Light Music and the Strauss Project
Despite its seemingly serious purpose, Marco Polo has always been open to light music. The British light music series, though consisting of just twenty-four titles, has proved popular: Ketèlbey’s In a Monastery Garden, Coates’s The Dam Busters march, Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha and Tomlinson’s First Suite of English Folk-Dances all sold well; Binge’s The Watermill, with the Scottish Rhapsody, Elizabethan Serenade and others, was a surprise top-seller. The total sale of 130,000 CDs from twenty-four titles has been very respectable.
In the heart of the light music series are the first eleven volumes of waltzes, polkas, mazurkas and more by the Danish composer Christian Lumbye, music director and composer at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen for nearly thirty years. That was in the mid-nineteenth century but his music is still hugely popular in Scandinavia. His complete orchestral works was a tall order for Marco Polo fans to absorb but Heymann was committed to it. He still hopes that some day he can complete the project: there are at least another thirty volumes to go.
But it is as nothing, at least in terms of logistics, when compared with the Strauss project. This is simply immense. Anyone else looking at the numbers, the prospects, the whole project, would probably call it reckless. It involved a huge amount of painstaking research in the beginning; many of the scores and parts had to be handwritten for the sessions because published editions did not exist. The complete Johann Strauss II Edition runs to fifty-two CDs. It began in 1991 and was concluded in 1996. The complete Johann Strauss I Edition runs to seventeen CDs so far and will eventually number twenty-four. The complete Josef Strauss Edition runs to twenty-six CDs. It is a stupendous project that is unlikely ever to be repeated. It could only have been imagined, planned, implemented, manufactured and released by the owner of the company.
Chamber Music
The nineteenth century produced an enormous amount and variety of chamber music, much of which is now forgotten. The Marco Polo contribution to rediscoveries, which are fashionable now but were less so in the early 1980s when Heymann started, draws on music truly from around the world. There are string quartets of the Slovakian Ján Bella, the Piano Quartet and Piano Trio of the French composer Léon Boëllmann; the Piano Trio in E and String Quartet in D by the Spaniard Tomás Bretón; and the delightful, very French salon piano trios by Félicien David. There is a useful collection of English cello sonatas by Ireland, Moeran and Rubbra, and three volumes of varied chamber music with piano by the American Arthur Foote that has resonances of Schumann and Dvoák. Piano trios and string quartets show Alexander Grechaninov to be rooted in the Russian Romantic tradition, though he died in New York in 1956. The two volumes of violin sonatas by Camargo Guarnieri, born in São Paulo, are similar in character to the music of Braga Santos and Villa-Lobos, while d’Indy’s piano and string quartets take us firmly back to France. All the works for flute by the American twentieth-century composer Robert Muczynski fit neatly on one CD, which features the composer on the piano and, if you look hard enough in the catalogue, the doyen of French flautists Jean-Pierre Rampal playing flute duets with Alexandra Hawley. Not a lot of people know that Rampal is a Marco Polo artist. The English composer Buxton Orr used twelve-tone techniques so it is a bit of a mystery how his Piano Trios Nos. 1–3 got onto Marco Polo at all, but they are sound works. There are also two piano trios by Christian Sinding, part of the generation after Grieg. Ildebrando Pizzetti was part of the Italian Novecento, which Heymann has been keen to represent; Marco Polo has released two volumes of his works, including two string quartets. Heymann also felt that Franz Schmidt had been unjustly neglected by the recording fraternity and the catalogue now offers his two main chamber works for clarinet: the A major and B flat major Clarinet Quintets, played by Hungarian musicians.
Perhaps the strongest single representation of a composer’s chamber music oeuvre on Marco Polo is the still-growing list of complete string quartets by Louis Spohr: fourteen volumes so far (there are thirty-six quartets in all). It shows the range of a composer who is so often sidelined into second or third rank. With much the same effect, Marco Polo showcases Spohr’s seven string quintets.
