This was a pivotal moment for Maria Kliegel, the first step in a long association with Marco Polo and then Naxos. Her recording career has played a central role in her performing life. She was born in Hesse and studied with János Starker and Mstislav Rostropovich (winning the Grand Prix of the Paris Concours Rostropovich in 1981), and she was particularly pleased that she began her recording career with Schnittke’s Concerto. ‘I was so happy that I could begin with a piece that was not Dvoák or Saint-Saëns or Tchaikovsky – but Schnittke. He was a very important composer, and also I was in love with that piece.’
Schnittke’s Concerto is fiendishly difficult and it demonstrated clearly the talents that both Starker and Rostropovich had recognised. Aware that he needed a cellist to record the standard cello repertoire on Naxos, and having been impressed with the Schnittke recording, Heymann turned to Kliegel. With some financial support from the foundation that had provided her with her Stradivarius cello, the next recording, of concertos by Dvoák and Elgar, was made in the relatively lavish circumstances (by early Naxos standards) of the Henry Wood Hall in London, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Michael Halász. ‘It was fantastic,’ says Kliegel. ‘I was a little afraid because I didn’t know what the English musicians would say about an unknown German cellist playing the Elgar Concerto. But they were very attentive and very nice – it felt like being in a big, comfortable, warm bed with them, and I loved it.’ The CD was released in 1992, and, having never been out of the catalogue, has sold in excess of 160,000 copies. For Kliegel it set a pattern of regular recording that was to last nearly fifteen years.
‘In the beginning years all the suggestions came from Klaus. He said he preferred one-composer CDs which were easier to sell but I knew this is more difficult for the cello because cello repertoire written by individual composers is not so large.’ Nevertheless, for the first couple of years it worked out well. ‘I wanted to record things I had played in concert but also pieces I actually wanted to play – not just recording for recording’s sake – and combine this with Klaus’s wishes.’
Kliegel recorded concertos by Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations and Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. Working with various pianists, she also recorded the central sonata repertoire (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms) and attractive programmes of encore pieces, including a collection of works by the cellist–composer David Popper. Her recording of Tavener’s The Protecting Veil sold more than 40,000 discs.
It was inevitable that at some point she would record Bach’s cello suites. ‘Klaus was very patient – it took me many years to prepare for it. I do love the Baroque and Classical pieces, but Romantic music touches me more.’ She compared the four existing manuscripts of the suites and eventually recorded them in Budapest with Ibolya Tóth producing; the recording was released in 2005.
Undoubtedly the most unique CD in Kliegel’s recording career for Naxos and Marco Polo is Hommage à Nelson Mandela. Inspired by the autobiography of Mandela which she read while on holiday in Hawaii, Kliegel, a musician of passion and enterprise, was determined to meet him and to mark her admiration for him in a special way. She commissioned a work for cello and percussion from the composer Wilhelm Kaiser-Lindemann and gave the first performance in Düsseldorf in 1996. In the following year she was in Capetown playing the Concerto by Saint-Saëns, and she included some extracts of Hommage à Nelson Mandela in the concert: within three months she was back in South Africa and playing sections of the work early one morning to Nelson Mandela himself. ‘I had a personal meeting with him for a whole hour,’ she recalls. ‘I played one of the movements for him – it was based on a lullaby from Xhosa … I decided I would take the song, sing it as a lullaby, and accompany myself on open strings and knock the rhythm on the back of my cello. It was complicated, but he was very touched. It was a wonderful experience. It had taken four years from first reading the book to have my wish fulfilled.’ It was released on Marco Polo with a photograph of Mandela and Kliegel together, and received worldwide publicity.
Kliegel has now made some thirty-five recordings for Naxos. She declares that curiously she has not developed a concert career to match her discography and her international sales. She puts it down to personal reasons, and possibly management issues. Instead she developed a career as a teacher, in recent years releasing books and DVDs addressing the many challenges facing cellists in the main repertoire. She looks back with affection on her association with Naxos.
‘I feel I have had a special relationship with the label because from the start all my correspondence was with Klaus Heymann personally. He has been in my house many times. We have had some disagreements, which is normal, but we have developed a certain trust. In the beginning I was very grateful because he trusted me enough to offer me the main cello repertoire and I knew he would have only one recording of these main works for ten years. At the start I was very sceptical about doing these for Naxos because it was a budget label and people said, “Why don’t you go to Deutsche Grammophon.” I said, “It is not easy!” In those first years, the presentation of Naxos and Marco Polo in the shops was very bad and the prices were cheap. But then I thought that I had a good orchestra with a good recording, so the result was very good, and I hoped that the distribution would get better in the coming years. And it did. And then I heard from other musicians that if their recordings don’t sell so well they are deleted, and I thought, “Well, this hasn’t happened with my recordings on Naxos and Marco Polo!”’
