The commitment shown by Alsop (and by Heymann) has paid off: since she took up the baton in Baltimore a stream of important discs have emerged, including the Dvoák symphony cycle recorded live in the hall that the orchestra knows so well. ‘Dvoák, for me, is like an extension of Brahms. I admire those same qualities in Dvoák that Brahms himself admired: incredible melodic inventiveness, long lines, unexpected variety. I also like the fact that Dvoák was the underdog, being Czech and remaining true to his inner self, promoting his heritage and standing up for his country. I have tried to bring a balance of beauty and authenticity to the performances. I love the primal underpinnings in Dvoák’s music and have tried to blend that deeply human quality with the sophistication of the mature Dvoák.’
Having started performing Bartók in Bournemouth (an unlikely conjunction that nevertheless produced some spectacular results in concert and on CD), she continued in Baltimore with the Concerto for Orchestra and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. She has also brought to Naxos one of the most exciting operas of recent years: John Adams’s Nixon in China, again a live recording taken from several performances. ‘That was insane! It is insane to do live an opera as complex as Nixon in China and I must give unbelievable praise to the producer, Tim Handley … that was really a tour de force!’ A Prokofiev cycle, comprising concert and studio recordings from São Paulo, is among other forthcoming projects. ‘It is hard to compare studio and live recordings. I think that the studio setting gets you a better recording technically but there is something about the live recording, with the audience there, that captures the flow and the living-in-the-moment. So I like parts of both. Perhaps my ideal is to have the live recording with a patch session just to pick up small slips.’
Alsop sees through the whole process of the recording. After some fifteen years she feels much at home with it. She listens carefully to the first edit. ‘I listen on headphones – sometimes on my computer, though that is a terrible thing to admit!’ She makes her comments and then listens subsequently to the final master. She is familiar with other areas of Naxos. ‘I often use the Naxos Music Library as a resource: it is one of my key tools when I am programming. I also find out what Naxos has already got, which helps me when I propose new recordings!’
Marin Alsop and Klaus Heymann communicate regularly. ‘We enjoy talking about music – and business. I like him and respect him a lot. There is no hierarchy in Naxos, there is no wheeling or dealing. I get paid just the same as some kid on the street. People could say that this is a cheap way to treat artists but I think it is a very honest way. Recordings are not about making money any more: they are about promoting your career and your orchestras and getting your ideas out there, and Klaus is the best partner I could hope for in doing that.
‘I do have a non-exclusive contract with Naxos, even though I treat it like an exclusive contract. If I am going to record for another label I always ask Klaus and discuss it with him. My view is that I want to offer every project to Klaus first. When he is not interested in it, he is perfectly happy to have me do it somewhere else. It is very simple: I value being with Naxos. I am also thrilled to be embarking on an educational series. I feel that Naxos has done more to connect the public with classical music than almost any other entity. To be able to reach out to young people is a passion of mine and this opportunity brings together all of my interests: love of music, desire to demystify classical music, communication with audiences, offering possibilities to young people, and igniting their imaginations.’
Antoni Wit
The distinguished Polish conductor Antoni Wit has been recording for Naxos across almost two decades and now features on some 100 CDs that have collectively sold more than three million units (and that is not counting download sales). It is an achievement that, before 1990, he never would have thought possible. He was then the managing and artistic director of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice and had heard along the musical grapevine that a strange company was making a lot of CDs with orchestras in Slovakia. Then he heard that the label Marco Polo was doing some Szymanowski with another orchestra based in Katowice that he knew was not of the standard of the PNRSO. Contact was made, and within months Heymann asked Peter Breiner to travel to Katowice and record some of his arrangements with the PNRSO; the result showed the standard of the orchestra.
Wit takes up the story. ‘We now had a chance to get in touch directly with Mr Heymann, and I said that we had an interesting Prokofiev project coming up for the centenary of the composer’s birth, giving concerts with the five piano concertos played by the Korean pianist Kun Woo Paik. Klaus suggested that we record the concertos for Naxos. We made two discs and they won the Diapason d’Or and the Grand Prix de la Nouvelle Académie du Disque in France. We could not have wished for a better start, and after that the collaboration became more and more successful.’