Piano Music
The Marco Polo alphabetical piano listing starts appropriately with Charles-Valentin Alkan, the neglected giant of French piano music, ripe for Marco Polo promotion: there are five volumes played by Bernard Ringeissen and Laurent Martin that cover the major works. ‘B’ is for Bach – an unexpected inclusion bearing in mind the purpose of the label, but this is a CD of Busoni’s transcriptions played by Sequeira Costa. Bartók also made transcriptions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music (less well known than Busoni’s) and the Hungarian pianist Ilona Prunyi presents a selection. Continuing the theme, Daniel Blumenthal plays Hans von Bülow’s piano transcriptions of Gluck, Wagner and others; and opera transcriptions by the Hungarian composer Ferenc Erkel are played by István Kassai. A more characteristic Marco Polo discovery is the Lithuanian composer Mikolajus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, who wrote appealing miniatures for the piano, and within the two volumes played by Múza Rubackyté are some haunting gems – as there are among the volumes of piano sonatas and other works by Robert Fuchs, who was praised by Brahms.
The Spanish pianist Jordi Masó has recorded two volumes of piano works by the twentieth-century Spanish composer Joaquim Homs and all the piano music by Homs’s teacher Roberto Gerhard (which conveniently fits on one disc). Gerhard’s Argentinian contemporary Luis Gianneo is represented by three CDs of piano music, from his Suite of 1933 up to the Sonata No. 3 and Six Bagatelles of the 1950s. There are also two discs of another Argentinian, Alberto Williams, played by Valentin Surif.
Major sets feature strongly. Tatjana Franova plays the complete piano music of Alexander Glazunov on four CDs, and Konstantin Scherbakov presents the first ten volumes of piano music by Leopold Godowsky, which makes staggering demands on any pianist. The works of another, though earlier, piano virtuoso, Sigismond Thalberg, appear on five CDs, including his variations on operas by Rossini for which Francesco Nicolosi is the agile performer. The piano music of Paul Hindemith on four volumes is performed by Hans Petermandl, the Austrian pianist who is particularly comfortable with the style, having played Hindemith’s Piano Concerto under the composer’s own direction.
On an English note, the pianist Rosemary Tuck plays two volumes of music by Albert Ketèlbey while Alan Cuckston takes care of music by Edward German. Edward MacDowell was similarly well known during his lifetime in his own country (the United States), and his piano music, played by James Barbagallo, is contained on four CDs (a fifth is filled with his songs).
Other Marco Polo regulars, such as Korngold, Lajtha, Liadov, Lyapunov, Myaskovsky and Rubinstein, have their piano repertoire included too.
Marco Polo Film Music
In the first fifty years of film, accomplished composers wrote outstanding scores. During that period, there was no snobbish division between film music and ‘serious’ concert music: composers were writing to order just as they had always done at some time in their lives. So making new digital recordings of some of the great scores of Honegger, Vaughan Williams, Herrmann, Khachaturian, Bliss, Auric, Waxman, Steiner, Shostakovich, Tiomkin and others seemed like a good idea – especially as they would be sold with the poster art from the original movies.
Some forty-six titles were recorded over a period of ten years, many with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Stromberg in the Mosfilm Studio in Moscow – often a big orchestra was needed in a space where sound effects, too, could be created with aplomb. Considerable research and preparation were involved to source the film scores, and in some cases a score needed to undergo detailed restoration (even total reconstruction) before the orchestra could go into the studio. It was a labour of love for the composer John Morgan.
The series began in 1990 with Arthur Honegger’s music to Les Misérables and Napoléon, played by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adriano
. But by the mid-1990s the project had become more ambitious with the declared intention to work from only careful restorations. These were hugely expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore the films were deliberately chosen for their scores, not because they were box-office hits. Korngold’s Captain Blood is on one CD coupled with Steiner’s The Three Musketeers; it was recorded by the Brandenburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Richard Kaufman and has sold in excess of 10,000 CDs. Steiner’s King Kong, recorded by Stromberg in 1996 and released in 1997, was another bestseller, chalking up a similar quantity.
