Leinsdorf features among the ‘Great Conductors’ in his own right, along with Wilhelm Furtwängler, Thomas Beecham, Erich Kleiber, Richard Strauss (conducting Beethoven) and many more of the twentieth century’s great names, including the controversial Karajan. There is even the inimitable Stokowski conducting his own transcriptions (though he probably would have had mixed feelings to discover that José Serebrier’s modern recordings of them, on the Naxos main label, have sold more).
Naxos Historical teems with legendary opera recordings: three of La Bohème (de los Angeles/Björling, Tebaldi/Prandelli and Albanese/Gigli), four of Madama Butterfly, two of Tosca (one with Maria Callas), and one of Turandot; there is Callas again in Il Turco in Italia, Gedda/Schwarzkopf in Die Fledermaus, and Schwarzkopf again in both Johann Strauss II’s Der Zigeunerbaron and, not to be missed, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. By way of musical contrast, the classic performances of Gilbert and Sullivan by The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company can also be found, among which H.M.S. Pinafore (sales of 20,000 copies to date) and The Pirates of Penzance particularly sell year in, year out.
Heymann admits that for him the recordings on Naxos Historical have been quite an eye-opener. ‘The biggest discovery of all was that the interpretations were far more personal and that the artists took a lot more freedom with the works than would be acceptable today. But they also played with more feeling – sometimes in a style that would now be called “bad taste”. And the biggest surprise in the vocal titles was that people sang with very little, if any, vibrato.’ While he knows that the reputation for the high standard of these Naxos recordings has made them highly collectible for the committed buff (even one who already owns previous versions), he hopes that the budget pricing will open the door for a more general buyer, who, he is sure, will be at times astonished by the performances.
Of course, Naxos Jazz Legends, Naxos Nostalgia and the collection of Naxos Musicals are studded with household names. That Christmas Feeling: 21 Vintage Seasonal Hits (1932–1950) tops the sales charts at over 45,000, carrying as it does everything from White Christmas (Bing Crosby) to Winter Wonderland (Perry Como). Among others are leading crossover figures of their day: John McCormack, Richard Tauber, George Gershwin and Marian Anderson. Then there are some from different genres again, whose popularity survives the passage of generations, such as Florence Foster Jenkins, Victor Borge and Larry Adler (whose recordings show even now what an exceptional virtuoso he was). The list is truly international: Mario Lanza, Gertrude Lawrence, Dean Martin, Lawrence Tibbett, Charles Trenet (La Mer is a top-seller), Paul Whiteman and Eartha Kitt. And Ezio Pinza singing Some Enchanted Evening – nostalgia indeed.
Jazz Legends has some surprises. Django Reinhardt tops the sales charts, Volume 1 selling over 35,000 copies and Volume 2 not far behind with 25,000. Stephane Grappelli, a one-time Reinhardt partner, has two CDs. Many other great names are here too: Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet and Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Bix Beiderbecke, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Glenn Miller and Art Tatum; even Miles Davis from the 1940s (Early Milestones) and early 1950s (Boplicity).
The historical series grows month by month, albeit at a steady pace. As the years roll on and various copyrights expire, more performers – both popular and lesser-known – are added to the catalogue.
Naxos DVD
In 1990 Heymann found himself with a growing classical catalogue and began to look for new ways in which he could use those recordings. In Hong Kong and the rest of the Far East, VHS was increasingly a part of home entertainment, as was the continuing format of Laserdisc. So he set up a video team, based in Switzerland, with the brief to travel to the most important towns and tourist areas of Europe, taking films of the main sites: these could later be edited into attractive travelogues shaped around appropriately chosen classical music taken from Naxos and Marco Polo. Each classical work chosen formed the script on which the shooting schedule was based. It was a deft idea and Heymann invested considerably. It was neither easy nor cheap, and it had to depend on the VHS videotape format which by then had won the battle against Betamax to become the dominant home video medium.
