Maggini Quartet
The Maggini Quartet has made a unique contribution to Naxos in general and English chamber music in particular. From its first appearance on the label in 1996 there was a steady stream of recordings that championed the heart of English chamber music in the twentieth century, especially from 1900 to 1950.
The offer to record this music for an international budget label was a considerable surprise to the Quartet. Surely English chamber music was the domain of the full-price English independent labels? But this special collaboration (part of the English music series established by David Denton) helped to give Naxos an English character in England – a ‘localising’ feature that was to be replicated elsewhere in the world by other Naxos companies. It started with the music of Frank Bridge and E.J. Moeran and finished fifteen years and some thirty CDs later with the music of Ronald Corp; in the middle was the momentous undertaking of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Naxos Quartets.
The relationship between Naxos and the Quartet began with a simple proposition. In 1994 its members – Laurence Jackson and David Angel, violins; Martin Outram, viola; Michal Kaznowski, cello – decided to record privately two CDs of English music and offer them to record companies. In a North London church they recorded short, attractive works for string quartet by Bridge and the string quartets and String Trio by Moeran. The engineer–producer was a friend of theirs, Andrew Walton: though a violinist with the English Chamber Orchestra, he was very interested in the recording process.
The master tapes went off to three labels. The Quartet received a highly positive response from David Denton, representing Naxos, who not only agreed to take the recordings but offered a contract for further discs of English music. He was also happy for them to be produced by Andrew Walton. It was a life-changing moment for the Quartet (and for Walton), as David Angel remembers. ‘I was on the train when I got the call from Andrew and neither of us could believe it. It was the most fabulous offer to both him as a producer and us as a quartet.’
It was the turning point for the Quartet musically, for suddenly English music became the central part of their concert life. ‘When we started the Maggini in 1988, we didn’t see ourselves as a vehicle for British composers. It all came by chance. We chose Moeran for the recording because we had happened to be asked to perform some of the music at a festival near Tunbridge Wells and we thought it was wonderful. We knew one of Britten’s quartets and our viola player, Martin, was very keen on it; but we played the central European quartet repertoire – we had already recorded some Haydn, Schubert and Szymanowski for other independent labels. We had no plans to play so much English music until Naxos asked us to record it!’
The next CD was of Elgar’s Piano Quintet, with Peter Donohoe, which went on to win a Diapason d’Or in France. It was particularly satisfying recognition, and ironic that it should come from outside England. When Anthony Anderson arrived at Select Music in 1997 he took over responsibility for the Maggini recordings, and over the following decade developed a close relationship with the group. The first volume of Britten’s string quartets (Nos. 1 and 2) followed in 1998, and a pattern was established of two recordings per year. The Quartet continued to play a broader range of repertoire in concert, but more often than not the middle work in the programme would be an English one – because of the Naxos commissions. The group planned carefully and quite far ahead, choosing the work to be recorded and scheduling it for concert performance before taking it into the studio.
British music became the hallmark of the Maggini Quartet although Angel points out that it only represented a third of their concert repertoire. The regular reviews received for their two releases a year – generally high praise indeed – helped to raise the Quartet’s profile and certainly increased the number of concerts it gave. After Britten came Walton; after Walton came Vaughan Williams. The collection of Vaughan Williams’s two string quartets and Phantasy Quintet with Garfield Jackson brought Naxos’s first Gramophone Award. ‘It began as a typical project for us,’ remembers Angel. ‘We didn’t know the music very well before we started working on it, and I wasn’t particularly keen on Vaughan Williams. But I fell in love with the quartets and in 2000 I ate, drank and slept Vaughan Williams. I read everything about him and his music that I could lay my hands on, and we played him all over the place. As with the Britten, we immersed ourselves in it.’
It turned out to be a special recording, and the sessions themselves demonstrated what a close team the Maggini Quartet and Andrew Walton had become. Angel recalls: ‘There was a moment when we were doing the slow movement of No. 2, the central movement, which begins pianissimo but with no vibrato. It is a very haunting and touching moment. We did a first take. Andrew in the control room said, “I think we can go one of two ways with this. We can either go down the slightly stony Shostakovich-like way, or we can go for something extraordinarily misty that perhaps we couldn’t achieve in the concert hall very easily” – and that was the one he wanted to push us down. The five of us worked at it and when I listened to the first take, I had to get nearer to my speakers to hear it. But I had to admit there was something extraordinary about it and he had driven us to it, actually. Somehow it did sum up how special we thought the music was.’
So they were particularly pleased that it was this disc that won them the Gramophone’s Chamber Award in 2001. They played a movement at the London awards ceremony, and during that evening a well-known conductor came up to them and criticised them for recording for Naxos. The prejudice against the company was still there, fourteen years later. ‘He said he understood that we had to get recordings where we could but accused us of “sleeping with the enemy!”’ The Vaughan Williams CD became the Quartet’s bestseller: 20,000 CDs were sold within a year of winning the award and some 45,000 CDs have been sold to date, which is an exceptional figure for relatively specialised repertoire.