Heymann had been looking for a top-class orchestra to take on some of the big Romantic repertoire, and now he entrusted much of it to the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra: all the symphonies by Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Schumann, and many more. Most were conducted by Wit, though he shared the Tchaikovsky cycle with Adrian Leaper and the Mahler with Michael Halász. The stream of offers continued – and for a wide variety of music. There was core repertoire, with Wit and the PNRSO providing sensitive accompaniment on concerto discs: piano concertos by Brahms, Dvoák, Rachmaninov (twice – first with Bernd Glemser, then with Idil Biret) and Ravel; and violin concertos that included both of Bartók’s (with György Pauk). There was also Smetana’s Má vlast. ‘It was one of our early recordings, and I didn’t feel at the time that it was very special. But it sold 150,000 CDs, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice was on the world musical map.’ Wit and the PNRSO also recorded Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony coupled with L’Ascension, which won a Cannes Classical Award at MIDEM Classique, 2002.
Wit remained at the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra until 2000, and in the preceding decade he began to record Polish music extensively for Naxos. ‘The year Witold Lutoslawski died [1994] Mr Heymann had the idea to record all the music that Lutoslawski wrote for orchestra. I was particularly happy to do this.’ The recording of the Piano Concerto remains unforgettable for Wit. It had to be recorded twice: the first pianist was replaced by Piotr Paleczny in order to achieve a more satisfactory result – a rare event in Naxos’s history. (The problems did not end there: the disc appeared with Paleczny’s name correctly displayed but with a photo of the first pianist, which raised a few eyebrows, not least because the gender was wrong!)
Wit brings a special authority to his Naxos recordings due to his close personal associations with principal Polish composers of the second half of the twentieth century. He studied composition with Krzysztof Penderecki at the Academy of Music in Krakow and was keen to record Penderecki’s main orchestral works, including the symphonies and the violin concertos. ‘Penderecki changed so completely his way of writing music. What he was writing forty years ago is so different from what he is doing now. It is true of all the Polish composers, but with Penderecki you can see the greatest change.’ Wit particularly appreciated Penderecki’s presence at the sessions. ‘Penderecki would always come to the recordings when he could. It was very stimulating for the orchestra, and interesting for me to discuss the music with the composer himself. I have also had the pleasure of conducting the music of Lutosławski and Messiaen with the composers present. They are all so different! Penderecki can write a metronome marking of 90 and he conducts at 60. When I asked him why he doesn’t amend the score and do metronome 60, he said that maybe someone in the future will do metronome 90.’
Lutosławski was a total contrast. ‘I worked with him in concerts and recordings for Polish Radio and Polskie Nagrania. One year before his death he wrote his Fourth Symphony for a premiere in Los Angeles but asked if he could come one month earlier to do a recording of the work, which would be held in abeyance until after the first perfo
rmance. I was pleased to assist him on his symphony and work with him closely. He was very deep in his thought, and in everything he wrote. He never wrote anything casual. If you take the score of No. 4 you will see at the beginning the metronome marking crotchet 55. This is unusual for a metronome marking because you have 54 or 56, not 55. Maybe you will not believe me, but I have a recording of Lutosławski himself doing No. 4 and the metronome is exactly 55.’
Wit had a similar experience with Messiaen. ‘We recorded the Turangalîla Symphony in Katowice in the 1990s, after Messiaen’s death. But I prepared St Francis in Katowice with him some years earlier: he came and attended five rehearsals. To satisfy him meant that you had to know really well what is in the score, but also you had to develop things in the score.’ Not surprisingly Wit took the Naxos recording of the Turangalîla Symphony very seriously. The two-CD set was recorded in 1998 in Katowice’s Grzegorz Fitelberg Concert Hall, in two blocks of four-day sessions – an unusual undertaking for a budget label.