Nearly 100 ‘Musical Journeys’ were made and it was certainly an adventurous enterprise. The team travelled to St Petersburg and Helsinki in the north, Sicily in the south, Uzbekistan in the east and England in the west; the filmmakers took pictures of castles, churches, landscapes, palaces, civil buildings and flowers. Back in the Swiss studios, footage was edited with the music of Bach to result in Germany, A Musical Tour of Bach’s Homeland; French music was the basis of Chateaux of the Loire; Czech music shaped Prague: A Musical Tour of the City’s Past and Present; and Albinoni, Corelli and of course Vivaldi underlined scenes of Venice. In the musical tour of Uzbekistan – against visuals of mosques and madrassas of Bukhara, Khiva and other stops along the Silk Road – there was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade and Sadko.
Alas, in a way, the series fell between two technical systems. DVD was being developed but it did not really make a significant impression in the market until the turn of the century, and it was not until 2003 that DVD sales overtook VHS. These ‘Musical Journeys’ were more suited to a format that offered a fast and competent search facility. Heymann had, by then, long stopped production of the series, though it has since been released on DVD and is at last recouping some of its investment. Ever mindful of the Naxos base in China, Heymann more recently commissioned ten DVDs devoted to some of the finest sights in the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Hangzhou as well as Tibet, though these came well after the main series had finished. In the case of these Chinese programmes, the footage came first and appropriate music was added later.
It became clear that DVD was going to make a significant contribution to classical music. Although this was a different area from classical audio recording, and very much the domain of companies with a background in television, Heymann brought to his new Naxos DVD label as many programmes as he could find.
There are operas and concerts, both classical and jazz. Opera festivals were keen for their productions to have a longer life than the live performances and a few TV airings: DVD was the ideal answer and opportunities appeared. On Naxos DVD now are operas by Donizetti (three, including Lucrezia Borgia), Rossini (including Il Turco in Italia) and Verdi (including Luisa Miller from Teatro La Fenice) as well as Wolf-Ferrari’s La vedova scaltra (also from La Fenice) and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (from the Salzburg Festival). There seems additionally to be a growing demand for films of concerts that include core classical repertoire.
An important addition to the DVD catalogue came in the mid-2000s from a remarkable American jazz series called ‘Jazz Icons’, which contained material from European television archives. It turned into a bestselling series, presenting as it did Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan and many others.
One of the most recent and unusual releases is Cello Master Class from Maria Kliegel, the distinguished Naxos cellist.
Deletions
A deletion policy is part and parcel of most sizeable classical labels, judicious pruning being advisable for both commercial and marketing reasons. It is pointless for dead titles to take up space in a warehouse or tie up money that can be used for new products. However, the advent of downloads has remedied the situation: there is no reason why specialist repertoire, which attracts very little interest, cannot now sit on a website for the handful of people who are interested in it. In fact Naxos has always operated a very modest deletions policy. Every few years there will be a slight cull, but in a quarter of a century fewer than 10 per cent (actually closer to 5 per cent) of recordings on CD have been deleted. Some have migrated onto less expensive labels, the most obvious examples being the Marco Polo recordings that have moved to Naxos; but Heymann sees his label as an archive for the collector, just as he did in the very beginning.
Thirteen
Marco Polo
Marco Polo started out as ‘HK Ma
rco Polo’ in 1982. Heymann had begun recording Chinese orchestral music for his HK label in the late 1970s with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, but their musical directors did not want to be restricted to Chinese music: they were keen to record Western repertoire as well. Heymann realised that there was no way he could sell Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms performed by the Hong Kong and Singapore orchestras and decided to focus on world-premiere recordings, which collectors would purchase regardless of the orchestras, conductors and soloists performing on them. The initial releases carried the dual ‘HK Marco Polo’ stamp but very soon the ‘HK’ was dropped and the Marco Polo label was born.