The next year saw the beginning of the project with which the Maggini Quartet will be forever linked: the Naxos Quartets, the ten works written especially for the group by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music. This remarkable commitment by composer, performers and record label to a startling musical venture was unprecedented in classical music. Angel says: ‘Max had been wanting to write a series of ten quartets – he felt it was the time – but he wanted to find something on which to hook it. He had had a long relationship with the Belcea Quartet and initially spoke to them, but they turned it down, probably realising the immense commitment it was going to require.
‘Then Klaus Heymann became involved and Naxos approached us. We were the Quartet that recorded English music; we were the natural people to do it. We knew at the beginning what a daunting project it was and we thought long and hard about it, but in the end we couldn’t turn it down. It was too exciting and unprecedented – to have an actual contractual agreement with an outstanding composer like Maxwell Davies for ten quartets over five years. It meant working with him intensively for five years, and when I look back on it I think it was one of the most important things musically I have ever done. It turned out to be absolutely extraordinary. All I can say is, “Thank God we got on!” I remember Max saying at the start that he didn’t know us, we didn’t know him, and we had no idea what was going to happen. What put our minds at rest was that the very first time we played to him, a week before the premiere of the First Quartet, we discovered that he was essentially musical! It wasn’t maths. Even though he is a maths wizard he uses that purely as a tool to help him compose. He can dance every rhythm he writes; he can feel it bodily.
‘He rehearsed us much as if it were a Haydn quartet (Haydn was the starting point for him anyway) so we got off on just the right foot for the first work. Then it was a road the five of us travelled together, really, him finding out more and more about how to write quartets and us finding out more and more about how to play them! They were playable but sometimes they were fiendish. It wasn’t that they got more difficult as the series progressed but we felt his writing
got clearer and clearer. There were always remarkable sounds right from Quartet No. 1, but I don’t think he ever went back to the dense writing in No. 2, gigantic and impressive though that Quartet is. If anything, he got more and more transparent. On the other hand, I am not sure whether he would agree with me. When we got to the Fourth Quartet, and mentioned this, he said: “But it is merely that you are becoming used to my sense of tonality, and if you went back to the other three now you would play them differently.” (I reminded him of that when we were preparing the Seventh Quartet and he said: “Did I really say that? What a cheek!”)’ As always, the Quartet toured the works before recording them. The poet laureate Andrew Motion even wrote a set of sonnets for himself to read in concert in between the movements of Quartet No. 7.
While these ten quartets were making their mark on English musical history they still had to take their place in the Maggini’s overall Naxos recording programme. During each of the five years that the players spent recording the Naxos Quartets they always made at least one other CD, and often more. There was music by Alwyn, Arnold, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Rawsthorne and Lennox Berkeley. In a way, however, the end of the Naxos Quartets project presaged the end of an era for the Maggini Quartet. Laurence Jackson, the first violinist, had left and they were joined by different leaders for short periods before settling with Susanne Stanzeleit. Music by Edmund Rubbra was followed by the quartets of Ronald Corp, both discs released in 2011. It was then that the Maggini Quartet and Naxos decided to part company. The Quartet wanted to record works outside the English repertoire, to reflect the broad interests of the musicians themselves, and Naxos had other groups to do this. It was an amicable separation because both recognised that something exceptional had been achieved by the partnership over fifteen busy years.
Patrick Gallois – Flute and Conductor
Patrick Gallois is almost unique among Naxos artists in featuring equally as a solo instrumentalist and a conductor. His recordings of the main flute repertoire bear the distinctive quality of his special instrument: a wooden flute made to his own specifications, with square holes and square keys. His recordings of orchestral works, from Haydn to Gershwin, bear a particular hallmark of vivacity, for above all Gallois enjoys the process of making music. He is not a conductor who operates like an efficient managing director in the recording studio: he insists on working with his orchestra for as long as it takes. The fact that he has managed to achieve that in the context of Naxos, where budgetary concerns are a major consideration, is a tribute both to his own commitment and ingenuity, and to Klaus Heymann’s ability to accommodate different kinds of talents. Selecting a Finnish chamber orchestra conducted by a French flautist to record music as disparate as early Haydn symphonies, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and music for clarinet and strings by George Gershwin is not an obvious strategy; but the musical results have justified the decision.
Gallois began his recording career at the traditional top, with Deutsche Grammophon. The prestige reflected his exceptional qualities as a flautist but he was unhappy in the environment. ‘I went to London and recorded the Rodrigo Concerto in one session and the Khachaturian in another. I can do it but I asked myself, where is the music?’ So after making around ten recordings with the Yellow Label, he stopped. ‘They wanted me to record Mozart with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. They are good musicians, but that is not my style.’ The recording was never released, and Gallois switched to Naxos. ‘The DG way of making recordings is fantastic if you want to make a career but I wanted to be a musician. I tried to find a company who would do the things I wanted to do, not Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto or Franck’s Sonata on the flute, which is terrible. The flute does have a lot of music but people don’t know it.’ He also wanted to do more conducting, especially of orchestras with whom he had a close association. For almost a decade his relationship with the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä has formed a central part of his work: he lives in Finland for much of the year.
