One of the most public illustrations of Peter Breiner’s work for Naxos involved his arrangements and performances of the national anthems and the scandal over the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In the years leading to the Games, Heymann approached the Beijing Organizing Committee on many occasions, trying to ensure that Marco Polo’s national anthems were used (it would be particularly satisfying for a company based in Hong Kong). Surprisingly the authorities declined, deciding to give the commission for preparing the set of anthems to the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. Disappointed though he was, Heymann suspected that it would be an almost insuperable task.
After the very first medal ceremonies, questions began to be raised in the close-knit world of national-anthem specialists about the provenance of the music. Some of the arrangements sounded familiar – too familiar. Suspicions were aroused, then alarm bells began to ring. Some of these anthems sounded very like Peter Breiner’s arrangements – published by Naxos and in copyright – though they were clearly played by an orchestra inferior to the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. It transpired that some of the Marco Polo anthems had been ‘borrowed’ in one way or another, as The Washington Post reported. There were 204 participating countries and fifty-four of them won gold medals: fifty-four national anthems were played at the venues from the complete set provided by the Beijing Symphony Orchestra.
At first, the Beijing Organizing Committee denied that some of these were Breiner’s arrangements. It had commissioned the Beijing Symphony Orchestra to record them, and in an interview in the Beijing Chronicle Mr Tan Lihua, music director of the BSO, said that it had been difficult to source the 212 anthems originally needed (though only 204 countries eventually took part). Apparently some scores came from the International Olympic Committee and others came from a variety of other sources ‘including transcriptions from audio material’. This suggested quite openly that somebody had listened to the CDs and copied the arrangements, which were then played by the BSO.
Getting reparation for copyright infringement was not an easy task in China, even though the country was trying to clean up its reputation for music piracy. Doggedly Heymann pursued the issue, eventually approaching the International Olympic Committee. In the end, it was determined that some 100 Marco Polo recordings had been used in the Chinese set of anthems supplied to the Beijing Organizing Committee – some as sources for re-recording. A settlement was negotiated. ‘It is very likely that the BOC had no idea that the orchestra copied our orchestrations,’ concludes Heymann.
Twelve
Naxos and Its Labels
The simple line is this: Naxos is the world’s leading classical music label. Actually it is far more than that, and there is no better illustration than the catalogue itself. It has 200 dense pages in small type; by a miracle of concision the Contents section is contained on one page. However, it does not encompass all the things that fall under ‘Naxos’. The website, www.naxos.com, gets closer but even that is not all-inclusive. The problem is the sheer amount of material: thousands of recordings – some straining the ‘classical music’ description and others, frankly, venturing way past it, however you define ‘classical’.
In truth it is the life’s work of one enthusiast who, over the years, has been happy to stray into other territories, maintaining only a tenuous link with the world of Mozart and Beethoven. In the past twenty-five years he has created sub-labels to realise his own ideas; formed new labels with some of the enterprising people whom he has met (sometimes using the name Naxos, but not always); and taken over other labels, occasionally letting them keep their names but often absorbing them into the mother ship. At various times he has gone outside the central classical recording territory into publishing (text, music and audiobooks) with an eye to education, or diversification, or complementing his business, or simply because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Here is a survey of the main parts of Naxos.
The Naxos Catalogue
In just a quarter of a century Naxos has created a catalogue comprising the largest number of individual works and the widest available repertoire of any classical label since the beginning of the recording era. It is a remarkable achievement, all the more so because it happened at a time when the record industry was at its most unstable and going through a period of dramatic change that brought many established labels to their knees. Some 7,000 titles have come onto the Naxos label. By far the majority of these have been recorded by, or for, Naxos itself. Some were originally recorded for Marco Polo and eventually transferred to Naxos, and a few were bought in from other labels. But Naxos as a large classical catalogue is the creation purely of Klaus Heymann: most of the recordings were set in motion by him, and certainly every single one of those recordings has been finally approved by him.
As with Marco Polo before Naxos, Heymann established a long list of works that had to be recorded – music that would form the centre of any record label. At the end of each of those early Naxos years the list became longer, not shorter, because the continuing success enabled Heymann to think more ambitiously. He readily acknowledges the suggestions and advice that came from members of his growing organisation across the world. In England David Denton set the English repertoire and recording schedule rolling, and this was continued and expanded by Anthony Anderson at the Naxos UK company, Select Music; in Scandinavia Håkan Lagerqvist, running Naxos Sweden, made a major contribution by recording Scandinavian music as well as launching some hugely successful television campaigns that promoted the label; in the US, Victor and Marina Ledin and then a committee of scholars helped to build ‘American Classics’; in Hong Kong, A&R Director Edith Lei put together the complete Liszt and Scarlatti piano projects and the ‘Laureate Series’. Many Naxos musicians – conductors and instrumentalists – have suggested a lot of repertoire over the years, and there have also been several individual enthusiasts who have plied Heymann with ideas. So while the detailed content of the Naxos catalogue was not entirely down to Heymann, the core, the architecture and the final choice certainly were.
