Hersch, Michael A young American composer championed by Marin Alsop, who conducts his Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2.
Hidalgo, Juan Volume 1 of The Guerra Manuscript – seventeenth-century secular Spanish vocal music.
Higdon, Jennifer A selection of chamber music by this American twentieth-century composer, including Impressions played by the Cypress String Quartet.
Hildegard von Bingen Two discs of this musical visionary, from the Oxford Camerata.
Hill, Alfred A prominent figure in Australian twentieth-century music, with three volumes of string quartets included here.
Hindemith, Paul The symphony Mathis der Maler, of course, but also chamber music.
Hoffmann, Johann A mandolin player and composer of the Classical era; two sonatas are included here.
Hoffmann, Melchior A Baroque composer represented by the cantata Meine Seele ruhmt und preist.
Hoffmeister, Franz Anton String quartets and double bass quartets from this Classical German composer and music publisher.
Hoffstetter, Roman String quartets good enough to have been attributed to Haydn for many years.
Hofmann, Leopold Five discs of attractive concertos from this Classical composer, the scores having been rediscovered and published by Artaria Editions.
Moving on to another section chosen at random, where the letter ‘S’ gives way to ‘T’ …
Szymanowski, Karol Piano music (four volumes), songs, sacred music, string quartets, two recordings of the violin concertos, King Roger and more.
Tabakov, Emil The twentieth-century Bulgarian conductor–composer directs his own piano and flute concertos.
Takemitsu, Toru A generous selection of music from this leading twentieth-century Japanese composer.
Tallis, Thomas All the major works.
Talma, Louise A French-born American composer, whose music here includes Variations on 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for tenor, oboe and piano.
Taneyev, Sergey Ivanovich A torch first taken up by Marco Polo, Taneyev’s works now on Naxos include string quartets and symphonies.
Tansman, Alexandre Two volumes of chamber music.
Tartini, Giuseppe Violin concertos (and the ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata!).
Tárrega, Francisco Principal guitar works on one disc.
Tate, Phyllis Her Triptych forms part of a disc entitled British Women Composers.
Tavener, John Five CDs that of course include The Protecting Veil and Song for Athene as well as piano works and Lament for Jerusalem; also a special two-CD portrait of the composer from Naxos Educational.
Taylor, Deems The American composer’s opera Peter Ibbetson.
Tchaikovsky, Boris A twentieth-century Russian composer (‘I consider him a genius’: Mstislav Rostropovich), no relation to Pyotr. Three CDs that include the Piano Concerto, Clarinet Concerto and the cantata Signs of the Zodiac).
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il’yich An entry which completes the page and runs on through both columns of the next.
This kind of page-by-page examination prompts amazement – even bemusement. The alphabetical listing of composers forms the first part of the printed catalogue and gives a kaleidoscopic picture of the label. There is method here, and a story behind most of the CDs. But after you pass
Zimmermann, Anton
Ziporyn, Evan
Zwilich, Ellen Taaffe the picture changes.
The Collections part shows a totally different aspect of running a classical label. Heymann prefers to have one-composer CDs because they are so much easier to catalogue but this is often neither possible nor advisable. Anthologies are very popular and many have been produced. It is therefore necessary to give them their own section, which proves to be just as surprising as the A–Z composer listing. It starts with Alphorn Concertos: you may think it a specialist title (it does include Daetwyler’s Dialogue avec la nature for alphorn, piccolo and orchestra, which caused no end of balance problems in the studio) but since 2002 it has sold a respectable 12,000 copies on CD alone. Next is Classic American Love Songs, performed by Carole Farley with John Constable, piano.
Here also are found some of the highly successful lifestyle and introductory compilations. Formally called ‘catalogue exploitation’, these are major revenue earners though they sometimes make the dedicated classical collector go pale. A typical example is the one-CD ‘Best of’ series: The Best of Bach, The Best of Beethoven etc. (all the way down to The Best of Ziehrer, which shows that Naxos does have a sense of humour). The series did well in the market so a sequel was required: a two-CD ‘Very Best of’ series. More compilations are found in the ‘Chill with’ series, which covers most of the same composers – Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart (100,000-plus units sold) … down to Tchaikovsky – but has high-design covers.
