The management of this is remarkable, all the more so because much of it goes through the hands of just one man: Klaus Heymann. In the early years of Naxos, when he was consciously building a catalogue, all repertoire and artist choices were his. Much of it was carefully planned, with lists of works and priorities. As the label grew, the confidence of his planning grew with it, until within five years it was very clear to him that he was building a world-class classical library with major repertoire. He proved himself adept at both creating a catalogue of works and choosing artists to perform the music. From his base in Hong Kong he read proposals, listened to DATs and to people, and with the support and advice of Takako Nishizaki he came to definite conclusions. He was not afraid or shy to say ‘no’ as often as he said ‘yes’, or to say ‘yes – but not that repertoire’.
A quarter of a century later, he seems not to have lost his touch. Instinct, information, an openness to ideas, a commercial nose and risk-taking have created Naxos. This is his A&R method, though it is not one that any conventional corporate entity could stomach. He has made a few mistakes but more often than not he has turned them to his advantage, converting a loss into an eventual gain.
Nowadays, while he still approves all new recordings, ideas and offers flow in from many different sources: agents, musicians, conductors, orchestras, impresarios, scholars, even individual collectors and classical music enthusiasts. All of it is coordinated by his director of A&R, Edith Lei (formerly general manager of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra), who also reminds him of the production costs when he considers a recording that she thinks will not sell sufficiently. In addition, he evaluates suggestions and projects proposed by the Naxos subsidiaries. The UK and USA are most active, with recording programmes that dwarf many independent labels; but there are ideas constantly put forward by other territories – from Scandinavia, Greece and Spain to Japan, New Zealand and Australia. He filters the repertoire and the artists carefully. He may mix and match, approving the repertoire idea but preferring it to be done by another orchestra for musical or marketing reasons; he may decline the repertoire because it is already in the pipeline or is too marginal (even for him) but want to work with the artist or orchestra – in which case he may come up with a counter-suggestion.
All these ideas go through to a master file that is maintained by Lei in Hong Kong and called, with refreshing and characteristically Naxos simplicity, ‘Recordings in the Pipeline’. This consists of a regularly updated spreadsheet of twelve separate pages, each with the current number of scheduled recordings in a particular category. At the time of writing, this was the picture: Orchestral 176, Concertos 73, Chamber 163, Instrumental 139, Vocal and Choral 76, Miscellaneous 31, English 64, Ballet, Opera & Stage 32, American 90, Other Regions 42, Blu-ray Audio 11 and Artaria (the publishing house) 10. This document does not include the book wing (incorporating Naxos Educational, Naxos AudioBooks and Naxos Books), which is run as a separate division. It is for regular new Naxos recordings, as well as finished recordings accepted from individuals and those previously released on labels such as Delos or Collins Classics.
It is a massive, well-organised operation. In previous years there were times when Heymann’s enthusiasm was so extreme that a project could be confirmed without being entered in the system: the first that the staff would know about it was when the master turned up. Surprises like that were not infrequent in the 1990s and a huge backlog of masters built up on the shelves at K&A’s mastering suite in Potters Bar, UK.
All masters go to K&A, and production information (the label copy) is entered into the Naxos production schedule maintained by Peter Bromley. As production manager he has the task of scheduling these releases into months, in detail for the coming two months and in general for further ahead. The construction of this schedule is a complex if fascinating job, for many factors need to be considered.
The sheer number of releases is always a problem. Salesmen worldwide do not like having to present an unwieldy Naxos release schedule, and often there are around thirty titles in a month. Certain dates dictate placement: anniversaries and concert tours, for example. There may be contractual reasons established at the start which state that a recording must be released at a particular time. Then there are planned campaigns (some international, some regional), often prepared far ahead for a specific reason. The balance of repertoire each month is important. The aim is to include: one blockbuster (big orchestral or choral–orchestral or opera recording); a concerto; an orchestral recording; one early music or Baroque recording; one guitar or lute recording; a chamber music recording; a keyboard recording; a national recording (other than ‘American Classics’); one ‘American Classics’ recording (if the other categories do not include works by American composers); an opera recording (if the blockbuster is not an opera); one choral recording (if the blockbuster is not a choral–orchestral recording) and every other month a lieder/song recording. Despite his collector’s instinct, Heymann asks that no more than 25 per cent of each month’s titles are what can be described as specialist releases. Only too often, this is not possible.