When Wit took up the post of managing and artistic director at the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in 2002, the Naxos commitment moved with him. It was business as usual. The Penderecki programme expanded to include the St Luke Passion, Seven Gates of Jerusalem and Utrenja, important choral works which had made an impact worldwide. Wit also undertook a Szymanowski series, encompassing symphonies, choral works and both violin concertos. And for the 150th anniversary of Chopin’s death, Wit conducted new recordings of the piano concertos with the Uzbek pianist Eldar Nebolsin.
Circumstances had changed, however. Wit points out that while Poland had been under a communist regime, and there had been a black market, the Naxos fee had been extremely attractive to musicians. ‘The Naxos fee was worth five times more!’ The development of democracy put paid to that advantage and if the Warsaw Philharmonic does a recording it has to be subsidised slightly by the orchestra itself. ‘But it is important to promote Polish music abroad.’
In 2005 Heymann asked Wit to travel to Weimar and record An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss with the Staatskapelle Weimar. ‘It was one of the first CDs they had ever made, I think, so it was something special for them. They were very keen and passionate and they love this music without anyone having to explain that it is beautiful.’ He went on to record more Strauss there: Metamorphosen and Symphonia domestica.
Antoni Wit is a conductor very much in the central European style. He speaks Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian and English; he is comfortable conducting around the world and enjoys seeing his Naxos recordings wherever he goes. ‘I am sometimes asked by other companies to do a concerto disc but mostly I am happy with Naxos. I did two discs of Szymanowski for EMI but I never see these discs. But when I go to Australia or São Paulo or even to a small city in Spain or elsewhere and I go to a shop, I see many of my Naxos CDs. This is very important to me.’ His work for Naxos continues. He still looks forward to the release of his recordings and is clearly not jaded by the number he has done. He feels that his recent recording of Penderecki’s Credo is special, though he knows it will never compete with his top-selling disc: Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, which has sold nearly 250,000 CDs. Among other recent recordings are two CDs of music by Janáek, choral works by Brahms, and two CDs of the Polish composer Mieczysław Karłowicz, who died at the age of thirty-three in 1909. He has enjoyed working with many of Naxos’s soloists, including the pianists Idil Biret and Jen Jandó. ‘All the soloists Klaus has suggested have been very good.’
Despite more than two decades of collaboration, Wit and Heymann have met only twice: once when Wit was on tour in the Far East and Heymann went to see him in Taiwan, and once when Heymann invited the PNRSO to Hong Kong for a week’s music festival. Other than regular phone and email contact – and Wit is another who marvels at Heymann’s rapid response – they have not met for fifteen years.
Dmitry Yablonsky
Dmitry Yablonsky is unequivocal. ‘I owe my conducting career to Klaus Heymann and Naxos,’ he declares. Given that he has conducted on more than sixty CDs for Naxos, covering a very wide range of music, it is almost too easy to overlook the fact that he began his concert career as a highly gifted cellist. Only recently he recorded for Naxos Popper’s High School of Cello Playing, a collection of forty studies which, without question, are among some of the most difficult and demanding pieces in the instrument’s repertoire. Just how he came to record them, when most of his time is now taken up by conducting rather than playing, is typical of a musician who combines bravura and talent with a touch of adventure.
‘I suggested it to Klaus because so many of my friends were saying that I was no longer a cellist, just a conductor. But to be honest, if Klaus had said no, I wouldn’t have learned them. They are incredibly difficult. I have recorded them all but I still don’t have them under my fingers. Ask any cellist and they will say that these studies are impossible to play. I recorded five at a time, eight sessions in all. I can’t tell you how difficult it was. Sometimes I was shaking as I went into the studio because I didn’t know what to expect. It is like Schubert’s Arpeggione: if you are not on the money, you just fall apart.’
With Maria Kliegel having been given the lion’s share of the cello repertoire, recording opportunities on Naxos for a player of Yablonsky’s accomplishment were inevitably going to be limited; he has, however, recorded Khachaturian’s Cello Concerto and Concerto-Rhapsody, Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata and other chamber music – and, of course, Popper’s High School, which for cellists comes first! ‘Klaus is a very straightforward man. He gives me compliments as a cellist but says, “You don’t have a career as a cellist, but as a conductor.” And in a way that is true. If I play fifteen recitals a year, that is fine – there are certain people who don’t want to do 100 Dvoák concertos every year.’
