Walton feels privileged to have recorded for Naxos the entire series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English choral music with the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge directed by Christopher Robinson (with repertoire ranging from Stanford to Rubbra and Tavener). He has also been responsible for recording live concerts, directing the necessary patch sessions after the audience’s departure. He has encountered and dealt with most glitches that can bedevil a recording: musicians who come to the session unprepared, traffic noise, rain from holes in the roof, fluttering pigeons in the roof space, having to pay off street vendors who make too much noise outside the recording studio, and musicians who arrive late. He was recording the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue and other pieces for the Naxos series of William Walton’s orchestral music when a bassoonist, needed for one work, was forty minutes late. It meant that in order not to overrun and incur very expensive overtime, the English Northern Philharmonia and Paul Daniel had time for only one take of March for A History of the English Speaking Peoples’. They nailed it with eight seconds to go.
However, the international nature and the sheer size of the Naxos recording programme has meant that the bulk of the recording work has been done by other teams. One of the most important contributions made over many years is by the producer Ibolya Tóth in Budapest, with the engineer János Bohus. Tóth was a student (composition and conducting) at the Liszt Academy at the same time as Jen Jandó, András Schiff and Zoltán Kocsis, and as their playing careers developed she moved into production, first of all in radio and then, in 1980, with the Hungarian national record company, Hungaroton. She was already working there when Heymann began his association with the company: it recommended musicians and recorded on his behalf for Marco Polo and – in the very early days – Naxos. In October 1987, when still with Hungaroton, Tóth worked on István Székely’s recording of Chopin’s Ballades and Scherzi, made for Naxos at the Italian Institute in Budapest. The contact with Naxos was to change her life.
By the end of the decade Tóth was producing regularly for Naxos as Hungarian musicians provided much of the Viennese repertoire. In two groups of sessions in May and June 1989 she recorded Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 21 (‘Elvira Madigan’) with Jen Jandó and Concentus Hungaricus, conducted by András Ligeti: it was to be the start of the complete cycle. In 1990 Tóth left Hungaroton and started her own recording company, Phoenix Studio, though she continued to record at the Italian Institute and the United Reformed Church in Budapest. ‘Hungary was very backward at the time, though we could make very good records!’ she says. ‘We had no fax machine at the start, and I remember sitting and watching the first fax come through, and I really couldn’t believe it.’
There were further Jandó discs made in 1990 (including Liszt’s B minor Sonata); Tóth was in the producer’s chair when Jandó recorded most of his major cycles, including the complete Mozart sonatas and concertos, the Haydn sonatas, and Bartók’s piano music. She produced the Kodály Quartet’s recordings of the complete Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert quartets as well as the Éder Quartet’s complete Mozart string quintet cycle; and she produced Béla Drahos and the Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia’s recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies (she herself founded the Sinfonia in 1992).
In 1995, the same year in which K&A started, she took the bold step of designing Phoenix’s own large, purpose-built recording studio in Diósd on the outskirts of Budapest. This is where all her recordings were subsequently made, including Mozart’s operas for Naxos. Phoenix became the leading independent classical production team in Hungary and, although it recorded for others, Naxos was for many years its major client. Tóth recorded, edited, worked with the musicians to arrive at a final edit, and sent the recordings to K&A to be mastered. Such was the standard of her work that there were rarely any problems.
Other Naxos regular musicians started to come to Hungary to record, including the cellist Maria Kliegel and the pianist Christopher Hinterhuber, whose C.P.E. Bach discs were recorded in Budapest. Over the years, Tóth has produced more than 350 Naxos recordings, which have sold in excess of three million discs. ‘The producer is a mirror to an artist,’ she remarks. ‘The musician never knows the reality of what they are doing until they hear it back. So in the recording, the musician is the inner ear and I am the outer ear.’ After hundreds of recordings – and her CD covers on the wall include Hungarian folk musicians as well – it is clear that neither her passion for music nor her respect for many of the musicians whom she records has diminished. Jen Jandó is one example. ‘Jen has an ability to learn music quickly, but his true talent is that he absorbs it so naturally, so instinctively, that it sounds as if he has been playing it for years. Even when he was recording such a lot of music for Naxos in such a short time, it was always fresh and idiomatic. He doesn’t think of what he can do with it or how he should play it: the music is immediately expressive. And at any one time, he has twenty-five or thirty piano concertos in his head.’
The team of Norbert and Bonnie Kraft in Toronto has been similarly active for Naxos. The success of the Krafts’ productions, which began with guitar CDs, led to a wider recording brief. They began to take on more ambitious projects, from period performance of key orchestral works, such as Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music with the Aradia Ensemble directed by Kevin Mallon, to full Baroque opera and oratorio. The largest recording was of Berlioz’s Requiem with 400 musicians, which was quite a challenge. Yet they were equally comfortable recording Ilya Kaler’s solo violin discs of Bach and Ysaÿe. The Krafts became the primary production team for Naxos’s solo and chamber music in North America and started to attract Naxos musicians from all over the world: the Vermeer Quartet recorded Bartók, the New Zealand String Quartet recorded Mendelssohn, Boris Berman recorded Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, Patrick Gallois recorded French flute music, and Takako Nishizaki came from Hong Kong to record the final group of Mozart’s violin sonatas. At one point, the Krafts were producing as many as thirty recordings a year – recording, editing and mastering. In two decades with Naxos they have made nearly 250 recordings.