Other priorities that contribute to the selection process are: core repertoire; recordings by key artists; the continuation of series; commitments to competitions (guitar, violin, cello or piano); long-term commitments to festivals; projects brought by subsidiaries; and the bank of finished masters simply awaiting release! In addition to all this, there must be a balance of music from different periods and a variety in terms of nationality – not too many American classics or English orchestral music, for example, which may be indigestible for other territories. Smooth scheduling can be complicated by a number of scenarios: unexpected problems may arise with masters or notes or permissions; a year may be full up, but suddenly an important contract is signed with an orchestra that stipulates early release of a number of recordings (which could not only challenge the number of releases but cause a repertoire clash); a recording may just have been made that is considered to be of exceptional, award-winning standard – can it be rush-released to make it in time for the GRAMMY Awards? And so on.
Managing the Naxos release schedule is an ever-changing juggling act that connects closely with recording, editing and artwork production, not to mention sales, marketing and promotion, and other commercial demands.
In January each year the Naxos distributors interact and meet customers at MIDEM in Cannes, but their main focus is the day of Naxos presentations in a hotel conference room. The highlight of this is the start, when the coming year’s releases are put on a big screen and Klaus Heymann takes his distributors through those recordings which he thinks are most important or interesting. It is the moment when all aspects of the company’s production work come to one point. Each month may have around thirty releases, but he will focus on five or six and play excerpts from just one or two. These do not include local crossover campaigns based on back-catalogue exploitation or promotion of a particularly local artist: it is the international new release schedule that is in the spotlight, the backbone of Naxos, by which it stands or falls. When Heymann unveils these plans each year, he takes the floor for around thirty minutes, without notes, and you can hear a pin drop.
Recording, Producing and Editing
It takes Andrew Walton and his K&A production team about four hours to set up the equipment for a Shostakovich symphony recording with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Vasily Petrenko in the city centre’s Philharmonic Hall. Phil Rowlands, the engineer, likes to use a matched pair of AKG 414 microphones as a main system, together with Schoeps outriggers, then individual cardioid mics at the head of each string section and for the woodwinds. Depending on the symphony, he places spot mics for the brass and – it being Shostakovich – for the percussion.
Hundreds of metres of cabling between the control room and studio have to be neatly laid, and the mixing desk and computers have to be organised: there is a back-up system but the recording goes straight into the SADiE software on the compu
ter (the same software that will later be used to edit it). Walton and Rowlands will be in the studio for four three-hour sessions over two days – or for five sessions over two and a half days if the music is particularly challenging, in terms of either playing or recording. It can be a tense time, with everyone working at full concentration for long periods, and technical hitches or blemishes are the last thing that anyone wants.
Before the first session the producer and conductor will already have had a discussion about the work itself. Walton will know the score well and be aware of the difficult spots, and his task is to enable Petrenko to realise his interpretation. Petrenko will highlight bars where, perhaps, he wants to bring out an inner melody, or push on the tempo, or is aiming for a particular balance between woodwind and strings. As it happens, Walton himself was a professional violinist before he turned to producing so it is an added benefit that he knows the work from a player’s point of view. The relationship between producer and conductor is crucial and can make or break a recording: some of the finest recordings in the history of the record industry have come from a special understanding between these two figures; when the relationship falters – or, even worse, breaks down – the sessions can turn into a nightmare for everyone.
‘As producer, you never go into a recording session thinking that you are going to put your own ideas of a work across,’ says Walton. ‘You may disagree with what the conductor wants, but it is his or her recording. Empathy is really important. On the other hand, you have to be open and say when you think something is not working, and suggest ways of getting what you think the conductor is after.’