In fact the printed catalogue shows only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to regional compilations, for many distributors across the world also release the ‘Best of’ series (and other variations) in their own languages. The enterprise of these distributors has contributed greatly to Naxos. In the US, a classical series called ‘Listen, Learn and Grow’ targeted at babies sold some 150,000 units, and when transported to the UK a further 40,000. Few could match the imagination of Naxos Sweden, which, engaging with a population of just 9.25 million, produced a string of hit CDs through television campaigns. (It began with a three-CD set Klassiska Favoriter, a compilation of popular classics, that sold a phenomenal 275,000 boxes.) Among the international campaigns with respectable results was Voices of Angels (music by Palestrina, Hildegard, Allegri, Byrd etc.), with global sales of 110,000.
Another regular marketing theme is Christmas. There are as many as thirty Christmas-themed collections in the Naxos catalogue (indicating the inventiveness of the marketing departments): A Classic Christmas, Christmas Piano Music, Christmas Concertos, A Danish Christmas, Christmas Chill etc. Remaining at ‘C’ in ‘Collections’, we find twelve volumes of ‘Cinema Classics’ (plus The Very Best of Cinema Classics), twelve volumes of ‘The Classics at the Movies’, and other cinematic compilations. There are pages of early music, easy listening, flute music and funeral music. Heymann has also supported light music, from orchestral ‘salon’ favourites to Vintage Broadway. There are operatic collections, English String Miniatures, Finnish Orchestral Favourites, French Festival and Macabre Masterpieces.
On a more serious note, there is a wealth of organ repertoire on Naxos, not only the volumes of Bach or Buxtehude but interesting and well-considered collections of English, French and German organ music. The piano is similarly well served, from ‘Romantic Piano Favourites’ (ten volumes) to ‘Easy Listening Piano Classics’ (more than ten volumes, divided by composers). In fact most of the main instruments (flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello) have their own sub-sections in ‘Collections’: a glance under ‘T’ shows that there are five volumes of ‘The Art of the Baroque Trumpet’ as well as other selections for the instrument. ‘Vocal and Choral’ starts with Abide with Me and other favourite hymns, and among other highlights are Pigs Could Fly (children’s choral music), Psalms for the Spirit, Psaumes de la Réforme, Russian Divine Liturgy and Spirituals. A closer look at this section unveils many more extremely thoughtful and useful anthologies. Moving on, there are a few collections of wedding music (including A Bride’s Guide to Music for Civil Ceremonies) though the first one has outsold all others by far: Wedding Music has reached 140,000 units since its release in 1993.
It is on naxos.com that the most up-to-date and comprehensive information can be found. In the ‘Sets/Series’ section there are no fewer than twenty-nine divisions, focusing on particular aspects of Naxos and classical music. These include ‘Early Music Collection’ (125 titles), ‘19th Century Violinist Composers’ (25 titles), ‘Greek Classics’ (10 titles), ‘Italian Classics’ (27 titles) and ‘Spanish Classics’ (75 titles). Laying the ground for the future is the task of the ‘Laureate Series’ (60 titles): recordings by prize-winners of various instrumental competitions around the w
orld. Here are young musicians (principally guitarists, pianists, violinists and cellists), generally with impressive virtuosity on display, showing why they were laureates. However, also among these so-called ‘Sets/Series’ are to be found other significant parts of the Naxos catalogue.
Opera Classics
Opera has come to play a central and growing role on Naxos with the rise of the DVD, but recordings on CD remain popular and Naxos has made a helpful contribution to recorded operatic repertoire. There are now more than 100 titles in the Naxos opera catalogue, some of which, as usual, are unexpected (especially so given their low price). The recording programme began with Mozart (six operas to date, including Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro) but swiftly moved on to cover other opera composers: Donizetti (six, including Lucia di Lammermoor), Rossini (sixteen, including Il barbiere di Siviglia), Verdi (seven, including Aida and Rigoletto), Wagner (six, including the Ring cycle) and Puccini (eight, including La Bohème and Madama Butterfly). There is Beethoven’s Fidelio, Bizet’s Carmen, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Meyerbeer’s Semiramide, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and Albert Herring, Berg’s Wozzeck and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
There are two operas by John Adams, including the one considered by many to be his masterpiece: Nixon in China. A further look reveals those by Lully, Rameau, Handel, Pacini, Massenet, Schoenberg (Moses und Aaron), Korngold, Schreker and Szymanowski, and operettas by Johann Strauss.