Building the catalogue has been a most extraordinary journey, from producing a tight group of thirty popular classics at budget price to offering a range of repertoire that is unmatched by any other single label. Getting to that position has not been free of challenges and problems. Naxos certainly had its opponents, from both without and even within: several existing labels publicly denigrated the recordings and used their influence to try (unsuccessfully) to halt Naxos in its tracks; some people within the company itself questioned the wisdom of broadening out into more specialist areas, be it the piano sonatas of Boulez or obscure American symphonic music. Many within and without wondered, and still wonder: where has the character of Naxos, once so tightly defined, gone? Yet none can deny the success of the label, or the fact that no one has picked up the beacon of classical recording and run with it so boldly and so far.
The statistics are stupendous. All the 7,000 music recordings on the various Naxos labels (and for Naxos AudioBooks the total exceeds 700) are available digitally, with the vast majority also available on CD. On the Naxos main label alone there are approaching 5,000 titles, most having been specially recorded and relatively few having been bought in. This amounts to a steady average of 200 releases per year, a schedule that no other classical label, certainly of today, can get anywhere near. These include not only single CDs but many multi-CD sets (such as a two-CD set of Bach’s Cello Suites or a four-CD opera set) and boxed sets (either popular compilations or specialist sets such as The Complete Haydn Symphonies).
It is not just the numbers: the range and variety are simply breathtaking and entailed relatively early on the creation of sections and series within the catalogue. However, the central classics – those works which any music lover building a collection would want to have – remain at the core of the label. These form the spine of Naxos.
The 2011 paper catalogue, an impressive document through which to browse, runs to 226 pages. It is a serious catalogue for the collecto
r: the careful attention paid to detail takes it far past the budget-label tag. Recordings singled out for special praise by critics across the world are marked by different symbols (for a GRAMMY in the US, a Diapason d’Or in France, a Gramophone ‘Record of the Month’, a starred review in The Penguin Guide, and so on) and it is salutary to note how often these appear.
The Central Classics
From the label’s early days the intention was to provide just one recording of each major classical work, in order to create a basic library. Heymann still likes to follow this policy, even with a wider repertoire (and great historical recordings are not regarded as directly competitive or comparable!), but as time passed and opportunities presented themselves it became clear that to stick to it rigidly would be perverse. Some of the early recordings were adequate but could be bettered. Sometimes a proposal landed on Heymann’s desk which it would have been unwise to ignore. Occasionally there was a clear marketing reason – a new young player with something particular to contribute, perhaps. Nevertheless, every new proposal for a recording that would duplicate what is already in the catalogue is seriously questioned, and the vast majority of works – even popular ones such as Mozart’s piano concertos – are still represented by the original recordings (and in the case of Mozart those are Jen Jandó’s sparkling performances, which remain a joy to listen to). The set of Beethoven’s piano concertos recorded in the 1980s by Stefan Vladar, with the Capella Istropolitana conducted by Barry Wordsworth, also remains the only one in the catalogue. By contrast, the recording of the symphonies played by the Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia under Béla Drahos, made in the 1990s, replaced an earlier set (and now there is yet another, with the Cologne Chamber Orchestra under Müller-Brühl); and Heymann deemed that the early recording of the cello sonatas played by the Hungarian musicians Csaba Onczay and Jen Jandó was worth keeping, though Maria Kliegel went on a decade later to record all of Beethoven’s music for cello.
In Naxos’s first decade Heymann often tended to entrust a composer’s output in a particular genre to one musician or group of musicians. This was partly due to practicality, as there was so much to do in so little time; but the relatively few re-recordings to date make it clear how astute the choice often was. The Kodály Quartet’s recordings of the complete Haydn string quartets will remain industry contenders for years to come when recordings are compared, as will Jandó’s performances of the piano sonatas by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. Haydn’s symphonies were recorded over a longer period and are shared between a number of orchestras, but they are not duplicated.
There are, perhaps unexpectedly, two sets of Brahms’s symphonies: the early set with the BRT Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Alexander Rahbari and the later recordings with Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which attracted a lot of critical praise and attention. There are also two recordings of Brahms’s Violin Concerto: the early one played by Takako Nishizaki, coupled with Bruch’s Concerto No. 1, and Ilya Kaler’s recording coupled with Schumann’s Concerto.
Central to the development of Naxos is of course the playing of Nishizaki, and all her recordings of the main concertos are available. Her very first recording for Naxos, in July 1987, of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons coupled with Concerto alla rustica retains its place in the current catalogue. It was not until 2006 that another recording of this most popular of classical works came into the catalogue: Cho-Liang Lin plays with Sejong, a virtuoso group of young musicians directed by Anthony Newman. The performance displays a more Baroque style but is still outsold year on year by its predecessor.