Walton marks the score as he goes, noting the takes and bars that have worked and the sections that need improving. Producers work in different ways; some even have a system of coloured pencils for successive takes, though Walton keeps it fairly simple. However, he aims to leave the sessions with a relatively clear plan of preferred takes marked on the score, so that when he starts to edit there is a good roadmap to follow.
Back in the K&A studios in Potters Bar he will start by observing the initial editing plan he made at the sessions, though he will listen to other takes to see if perhaps there was something a bit better that he hadn’t noticed – maybe a detail that was clearer. He will produce a first edit to which the conductor will listen and make comments; Walton will try to implement these when he makes the second edit. He reckons that by the end of the editing stage he has listened to more or less everything again twice. It generally takes four or five days before the recording is ready to be mastered. This is the general process that lies behind all Naxos titles: a considerable amount of expertise, care and detailed work goes into just one, which can be showered with awards and sales, or dismissed in one trenchant line by a critic.
The basic pattern has changed little since Marco Polo and then Naxos started, though technology for both recording and editing has moved on considerably. Many Marco Polo recordings were made in two centres, Bratislava and Budapest; and when Naxos began, Heymann relied on a recording team based in Heidelberg that had been put together by Teije van Geest, with producers Martin Sauer and Günther Appenheimer. Their names are on the back of numerous Naxos CDs dating from the early years. On 10 July 1987 Appenheimer left Heidelberg in a van packed with his recording equipment. By the morning of 12 July he was set up in the Concert Hall of the Slovak Philharmonic, ready for the first session of The Four Seasons played by Takako Nishizaki and the Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Stephen Gunzenhauser. (He was a producer who was happy to set up the microphones and engineer the recording himself – as are some Naxos producers even now.) It took nearly a week, because the sessions had to be slotted within the normal work of the musicians and use of the concert hall. So for the recording team there was quite a lot of waiting! When the sessions finished, Appenheimer returned to Heidelberg where the van Geest team (a busy independent company) edited and mastered the recording. On 10 October 1987 Appenheimer was back in Bratislava to record the Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Wolfgang Sobotka, playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Serenata notturna and Lodron Night Music. The recording is still available and sales are approaching 250,000 CDs. This process continued for some years, though the rapid expansion of Naxos (and Marco Polo) meant that recordings were made in many other centres too, and were produced and engineered by teams all over Europe, from London to Moscow as well as in the US, the Far East and New Zealand. Generally the edited DATs went to Heidelberg to be mastered.
The success of the label began to put the spotlight of critics and consumers not only on the performances but also on the technical aspects of the recordings. While most were acceptable, Heymann realised that Naxos had to achieve a greater consistency of standard. There was an equally urgent need for a central studio to collate and organise the hundreds of tapes flooding in from all over the world. Heymann decided it was time to set up a dedicated Naxos production facility. In 1995 David Denton, who was initiating many recordings in the UK, introduced him to Andrew Walton, then a young but keen producer who was dividing his time between his passion for record-making and freelance work as a professional violinist. He had long been fascinated by the recording process and was spending an increasing number of hours in front of a mixing desk rather than a conductor. It was Walton who produced the first private recordings made by the Maggini Quartet, which led to the group’s contract with Naxos. Those recordings also led to a complete change of career for Walton. He spoke on the phone with Heymann (in Hong Kong), who had heard the recordings and could judge their quality; and even before the two met, Heymann invited Walton to form a joint venture company and provided funds to rent premises, buy equipment to set up a state-of-the-art studio, and hire staff. Most contact with Heymann was via fax during this period as he was in either Hong Kong or New Zealand, but after some two months the process distilled into the creation of the company that Heymann named ‘K&A [Klaus and Andrew] Productions’, its primary purpose being to set up a mastering house to consolidate and raise the technical quality of Naxos and Marco Polo CDs. Despite going into business together, Heymann and Walton didn’t actually meet until they both attended a sales conference in Germany later in the year.