His first disc for Naxos was Mozart’s concertos for flute, including the Flute and Harp Concerto, with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the harpist Fabrice Pierre, released in 2003. Typically Gallois wrote his own cadenzas, stamping his personality even more distinctly on the recording. Other flute recordings appeared over the following decade, including the Flute Concerto by Friedrich Witt (in a programme with two Witt symphonies); the Concerto for two flutes written specially for Gallois by the contemporary Bulgarian composer Emil Tabakov (and recorded with Philippe Bernold); Reinecke’s Flute Concerto; the complete flute concertos by C.P.E. Bach; and music for two flutes and orchestra by Franz and Karl Doppler (recorded with Kazunori Seo).
All the recordings he made for DG were on a gold flute. Underlining the change that took place, on all the recordings made for Naxos Gallois used the wooden flute of his own devising, even for twentieth-century works. ‘I didn’t want to play on a period flute with a period orchestra. I did that many years ago. But you have to know what is your specific voice, and my voice is very specific. My instrument, the wooden flute with square keys and square holes, is unique. You must be like a singer with your own voice; you must be able to do everything. I was frustrated with the traverso because in the end I was making the same sound. That is not the sound of me but the sound of the instrument.’ He points out that Reinecke’s music was written for a player who used a wooden instrument, though an unusual one with twenty keys. ‘I played it and it is interesting but it is very hard.’ While Gallois acknowledges that authenticity in the choice of instruments does have a place, he believes it can be overstated. ‘The Romantic instrument has eleven keys and there are three or four different fingerings for every note … some Baroque flutes have one key, others five keys. You cannot be a specialist in all these flutes. It is better to be a specialist in the music.’ So he uses his special flute for composers ranging from Einojuhani Rautavaara to François Devienne to Saverio Mercadante, whose chamber arrangements feature on one of his most recent recordings.
‘Making music’ is a constant statement and a constant theme for Gallois. His special relationship with the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä, a salaried orchestra, enables him to schedule a week’s rehearsal for one Naxos disc – a highly unusual circumstance. ‘It is a luxury! I can make mistakes with my orchestra. We can try things out, we can even record, and, when I sleep on it and feel it didn’t really work, we can record again!’
It started simply. ‘I went to Klaus and asked him if I could record as a conductor. He trusted me and he said yes. It was very easy. The main problem with conductors is that they conduct. It is quite easy to get an orchestra to play together and play in tune. The main difficulty is having a musical direction, to know where you are going. A conductor should be an artistic director, a guy who says we go in this style or that style, to the left or to the right, but we go somewhere!’
This was particularly the case with the early Haydn symphonies that Gallois recorded in the Suolahti Hall. ‘These symphonies are another world. They are not Baroque music; they come from C.P.E. Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and you cannot simply perform them the way they are written. It would be boring. You have to look for the music. I took a position, using so much harpsichord in improvisation, moving around the harmony, making the joke. I am 200 per cent sure that this is what would have happened. Generally, musicians never really work on early Haydn, in much the same way as Vivaldi. They just play it. But you have to use more imagination with this kind of music; you have to have more rehearsal to really make music out of it. With Mozart there is less space for creativity, there is less room for interpretation: it is just perfect. There is more room with Haydn. It is the same with Ravel next to Debussy: Ravel and Mozart, Debussy and Haydn.
‘With my recordings for Naxos I feel I am free as a musician. I have been with the Sinfonia Finlandia for nine years and the style and the sound is really quite specific. The orchestra gets better and better. You cannot work this way in London – the musicians are just too busy.’
Since they are based in Finland, it is natural that Gallois and the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä have made many recordings also for the Finnish label Ondine, which is now owned by Naxos. They continue to record for Ondine but Gallois is equally busy with Naxos itself. His recent flute recordings include music by Ignaz Pleyel; recent orchestral recordings include American Classical music ‘that not even the Americans know’, as well as overtures and ballet music by Joseph Martin Kraus; and at the time of speaking he was scheduling overtures by Cimarosa with the Sinfonia Finlandia. ‘I will cook spaghetti for the orchestra that week …’
Norbert Kraft – Guitar and the ‘Guitar Collection’
‘The guitar is a bit of an odd duck in the classical world,’ declares Norbert Kraft, the Canadian guitarist. Nevertheless Klaus Heymann was keen to accommodate it, and started the ‘Guitar Collection’ with Kraft in 1994; it now has the largest catalogue of classical guitar recordings of any single label in the world. Furthermore, Heymann recounts that virtually every CD in the series has moved into profit, or at least broken even, which is a testament to its reach within the international guitar community.
Norbert Kraft, the Toronto-based virtuoso and teacher, had been making recordings for an English company but the relationship had become increasingly fractious. It was SRI, the Naxos distributor in Canada at the time, who suggested Kraft look at this emerging label. ‘At the start I was sceptical because a “budget” label meant cheap product to me at the time,’ recalls Kraft. ‘But the distributor told me that Naxos would be the only company standing in a few years’ time so I thought I should investigate!’ Heymann heard Kraft’s existing CDs, approved, and asked him what he would like to record. Kraft put together a list of thirty CDs, expecting a small selection to be made, and was taken aback when he was told that he could do the lot – but in a year!
The Story of Naxos Page 17