Heymann made a declared commitment to Georg Tintner for Bruckner’s symphonies, which resulted in a cohesive set, even though it was shared between the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The Viennese conductor, who died in 1999, also recorded selected symphonies and orchestral works by Mozart, Schubert, Richard Strauss and others: his work has been collected into a ‘Tintner Memorial Edition’ series, which represents a unique accolade for an artist on Naxos.
Lieder – especially that of Schubert, and more latterly Schumann – has also been fostered with particular care by Heymann. Sensitive to lieder recordings made by non-native German singers, who are less equipped to convey a meaningful interpretation of the text, he entrusted the Deutsche Schubert Lied-Edition to the pianist Ulrich Eisenlohr, who selected German-speaking performers. Released in individual volumes between 1999 and 2010, the Edition features no fewer than thirty-nine singers, five pianists and six instrumentalists; with around 650 songs plus many in alternative settings or versions, it is the most comprehensive edition available. It was released as a boxed set in 2011.
It was not long after the start of Naxos that its catalogue extended beyond the brazenly popular. The bestselling works by the likes of Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Schumann, Grieg, Dvoák, Liszt and Rachmaninov came first, of course, followed by Mahler and Elgar; but Handel, Byrd and Tallis were also present. Within the first few years, chamber works such as the violin sonatas by Grieg showed that Heymann had his sights on a more broad-based classical label.
There was a form of master plan at the start, emanating from Hong Kong and covering core works; but in the early 1990s the repertoire being recorded had become subject to many other influences (suggestions from musicians, requests from distributors, demands from the market), some of which were totally unexpected. It was a music lover at the helm, not just a businessman. So there developed, almost undetectably, a bolder recording policy that took Naxos into the arena of the classical collector: chamber music, instrumental music, choral music. Even its early forays into contemporary music unexpectedly reaped both musical and commercial rewards. Another label’s full-price recording of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 achieved popularity and hit the charts: would there be room for a budget version? The performance by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under Antoni Wit, recorded for Naxos in 1994, reflected more closely the voice of the composer’s homeland than did the original Nonesuch version that had created a stir. It was widely praised and sold more than 250,000 copies. The same forces went on to record Symphony No. 2.
The film The Piano was a commercial success helped by Michael Nyman’s soundtrack. Why not record the Piano Concerto that Nyman had formed from the film score and release the first budget version? It sold over 60,000 copies. Neither Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa nor John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil needed film support: they reached similar sales figures on their own merits. The Naxos pattern, which showed that people were prepared to try new music at a budget price, was continuing. These recordings may have appeared opportunist moves at the time because they followed successes achieved by the majors and the independents, but they were more than that: as good recordings at an affordable price, they helped to show that Naxos was fast becoming a serious classical label. This battle has now been won, but it had to be fought. An even more astounding success, given the nature of the music, was Idil Biret’s recording of Boulez’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 1–3; released as early as 1995, it has sold more than 40,000 copies. This was not repertoire that Heymann had ever expected to include on one of his labels. It just seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.
By the middle of the 1990s Naxos had clearly broken away from its initial purpose of providing affordable popular classics. It was spreading in all directions. There were many ‘complete’ series underway: Liszt’s piano works, Reger’s organ works, Glazunov’s orchestral works (which had started on Marco Polo and shifted to Naxos), Rodrigo’s orchestral works (ten volumes), Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas, Soler’s harpsichord sonatas and Shostakovich’s symphonies (originally recorded by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under Ladislav Slovak but now being recorded again in an award-winning manner by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Vasily Petrenko; both cycles are available). Heymann’s pronouncements on the direction of the catalogue had to be constantly revised. What was the goal of Naxo
s? ‘To record everything,’ he said at one point.
One way of conveying the breadth of music covered by Naxos is to outline a page or two of the printed catalogue. Here, taken more or less at random, is the ‘H’ listing. On one double-page spread we get:
Haydn, Franz Joseph The end of the final column of his works, headed ‘Vocal and Choral’, including the oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia; and, from Naxos Educational, The Life and Works of Haydn written and narrated by Jeremy Siepmann.
Haydn, Michael A Divertimento (coupled with oboe quartets by Stamitz).
He, Zhanhao The Butterfly Lovers (Takako Nishizaki’s recording that has sold millions in China).
Headley, Hubert Klyne A twentieth-century American composer represented here by his Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, Symphony No. 1 and California Suite.
Heggie, Jake For a Look or a Touch (an excerpt from his stage work).
Heifetz, Jascha Transcriptions for violin and piano.
Helfman, Max Di Naye Hagode and other works from this Polish–American twentieth-century composer.
Helps, Robert Another twentieth-century American, with Shall We Dance for piano, and other chamber works.
Hely-Hutchinson, Victor An English twentieth-century composer represented by A Carol Symphony – his orchestral work based on Christmas carols.
Henze, Hans Werner Guitar music and the Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 from this major twentieth-century figure.
Herbert, Victor Edwardian light music, including the Irish Rhapsody.
Hermann, Friedrich Chamber music from this nineteenth-century German composer.
Herrmann, Bernard The film composer is represented on four CDs that include his music for The Egyptian.
The Story of Naxos Page 26