From the start, Marco Polo was dubbed ‘The Label of Discovery’, for it was the first of the CD era to focus on world-premiere recordings: most of the releases featured works that had never been recorded before. In a way it was less of a commercial enterprise and more of a hobby for Heymann – his personal contribution to the music that had been a consistent inspiration during his time in the Far East, when he had otherwise been absorbed by business interests. He had always been drawn to Romantic and late Romantic music, and had been stimulated by venturing off-piste when collecting (and distributing in the Far East) Opus, Hungaroton, Melodiya and other similar labels. He found the kinds of works that he especially liked and, in reading around the subject in music magazines, music encyclopedias, old books and biographies, he realised that there were numerous composers active in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had faded from concert-hall programmes (such as Anton Rubinstein, Joachim Raff, Franz Lachner and Vasily Sergeyevich Kalinnikov). Often they were just names in books and he didn’t know what their music sounded like (because there were no recordings!). Consequently it was difficult to judge whether there really was worth in Myaskovsky or Garofalo or Ciurlionis; but once he had started he proceeded with a strong concept, determined to make Marco Polo a label of premiere recordings as well as one of discovery. There were many times when no one – apart from the conductor, sitting at home with a photocopied score from a specialised library in preparation for the recording’s coming rehearsals – knew whether the work (in which a considerable amount had been invested) was any good at all.
Of course, most of the time Heymann made a shrewd judgement: sometimes he came across comments that contemporaries (critics and friends) had made about a composer’s work; or he might know two symphonies by Raff and could judge that here was a serious and competent composer with something to say; or maybe he found that an established and more familiar composer, such as Respighi, Ippolitov-Ivanov or Cui, who was known by only a handful of popular calling cards, had a large repertoire languishing in obscurity. There were major names with sizeable works awaiting a recording premiere, or at least their first stereo recording, and some real gems were discovered. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote more than Sheherazade, and his Night on Mount Triglav and Pan Voyevoda received their first recording on Marco Polo. Perhaps there were also times in the studio when an able conductor, standing in front of an excellent orchestra in Moscow or Bratislava, was asked, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and could only answer, looking into his score, ‘For a rich German classical enthusiast businessman in Hong Kong. We go from bar 65!’
Whether or not he was entertaining a personal enthusiasm, Heymann turned out to be more astute than many realised. An interest in these obscurities, and a market for them, did exist, consisting of men (and they were mainly men) who were on the same wavelength as Heymann and particularly intrigued by off-the-beaten-track repertoire. There were probably not many of them in any one country – the trick was to find them. One well-known supporter was an international star: the Australian comedian Barry Humphries, better known by his alter ego Dame Edna Everage. When Barry Humphries was invited to record the narration for Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for Naxos he waived any fee: all he wanted, he said, was a copy of every Marco Polo recording for as long as he lived. That was in 1996.
Thirty years after Marco Polo began it had notched up 1,000 new recordings, and sales (on various formats – LP, cassette, DVD but mostly CD) of around 3,750,000 units. Not bad for a personal enthusiasm.
The Marco Polo Catalogue
Chinese Classics
Marco Polo began with Chinese music on the HK label, Heymann realising that there was an opportunity for recordings of Chinese orchestral music written in a Western style (mostly since the end of the Second World War). It enabled him to acknowledge musically his Hong Kong home and to provide a service to Chinese music buyers. Piracy was undoubtedly an issue but the genuine sales were growing, and through persistence this category has sold millions of units over the years. It began with the most famous work of this genre, Chen and He’s The Butterfly Lovers, featuring Takako Nishizaki as the soloist with her hometown orchestra, the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra. Over the years, Nishizaki recorded another seven versions of the work, in Japan, Slovakia and China (released in audiophile formats and on video as well as CD). Spurred by her constant touring and performances throughout China, the total sales reached several million units. There were other releases with good sales, including Master of Chinese Percussion featuring Yim Hok-Man, Three Wishes of the Rose – Everlasting Chinese Love Songs, Ding’s Long March Symphony, Xian’s Yellow River Cantata with other choral works (which has sold in excess of 30,000 copies), and Ren’s Colourful Clouds with other Chinese orchestral favourites. Heymann also licensed a substantial number of recordings from China Records and these subsequently became available internationally for the first time.