That level of sales, alas, was the exception. Despite the enormous effort that went into realising these recordings, they did not make a sufficient impact on CD buyers, and the last Marco Polo Film Music CD – Korngold’s music to the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, conducted by Stromberg – was released in 2003.
Yellow River and Middle Kingdom
These two Chinese labels were established in the 1990s, Heymann wanting to look east for the Naxos label as well as west. With the Naxos headquarters in Hong Kong, which was shortly to be returned to China, it was part of the musical and commercial strategy to provide special recordings for the home market.
Yellow River began in 1992 with orchestral works based often on traditional themes and melodies. Among these are The Legend of Shadi-er and other pieces played by The Shanghai Conservatory Chinese Orchestra, and Wild Geese on the Sandbank, featuring solos by Chinese traditional lutes (the sanxian and the ruan). Also represented are compositions written during the communist era (such as the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, which tells the story of personal sacrifice for political success) and modern revolutionary Peking operas – for example, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. There are some sixty recordings in total, all produced in mainland China.
Middle Kingdom was closer to the concept of a world label, with thirteen recordings presenting classical Chinese instruments (including the pipa, the erhu, the suona and the dizi) and featuring leading Chinese performers.
Postlude
Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century the Naxos label expanded its coverage of specialist repertoire, not only by re-releasing Marco Polo titles at a low price but also by continuing to issue a wide range of music and world-premiere recordings. Market forces brought ‘The Label of Discovery’ down from full price to mid-price and the role of Marco Polo was redefined, so that now it is mainly the vehicle for the large series of light music works by composers such as the Strauss family and Lumbye. It has come a long way in thirty years.
Fourteen
Publishing
Naxos AudioBooks
Naxos AudioBooks was founded by Klaus Heymann and Nicolas Soames in September 1994 with the defining line ‘Classic Literature with Classical Music on Cassette and CD’. It was a period of sudden expansion by book publishers into the arena of spoken word, the genre having been dominated previously by classical record companies selling spoken-word LPs and cassettes into record shops. Heymann was keen to open up a new area of expertise for Naxos and to use his wealth of recorded music in ever-differing ways.
Naxos AudioBooks established its ground from the start by recording not just popular classics (in abridged versions) but the high end of literature, too. Behind the literary choice was the confirmed Naxos intention: to make the classics as accessible as possible to the widest range of people. Among its first recordings were Milton’s Paradise Lost, in a three-CD abridgement read by Anton Lesser, one of England’s leading classical actors (a decade later he added his unabridged reading, which is one of the finest recordings on the label); The Death of Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, read by Philip Madoc; Shelley’s Frankenstein shared between three actors; Orlando by Virginia Woolf, read by the young actress Laura Paton; and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment read by Michael Sheen, now a Hollywood star but then just out of drama school.
Three other recordings in those initial months set the pattern. The first was a remarkable four-CD abridgement of James Joyce’s Ulysses read by Irish actors Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. This won one of the main audiobook prizes, which established, in the label’s launch year, its credentials for outstanding recordings and its ability to make the most difficult works in world literature approachable for all. The second and third pivotal recordings showed the intention of Naxos AudioBooks to serve classic literature for children as well, and both of these have been bestsellers ever since. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, read endearingly by Laura Paton, was enhanced by classical music, which simultaneously introduced young children to delightful popular repertoire. It was followed by the first newly commissioned text for the label: teacher and writer Edward Ferrie retold some of the most popular Greek myths in Tales from the Greek Legends, and, through a widely praised and engaging reading by the young actor Benjamin Soames, introduced a younger generation to Perseus and Medusa the Gorgon, Theseus and the Minotaur, and many others.