Many of these were Naxos-funded recordings, the casts chosen in association with the conductors; some were co-productions; and others were the results of licensing arrangements with radio stations or festivals. The cost of recording opera is so daunting that often it can be done only through joint productions with opera houses or broadcast organisations. Whatever the routes have been, the end result is a varied and satisfying opera catalogue.
American Classics
If there is any single area of Naxos that was the most unexpected, and is perhaps the most innovative, it is its championing of American classical music from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Many American composers are familiar names in classical music: Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, and even those generally represented by just one or two works, such as John Philip Sousa, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson. What Heymann set out to do with ‘American Classics’, which he began in 1999, was to create an unmatched catalogue of music by the greatest American classical composers, including those alive today, in order to awaken Americans to their own heritage as well as to show the musical world, through the Naxos international distribution network, that here was a body of work worth getting to know. In a decade of dedicated and carefully planned recording, with a release schedule that tried to keep up, ‘American Classics’ developed into a 360-title (and still growing) display cabinet for American music.
Initially Heymann turned to the producers and agents Victor and Marina Ledin (referred to by Heymann as ‘the Encores’, following the name of their company, Encore Consultants) for advice regarding repertoire. He subsequently assembled a formal advisory board with such luminaries as the eminent musicologist Wiley Hitchcock, the musicologist of the Library of Congress Wayne Shirley, and the highly regarded author and musicologist Joseph Horowitz. Together, after often animated arguments, they drew up a master plan for the project. Some of the recordings were world premieres – increasingly so as the years went by; but many were new, digital recordings of important orchestral music that had been unavailable on record for many years. Among the early releases were Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland coupled with The Red Mill, the first volume in a series of piano works by Charles Griffes, and a disc of Leo Sowerby’s works for organ and orchestra. Having decided on the repertoire approach, Heymann moved ahead rapidly, recording and releasing works by established American figures such as Piston, Ives, MacDowell, Barber and even John Cage: his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano went on to sell over 40,000 CDs. Important projects included the complete orchestral works of Barber, conducted by Marin Alsop (the Violin Concerto sold over 40,000 CDs); the complete music for wind band by Sousa, masterminded by Keith Brion (many of the scores had to be recreated using material gathered from a variety of sources; it was a major undertaking); the published symphonies of William Schuman, conducted by Gerard Schwarz; the complete orchestral works of Bernstein; and the first recording of the complete songs by Ives, in cooperation with Yale University. The music of other established twentieth-century composers such as Howard Hanson, Roy Harris and Leroy Anderson benefitted from being under the umbrella of ‘American Classics’: Anderson’s Orchestral Evergreens sold over 40,000 CDs.
Equally important have been recordings of the younger generation of composers, including John Adams (Shaker Loops, the Violin Concerto, Nixon in China) and John Corigliano (seven CDs that include Symphony No. 3, the Violin Concerto The Red Violin, and music for string quartet). The biggest single endorsement of the whole enterprise came in 2006 when William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience conducted by Leonard Slatkin won four GRAMMY Awards. A challenging work, its presence, in truth, did more for ‘American Classics’ than for the sales figures: it underlined the unwavering purpose of the series.
Many titles have sold only a few thousand CDs, despite being large orchestral works, but the momentum generated served the genre and the label. In total, sixteen GRAMMYs have been won by ‘American Classics’.
Spanish Classics
Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados, along with Joaquín Rodrigo, may be the best-known representatives of Spanish classical music but, as with most European countries, there is a wealth of other music known only within the country itself.