Yablonsky established himself as a cellist first and foremost, both as a gifted child in the Soviet Union, and from 1977 when he emigrated to the US with his mother, the pianist Oxana Yablonskaya. He went to The Juilliard School, studying with Zara Nelsova, but he always maintained his interest in conducting. It was actually through his mother that he made his first contact with Heymann and Naxos, via the intermediaries Victor and Marina Ledin, San Francisco-based producers and advisors to Naxos. (Yablonskaya herself went on to record concertos by Glazunov and Khachaturian, and several albums of the Naxos Liszt edition.)
In the early 1990s Heymann had extensive plans to record Russian, Scandinavian and Baltic music, particularly for Marco Polo. These included works by two Latvian composers: symphonies by Janis Ivanovs and orchestral works by Jāzeps Vītols. Having learned that Yablonsky had an association with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra in Riga, he offered him both projects. On paper it was a perfect match and so it proved in the studio. A selection of orchestral works by Vītols was recorded in the Great Concert Hall of the Riga Recording Studio in August 1994 and the first of the Ivanovs symphony programme six months later. On hearing the results, Heymann offered Yablonsky an ambitious list of around sixty discs. ‘He is a great cellist, a musical conductor and a good businessman,’ Heymann comments. He went on to entrust Yablonsky with some key recordings for Naxos, including violin concertos by Tchaikovsky and Bruch, and piano concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.
Yablonsky’s particular contribution to Naxos and Marco Polo has been his ability to take on little-known repertoire and give a strong, distinctive performance. In fact musical politics intervened right at the start of the Marco Polo programme, when another conductor attempted to take over the Naxos offer with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. Heymann demonstrated his commitment to Yablonsky by helping to engineer a switch to Russian orchestras, including the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra. Only then did the stream of recordings get underway, rising to as many as fifteen in a year. There was music by Amirov, Arensky, Balakirev, Glazunov, Kabalevsky, Karayev, Lyapunov, Myaskovsky and Tishchenko; and, later, Japanese composers, including Ifukube and Oh
zawa. Interspersed was more central repertoire: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 ‘Leningrad’, his film score for Hamlet, and the Jazz Suites. A particular commercial success was Tchaikovsky’s complete music for Swan Lake.
‘It was really challenging to record all those CDs of unknown repertoire. You jump into the studio and do something you have never done before. I was a relatively inexperienced conductor and your brain has to work at 250 miles an hour. Everything was learned from scratch, and there were many occasions when I was working from a score written by hand. I think I am quite quick at learning scores, but until you actually hear it played by the orchestra it is quite difficult to know what it is really like. And problems arise: wrong notes, wrong rhythms … so sometimes we lost a lot of time in the studio because of mistakes by copyists. Sometimes I tried to arrange concerts beforehand, so we could get to know the works (I was guest conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic from 2000), but if it is an unpopular work the orchestras don’t want to programme it.
‘Some of the music was very difficult to source. Take for example Arensky’s Egyptian Nights, the music for a ballet by Fokine for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. I found out that there was a handwritten score by somebody in St Petersburg. I called the Mariinsky Theatre and the Kirov Theatre, and they wanted $10,000 for the score. So I used my channels, and I got it for $1,000. We have libraries and librarians!’
Yablonsky certainly champions some of the works he has recorded for Naxos. ‘Glazunov’s piano concertos should be in the repertoire, not only Rachmaninov’s concertos! Richter used to play Rimsky-Korsakov’s Piano Concerto and that should really be heard in the concert hall more often – as you can hear if you listen to our Naxos recording with the wonderful Chinese pianist Hsin-Ni Liu – though I suppose it needs a famous person to bring it back into popularity. And Lyapunov’s Violin Concerto is a gem.’
The Story of Naxos Page 20