Within a year Naxos AudioBooks was taking shape, with some fifty recordings divided into categories. ‘Classic Fiction’ was starting to cover a good range, from Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dickens’s Great Expectations, to Melville’s Moby Dick and Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, to Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Poetry was a growing thread, from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (read by Anton Lesser) to compilations including Popular Poetry, Popular Verse and Great Poets of the Romantic Age (read by Michael Sheen). Even Whale Nation, the moving ‘green’ poem on whales (written and read by Heathcote Williams, with music again playing a particularly imaginative supporting role), was an early release. ‘Classic Non-Fiction’ was also there from the start (with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Composers’ Letters) and there was the first step into drama with Great Speeches and Soliloquies of Shakespeare, a compilation that featured, among others, the young Simon Russell Beale, who is now established as one of the UK’s leading actors on the classical and modern stage.
As the months and years went by, and Naxos AudioBooks became a regular prize-winner on both sides of the Atlantic, it broadened its scope and settled into a regular release schedule of fifty new titles per year. Readers are key to audiobooks, for the character of a voice and the approach to the performance can totally change a recording. Buyers follow readers as often as they do authors or genres. Some actors began to be strongly associated with Naxos AudioBooks. As early as 1995 Juliet Stevenson read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in abridged form, and her remarkably well-judged classical delivery became instantly recognisable. She went on to record most of Jane Austen’s works in abridged and unabridged form, making them one of the most internationally appreciated parts of the label. Neville Jason, a reader of urbane poise, made a similar impact with two massive projects. The first was Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: it began with Jason’s own abridgement of the first part, Swann’s Way, moved on to Swann in Love, and as the years went by it continued inexorably to the final part, Time Regained (in his own translation). Even abridged the whole thing ran for thirty-nine CDs, but as with the abridgement of Ulysses it has served thousands as an introduction to a major twentieth-century novel. Then Jason settled into the studio for some twenty-five days to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in unabridged form. It was released on fifty-one CDs and is a startling achievement of sustained reading, the myriad of characters clearly delineated.
Another reader closely associated with Naxos AudioBooks is David Timson. When he read a three-CD collection of Sherlock Holmes stories in 1998, including The Speckled Band, neither he nor Naxos AudioBooks had any idea that it was the start of the whole canon. Ten years later he went into the studio to read the final stories from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. Longer than War and Peace, The Complete Sherlock Holmes was released as a sixty-CD boxed set and features an absolutely extraordinary range of characters and accents from one of the most versatile readers England has ever produced. In typical Naxos AudioBooks style it contains an extensive booklet with Timson’s explanatory notes
on every story. It even includes a new Sherlock Holmes story written by Timson, which he reads with suitable flourish.
While all this was taking place, both Jason and Timson were also involved in directing a range of unabridged Shakespeare plays for the label. Jason directed the first one, Hamlet (with Anton Lesser in the title role), as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Timson directed Twelfth Night, Othello, Henry V and Richard III. The production of Richard III, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, was unusual in that it went from the initial suggestion over the telephone from Branagh’s office to the first day in the studio in just over a week. Branagh had been keen for some time to work on the play but had to fit it in between a series of blockbuster films. The cast was agreed and gathered quickly; and the recording, across three days in the studio, buzzed with excitement.
The single bestseller of the Shakespeare plays is Romeo and Juliet, featuring Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen – who plays Romeo and also directed. The highly individual Irish actress Fiona Shaw directed Macbeth while also playing the part of Lady Macbeth. Both Shaw and Sheen, directing an audiobook production for the first time, produced extremely vivid Shakespeare.
The next big step for the Shakespeare series was through the distinguished former BBC producer John Tydeman, who brought Paul Scofield into the Naxos AudioBooks studio to play King Lear. Scofield, celebrating his eightieth birthday year, headed one of the finest casts ever assembled for an audiobook drama production, with Emilia Fox as Cordelia, Kenneth Branagh as the Fool, and Alec McCowen as The Earl of Gloucester. Tydeman also directed The Tempest with Ian McKellen (fresh from his triumph as Gandalf) as Prospero. Finally, a three-way production between the Donmar Warehouse (one of the leading London theatres), BBC Radio 3 and Naxos AudioBooks brought the award-winning stage production of Othello to CD with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Ewan McGregor as Iago, directed by the Donmar’s Michael Grandage.
The Story of Naxos Page 30