Apart from works by Renaissance Spanish composers such as Tomás Luis de Victoria, and by the eighteenth-century Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, the most important Spanish music was composed in the Romantic nationalist period; in its frequent reliance on regional folk melodies and rhythms it reflected the approach of well-known nationalist composers such as Dvoák.
In order to select the most important composers and their works, Heymann joined with Isabel Gortázar (editor, writer and businesswoman) to form the company Marco Polo and Naxos Hispánica SL in 1999. Her connections with several important orchestras in Spain and knowledge of the music itself made her the ideal person to develop ‘Spanish Classics’. Over the next decade Heymann and Gortázar developed a list of around seventy-five titles that would reflect the country’s variety of music, most of which did appear on Naxos or Marco Polo.
Following the nationalistic pattern, the collection started with what is to this day the most important series of Basque music ever recorded. Two Basque operas, Amaya by Jesús Guridi (1886–1961) and Mendi mendiyan (‘High in the Mountains’) by José Maria Usandizaga (1887–1915), were recorded in the original Basque language. Mendi mendiyan was a world-premiere recording. Guridi’s zarzuela El Caserío (‘The Homestead’), sung in Spanish, his Sinfonía pirenaica, and his most popular work, Ten Basque Melodies, were also included. Francisco Escudero’s oratorio Illeta, written in 1953, is also an important piece of the Basque collection. The Bilbao Symphony Orchestra (founded in 1922) was conducted by Juan José Mena in all the orchestral music and Mendi mendiyan; Amaya (released on Marco Polo in 2000) was conducted by Theo Alcántara.
Some of the bestsellers, not surprisingly, feature Rodrigo. The Concierto de Aranjuez is on the second volume of his ‘Complete Orchestral Works’, together with the well-known Fantasía para un gentilhombre but also with Concierto Andaluz for four guitars and orchestra, a lesser-known jewel. The guitar soloist is Ricardo Gallén, playing with the Asturias Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maximiano Valdés. (Released in 2002 it has sold nearly 60,000 units, which, considering the number of available recordings of the famous Concierto, including Norbert Kraft’s bestselling version still in the Naxos catalogue, is no mean feat.) The commitment to record all Rodrigo’
s orchestral music being such a major project (aided by the composer’s daughter, Cecilia Rodrigo), the recordings were shared among three different Spanish orchestras.
The Castile and León Symphony Orchestra (founded in 1991) recorded three of the Rodrigo discs and, more importantly, produced the first recording of the Sinfonía castellana by the largely forgotten Antonio José (1902–1936), a composer from Castile who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The coupling is a Suite from El mozo de mulas (an opera still awaiting its first recording).
The Madrid Community Orchestra (founded in 1984) made seven recordings for ‘Spanish Classics’, including a contribution to the Rodrigo cycle, a bestselling Preludes and Choruses from Zarzuelas, and the premiere recording of the Symphony in D minor by Ruperto Chapí (1851–1909).
It fell to the Asturias Symphony Orchestra (founded in 1937) and Maximiano Valdés to record Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo, El sombrero de tres picos and La vida breve (as well as six of the Rodrigo volumes). In the spirit of the collection, which intended to ‘resurrect’ forgotten composers, the orchestra also recorded works by Julián Orbón (1925–1991).
Last but not least, a relatively small Catalan orchestra, El Vallès Symphony Orchestra, recorded various interesting works by Joaquim Serra (1907–1957).
Italian Classics
From the earliest days of the Marco Polo label, Heymann was keen to represent the growth of Italian orchestral and chamber music from the later nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, a time when composers were determined not only to modernise the Italian opera tradition, with its excessive reliance on melody, but to re-establish non-operatic Italian music. It was an area of music neglected by record companies. Ottorino Respighi’s Sinfonia drammatica received its world premiere on the label in the mid-1980s, as did the symphonies of Gian Francesco Malipiero in the 1990s (now on Naxos). In the first decade of the twenty-first century Naxos embarked on the complete orchestral music of Giuseppe Martucci, the foremost Italian orchestral composer of the late nineteenth century.
The Story of Naxos Page 27