Kodály Quartet
Attila Falvay, 1st violin • Erika Tóth, 2nd violin • János Fejérvári, viola • György Éder, cello
Haydn is the bedrock of the string quartet. Most groups maintain a few Haydn quartets in their repertoire and almost all players express a continuing delight in them. Relatively few experience the privilege of playing them all, and even fewer have recorded the complete cycle. Attila Falvay, first violinist of the Kodály Quartet, is very clear that in nearly a quarter of a century spent recording for Naxos this was the highlight for him – a continuing highlight, for the cycle was recorded organically over a decade. Between 17 and 19 June 1988 in the Italian Institute, Budapest the Kodály Quartet (at the time, Attila Falvay, 1st violin; Tamás Szabó, 2nd violin; Gábor Fias, viola; János Devich, cello) played Op. 76 No. 3 in C (‘Emperor’), Op. 76 No. 2 in D minor (‘Fifths’) and Op. 76 No. 4 in B flat (‘Sunrise’). These were all in the group’s repertoire, so it was simply a pleasure. None of them – certainly not Falvay, who had joined the Quartet in 1980 (it was founded in 1966) – had any idea that it was the start of a cycle. As far as they knew, it was just a one-off disc for an obscure budget label, though that did not lessen the enjoyment of the sessions. It turned out to be an important disc for Naxos because it brought the first very positive review in the UK, in November 1990 on BBC Radio 3’s influential programme Record Review, and this helped to establish the label as a reliable source for classical music despite its low price.
The Kodály Quartet had as many as half of Haydn’s quartets in its concert repertoire, so it was relatively easy for the musicians to move into the studio and put them on disc. Each time was pure pleasure, as Attila Falvay explains. ‘If I had the fortune to record them again, I would start with the early ones and step by step go with the quartets as they were composed. But in those early days, we didn’t have the best scores: it was the communist era, and the urtext scores were not available. We only had the Peters Edition and there were lots of questions about those. Sometimes we just had to go on our instincts. But it is a fantastic thing to do for a string quartet, especially for the first violin, and I was very happy. It is a dream to do all the Haydn quartets, to know and play this wonderful literature.’
The commissions for the recordings came from Heymann, who initially asked for the ‘named’ quartets because they were more popular. Fairly soon, however, the Quartet recorded programmes in order of opus number, which Falvay feels was right. ‘What we found so very interesting
was the Haydn “laboratory” of string quartets. Musical ideas that he tried in No. 1 of an opus would appear in No. 2 and No. 3 of that same opus. It was a family of thematic ideas, growing and being worked out further by Haydn. And tempo is so important. And asking what kind of music is it: a kind of peasant dance or, like the ‘Emperor’, more aristocratic, more noble?’
By 1994 it was clear that the group was on course to do the whole cycle, and the composer was a regular feature in its annual recording programme. Sometimes it was two Haydn discs a year, sometimes more. The last disc in the cycle was recorded in 2000: it contained the arrangements, now known to be spurious, of two cassations as Op. 2 Nos. 3 and 5, as well as the two Op. 3 quartets now normally attributed to Hoffstetter; but it was decided to do these for completeness’ sake. The whole set (twenty-five CDs) came out in 2008 and was well received critically. Falvay comments: ‘Inevitably, over the twelve years, we changed our approach and our style. The personnel changed [the current membership dates from 2005] and so the way we played the quartets changed slightly. But this is natural – all musicians change individually over that spread of time.’
Interpretation was particularly crucial when it came to Haydn because awareness of period performance was burgeoning during the 1990s. Falvay took note of the differing views and the gut-string performances, and, although all four musicians play on modern instruments, the style of the Quartet’s Haydn evolved. ‘My way of playing is very close to singing, a natural singing voice, without too much mannerism. I like the pure musicality, when the character comes out by itself.’ A Hungarian quartet is a natural choice to play Haydn because he wrote so many of the works at the Esterházy court. Certainly Falvay thinks that the Kodály Quartet may have a distinctive Hungarian flavour, and it follows a strong tradition of Hungarian quartet playing. ‘Perhaps it is more Classical, less academic and scientific, than an American or a French quartet.’
The success of the Haydn cycle set the Kodály Quartet on the road to the central Classical repertoire, resulting in complete cycles of Beethoven and Schubert. Falvay suggested the Beethoven cycle to Heymann. The group had already performed all the works in concert, though this did not mean the recordings were simple to do. ‘The Beethoven quartets are very complicated – it is a very different project. In the Haydn quartets, most of the melody is played by the first violin. In Beethoven’s quartets, everyone is playing important things. Take the Grosse Fugue. If everybody plays the dynamic written it is a terrible work because the listener cannot hear any melodic line – everyone is just playing fragments. We had to bring out the continuity; we had to rewrite the dynamics many times, even from fortissimo to piano, because other parts may be much more important. It was a very difficult work to do. It really helped to record this, because when we listened to the playback we could hear what we were all doing and how our theories functioned. I was pleased that we got good reviews for this because we worked very hard on it!’
