end, with her husband Şefik Yüksel, she has founded the Idil Biret Archive. She is bringing as many of her earlier, pre-Na
xos recordings as possible into this collection (including Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies) and adding new titles by the dozen. Naxos could not accommodate all the music that she still wants to record but Heymann did offer her the umbrella of the Naxos worldwide network; so the IBA, distributed by Naxos, now appears as an independent label with Naxos catalogue numbers. It is an ideal compromise for both.
Biret divides her time between her homes in Brussels, Paris and Istanbul. She has an 1889 Pleyel grand piano in Brussels and a 1960 Steinway and 1916 Schröder in Istanbul, but she also prepares for her recordings and concerts at night on electronic and even silent keyboards. She is now in her seventh decade and her energy in performance appears undimmed. During Chopin’s 200th anniversary year, 2010, she gave many Chopin recitals; and when a leading Polish newspaper published a fifteen-volume partwork on the composer’s life and work, it was Idil Biret’s Chopin recordings that were chosen to accompany it: a rather particular endorsement.
Maria Kliegel – Cello
It was quite a recording coup that put the German-born cellist Maria Kliegel in touch with Klaus Heymann: the world-premiere recording of Alfred Schnittke’s Cello Concerto. The work had been written for and premiered by Natalia Gutman, and she was given a two-year window to make the first recording. But plans went awry, the time expired, and by that point Maria Kliegel had already learned it and begun to play it in concert. Heymann had heard about this and asked her to record it for Marco Polo. Something of a race developed between the two planned recordings, and each one had its problems. The composer himself had been to the Gutman recording sessions but a second work to go on the disc had yet to be finished. Meanwhile, shortly before the start of the Marco Polo sessions with Kliegel and the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra, the conductor suddenly dropped out. Kliegel persuaded the orchestra to accept Gerhard Markson, who had conducted her first concert performance of the work, and the Marco Polo CD came out in 1991 as a world premiere. It was highly praised by the composer (he called it the ‘definitive’ performance).
The Story of Naxos Page 15