K&A’s task involved the careful auditioning of every recording that was sent to Naxos for release – checking it against the score for performance mistakes, audible edits, noises, unequal levels and the many other problems that can spoil an otherwise good recording. Sometimes extensive corrections needed to be made. Walton remembers that for those first few years he was surprised at the varying standards of recordings submitted by producers. Part of the problem was simply the number passing through the hands of producers and editors: Heymann’s ambitious plans – provoked by both enthusiasm and consumer demand – had put the system under strain. Each recording was now put through a meticulous quality control. There were times when Walton requested the re-recording of material because problems could not be fixed by his team; sometimes he even recommended that recordings should be discarded because they did not meet the labels’ high standards. Copies of such examples would be sent from Potters Bar to Hong Kong, where Heymann and Nishizaki, reluctant to lose a whole recording, would listen to them. Almost always they accepted Walton’s advice.
It was a very busy time in Potters Bar. Between July 1995 (the month that the fledgling company took wing) and the end of the year, 211 recordings were mastered. In 1996 the total grew to 515, which reflected the continuous activity by Naxos musicians all over the world. It stayed at that 500 level for nearly a decade. In 2004 it shot up to 752. By this time K&A had expanded within the Potters Bar building and had at least six mastering engineers working full time. The recordings covered the gamut of the Naxos enterprise: new recitals, orchestral music, chamber music and opera; and a huge number of historical recordings, most of which had been expertly transferred from 78s by Mark Obert-Thorn and Ward Marston on the other side of the Atlantic but still had to have the track points inserted, be checked gene
rally, and then be mastered. In 2005 the total rose to 898; 2007 was the top year, with 950 recordings, before the number settled down to a more manageable average of 700.
The pace of Heymann’s recording programme meant that there was inevitably a backlog: sometimes there were as many as 600 recordings sitting on the shelves, logged and with paperwork, waiting to be mastered. The volume of work was such that some recordings were delayed in their release for years. In the first fifteen years of K&A some 10,130 recordings were checked and mastered, and many of them were edited too. In addition, its high standards had become recognised by other record labels and the company found itself in demand by both majors and independents for its services. ‘We wanted to make a product that was technically and musically from the top drawer, regardless of price,’ declares Walton. The regular editing commissions from award-winning labels and producers were the proof that this aim was being achieved.
Of course the days of editing with tape and razor were over: everything was digital. For the first few years K&A used Sonic Solutions, an editing software system based on the Apple Mac. Then it switched to SADiE, a PC-based system that it still uses today. Initially everything was mastered from DATs but gradually CD-Rs came in. The nature of the work and the ever-changing technical environment meant that Walton was constantly investing in the latest equipment. He was fortunate to have in Heymann a partner with a background in studio equipment who knew how important it was to be at the forefront of technology. In fact, regardless of its budget price, Heymann wanted Naxos to put out its top new recordings in the latest format of the day, and this has led to the label being a trail blazer in new formats, be it DVD-Audio, SACD or BD-Audio. Recent years have seen a rapid expansion of classical DVDs, and K&A has added DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring to its roster of activities.
The initial purpose of K&A was to be a mastering house, with quality control its main function; but less than a year after the company started, it was in charge of recording sessions as well. Paul Myers, the distinguished former CBS and Decca producer, had started to work for Naxos but in 1996 became ill during a recording session in Bristol of piano music by Wilhelm Stenhammar, played by Niklas Sivelöv. Walton and his team stepped in, and within a short time they were equally busy recording as well as mastering. Walton has always preferred to work with a sound engineer, so that he can concentrate on producing and working with the musicians. In the following years he and his team travelled all over the world, recording for Naxos and Marco Polo. Many discs of French, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese music were made by them, involving long hours of driving or flying, usually transporting their own recording equipment. The symphonies of the Portuguese composer Joly Braga Santos, conducted by Álvaro Cassuto, took Walton to Lisbon, Dublin, Bournemouth and the Algarve; Guridi was recorded in Bilbao, Hanson in Nashville and Yashiro in Japan. One of the most challenging but rewarding tasks was recording the ten Naxos Quartets by Peter Maxwell Davies, played by the Maggini Quartet in Potton Hall, Suffolk.
The Story of Naxos Page 32