Marco Polo Classics
‘Marco Polo Classics’ forms the central part of the label, with around 800 titles comprising possibly the most idiosyncratic repertoire of any independent classical calatogue. It began with an astute selection of forgotten overtures and marches by none other than Richard Wagner – Polonia, Rule Britannia and others, all previously unrecorded – played by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. It was a typically smart Heymann marketing gesture, but it showed immediately a dedication to the task of bringing neglected music of substance onto LP – and soon CD. One of the next releases, Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano, was another world-premiere recording and a very satisfying discovery for many. As the catalogue developed it soon fell into sections – orchestral, chamber, instrumental and opera – and as the years rolled by there came a handful of extraordinary ventures that gave the label extra dimensions. These included the complete music of the Strauss family, a stupendous undertaking that is approaching completion; and the ‘National Anthems of the World’, an unrivalled and constantly updated set that has become a boon to sports organisations worldwide, including the Olympic Games.
Opera
Unusual operas from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century have been released regularly on Marco Polo. These include the world-premiere recording of Weber’s Peter Schmoll and His Neighbours, Marschner’s ghost opera Hans Heiling and Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon from the nineteenth century; and from the twentieth century Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang and Die Gezeichneten, and no fewer than ten operas by Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried (including The Man in a Bear’s Skin and The Kingdom of the Black Swan). There is Szymanowski’s King Roger, Granados’ three-act María del Carmen, Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du nord, Respighi’s Lucrezia, Pfitzner’s Das Herz, and even a contemporary Italian opera, Divara – Wasser und Blut by Azio Corghi.
Orchestral Music
The early showpiece of the label was undoubtedly the premiere recording of Havergal Brian’s Symphony No. 1 ‘The Gothic’, by virtue of its size as much as its musical content. But it could be said that here among the orchestral recordings is the heart of Marco Polo: a stream of discoveries by both the known and the unknown. There is plenty of music by familiar composers: Adam (two more ballets from the composer of Giselle), Arensky (Egyptian Nights), Balakirev, Bax, Bloch, Cui, Donizetti, Dvoák (opera overtures), Glazunov (four volumes of orchestral works, before the remaining sixteen volumes
that were released on Naxos), Goldmark (Symphony No. 2 and Penthesilea), Hummel, Humperdinck, d’Indy, Janáek (Danube and Moravian Dances), Korngold (Violin Concerto, coupled with Goldmark’s), Respighi (many works, including the Sinfonia drammatica), Rimsky-Korsakov, Salieri (overtures), Smetana, Spohr, Stanford, Szymanowski and Zemlinsky.
Even more impressive, in a sense, is the collection of rarely heard or largely unknown composers who in Heymann’s estimation have written works that are worth a place on CD and in the digital archives of today. A brief list scarcely scratches the surface: Bantock, Berners, Boulanger (both Lili and Nadia), Braga Santos (six volumes of this key Portuguese composer), Brian (eight volumes of symphonies and other orchestral music), Ciurlionis (The Sea and other atmospheric tone poems), Devreese, Emmanuel, Enescu (his complete orchestral works, licensed from Romania), Furtwängler (four volumes of symphonies and the Piano Concerto), Garofalo, Glière (four volumes including the three symphonies), Grechaninov, Hill (three volumes of symphonies), Ippolitov-Ivanov (three orchestral CDs), Ivanovs (four symphonies; two more were subsequently released on Naxos), Koechlin (including the distinctive Le Livre de la Jungle), Lachner (four orchestral CDs), Lajtha (all nine symphonies of this Hungarian composer), Liadov, Lyatoshynsky (five symphonies), Malipiero (all the symphonies), Markevitch (seven volumes of the complete orchestral music), Moyzes (all twelve symphonies), Myaskovsky (four volumes of symphonies so far but Heymann hopes one day to have a complete set), Pfitzner (Piano Concerto), Poot, Raff (all eleven symphonies), Rubinstein (the largest collection of orchestral works available anywhere, including five piano concertos), Schmitt (including La Tragédie de Salomé), Spohr (the complete symphonies), Taneyev, Tournemire and Vītols.
The Story of Naxos Page 29