The recording process was different for Beethoven. Haydn sessions would involve one quartet a day; for middle-period Beethoven, the Quartet would be happy with one or two movements a day. But most sessions followed a pattern: 9 a.m., warm up; 10 a.m., record for two or three hours without a break; then lunch and record again until 5 or 6 p.m. ‘I don’t like the breaks because you lose the tension and it is difficult to find the character. I am completely exhausted after each session because it takes a great amount of concentration and energy not to become boring when you repeat. We have to keep the playing fresh, which is much more difficult to do without an audience. It is such a different feeling in a recording session! When you are giving a concert it is much easier to be alive and full of vigour, though in a concert you only have one shot. Sometimes, when you listen to the playback in a recording session, you are surprised by what you hear – you didn’t expect a phrase you have just played to sound like that!’
Most of the recordings took place with the producer Ibolya Tóth (as did so many recordings in Hungary) first at the Italian Institute and then at the Phoenix Studio in Diósd. However, the difference with many of the later Kodály Quartet recordings is that they were edited by Falvay’s wife, Mária. Falvay would listen to the first edit then trust his wife and Tóth to finish it. ‘They listen in a different way from me.’ Over twenty years the Kodály Quartet made more than fifty recordings for Naxos, with their three main cycles of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert happening simultaneously. The group also recorded other things, including the octets by Mendelssohn, Schubert and Bruch (‘that was a discovery for us’); the quartets by Ravel and Debussy; and Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet and Bartók’s Quintet (both with Jen Jandó). They regret not having been able to record for Naxos other works that they play a lot in concert – quartets by Bartók, for example (recorded for Naxos by the Vermeer Quartet), or Dohnányi or even Kodály himself. But Falvay does not complain. ‘We were very grateful for the opportunity to do all this central Classical quartet repertoire for Naxos. At first, we didn’t think about the company we were doing it for – whether it was a budget label, or what nationality it was. We were just happy to have the chance to do this. We did meet with some prejudice at the beginning from some people who did not care for Naxos because it was sold at a budget price. People thought that maybe it was a budget performance – cheap in some way. But fortunately this perception changed completely. And it certainly helped our concert career. It was very good to take our recordings with the good reviews to concert agents.’
Ilya Kaler – Violin
After the Russian-born virtuoso Ilya Kaler had won three of the leading international violin competitions in the mid-1980s (Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Paganini), it was not so obvious that he was going to migrate to Naxos in the early 1990s. The appearance of his first recordings, however (Paganini’s Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 and the same composer’s Twenty-Four Caprices), brought worldwide recognition and demonstrated the emerging appeal that Naxos was having for outstanding players. It was clear that Naxos could provide them with an international platform equal to that of any established label.
Stephen Gunzenhauser, already a Naxos artist, conducted two concerts with Kaler in the US and recommended him to Klaus Heymann, who responded immediately with the Paganini offers. Other recordings, including concertos by Glazunov and Dvoák, followed swiftly. ‘He was clearly one of the great violinists in the Russian tradition of today but didn’t have the career he deserved,’ says Heymann. ‘He is very musical, excellent technically, and a very intelligent player.’ Over the following years Kaler extended the Naxos violin repertoire so far established by Takako Nishizaki, adding his own performances of core repertoire but also recording lesser-known works (a path he continues to tread). Sonatas by Brahms came in 2002, and then major concertos by Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Schumann as well as both of the concertos by Shostakovich.
Kaler is unequivocal in his commitment to Naxos. ‘It was a wonderful opportunity for me to record these great pieces, and they helped me enormously in my career.’ From his home in Illinois he pursues an international playing career with major orchestras and encounters the Naxos distribution in all corners of the world. ‘The other day I was playing in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and out of the blue these young people came up after the concert and asked me to sign the Naxos recordings they had bought – Paganini’s Caprices. It was very sweet to see that.’
He now records once or twice a year. ‘Most of my work takes place in a concert hall, so it can feel a little bit strange to stand again in front of the microphone, though it doesn’t take me long to get used to it. I look at it always as a learning experience for me because when you stand before a microphone your ears somehow work differently. You start listening intently to what you are doing, and why you are doing it, and then you hear the playback and you discover new things in your playing – which sometimes you like and sometimes you do not! It is very stimulating for me as an instrumentalist. But generally I think my recordings honestly reflect my way of playing, the w
ay I sound in life.’
Inevitably his reputation as a recording artist stands by the more popular repertoire. He has also recorded Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas and partitas, where violin playing is put under the clearest of spotlights, and Ysaÿe’s solo sonatas. Yet looking back at his two decades of recording for Naxos, he is equally engaged by the lesser-known works that he has put on disc. These have included Taneyev’s Suite de concert; Szymanowski’s two concertos with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Antoni Wit (a recording which led to a series of concert performances, as promoters picked up on the works); and the Violin Concerto by Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, again with the Warsaw Philharmonic and Wit. Kaler knew about Karlowicz’s Concerto because it was played in Russia when he was young, but he never thought he would have the chance to record it. ‘That is why working with Naxos has been such an interesting experience,’ he says.
The Story of Naxos Page 16