One of the most prolific producer–engineers of the past decade is the UK-based Tim Handley. Since the turn of the century he has travelled the world, working on everything from solo discs to recordings of the largest scale. He generally works on his own, happy to produce and engineer, and has made over 200 Naxos recordings, including two huge ‘live’ projects: William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience conducted by Leonard Slatkin and John Adams’s Nixon in China conducted by Marin Alsop. These live recordings place considerable pressure on the producer, who has to work fast and immediately identify sections for the patching sessions that follow: there is very little room for error. But most of Handley’s work has been in studio conditions. In July 2008 he was with the Nashville Symphony, again with Leonard Slatkin, working on the Abraham Lincoln Portraits disc. A couple of weeks later he was in France with the Orchestre National de Lyon and Jun Märkl recording Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, Les Offrandes oubliées and other works. Then came a volume of Roussel in Glasgow with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Stéphane Denève; just over a month later he was in New Zealand to record symphonies by Sibelius with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Pietari Inkinen; then it was back to Glasgow for more Roussel. In between this travel, he returned to his studio in London to edit.
There are many other producers around the world regularly working on Naxos projects. Michael Ponder has produced numerous solo and chamber music recordings in the UK, and Günther Appenheimer is still producing for Naxos after decades. The production team of Karol Kopernicky and Otto Nopp continues to look after the mammoth complete Johann Strauss I Edition with the Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina conducted by Christian Pollack and the late Ernst Maerzendorfer in Slovakia, one of the most extraordinary Marco Polo enterprises.
From the very first Marco Polo discs, Klaus Heymann ensured that the recording details were
accurately printed on the back of each CD and he saw no reason why this should not be continued on Naxos, despite its budget status. As a record collector himself, he knew the contribution made by the producers and engineers: he was always intrigued as to when a recording was made, by whom and where. Most of the musicians know how much is owed to the technicians who work on a project, and this is acknowledged on Naxos and Marco Polo, with care taken over details.
Recording Speech
While all the music recording was happening, Naxos AudioBooks was steadily producing its catalogue of classic literature. Most of its recordings are one-voice productions, but speech recording is a different discipline, involving special microphones and a studio with little, or no, natural ambience – unlike music recording, which requires a more lively acoustic. With some works running to thirty or even forty CDs (War and Peace unabridged was fifty-one) it means that the reader and producer can be working together for as long as three weeks, virtually on a daily basis. The producer is crucial to the recording: he must know the text intimately and will have reached clear decisions on the pronunciation of esoteric names and places. Roy McMillan, who has produced many of the major unabridged classics (including Middlemarch read by Juliet Stevenson and Nicholas Nickleby read by David Horovitch), will discuss with the actor the tone of the work and the interpretation of the protagonists, and this can influence the character of the whole performance.
Recording classic plays, with a large cast, music and sound effects, makes considerable technical demands – in the studio as well as in the long process of editing: both the Battle of Agincourt in the fields of France and the death of Juliet in the tomb in Verona must sound equally realistic.
Editing speech is a specialist skill, as is mastering. For classical music a wide dynamic range is the requirement; for speech the priority is that all the words can be heard wherever the recording is being listened to – in the car, on a train, or in a quieter environment at home. If the dynamic range is too wide, the quieter speech cannot be heard while the louder speech can come as a sharp shock to the listener. Putting music to speech is also a particular skill; it has to be done with sensitivity.
For the first few years Simon Weir of the Classical Recording Company oversaw many of the Naxos AudioBooks recordings. For the last decade the principal editor has been Sarah Butcher. She has edited hundreds of hours of recordings, from The History of Opera by Richard Fawkes (with all its musical excerpts), read by Robert Powell, to Anton Lesser’s reading of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. As a professional cellist, she has been able to use her knowledge to select appropriate accompanying music and place it with exceptional skill.
Contracts and the Organisation of Recordings
Recordings have to be organised, and organised well. Fixing the hall, booking the musicians, getting the music to the right place at the right time, scheduling the sessions – these are administrative issues that require not just organisational ability but an intimate knowledge of music, and often language skills.
At the heart of the Naxos recording operation for most of its life has been the Slovakian musicologist Ivan Marton. Helped by his background in music and an ability to work in English, French, German, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Italian and Dutch as well as his native Czech, Marton ensured that the recording programme in the first decade and more was kept on the rails, no matter how frenetic the pace. He became the Naxos fixer and contract manager. During the mid-1990s he was looking after as many as 200 recordings a year from his small office in Bratislava, sometimes with one assistant but often on his own. It could be a sonata programme involving just two musicians or a full opera involving orchestra, chorus and twenty or more soloists: all the details and the principal organisation would go through his hands.
He first met Klaus Heymann in the mid-1980s when he worked for Slovart, the state export–import business that handled all commercial affairs for arts organisations in the Slovakian part of Czechoslovakia. ‘We met at MIDEM, and I was very excited because Klaus said he wanted to make forty recordings of popular repertoire.’ In the summer of 1987 the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra started to record the CDs and Marton remembers it as a very busy time. ‘It was the communist period and Klaus Heymann brought the musicians work, money and hope! They were doing two and sometimes three sessions a day – and these were four-hour sessions, not three hours like today.’
The project encountered political problems within the communist regime and the work shifted to the Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, but Marton continued to work closely with Heymann. In May 1989, just before the Velvet Revolution, Marton left Slovart and joined Naxos. The expansion of the recording programme meant that Naxos needed a full-time administrator and A&R advisor. For nearly a decade he organised all the recordings that happened in Eastern Europe, including Russia, the Ukraine, Poland and Hungary. He went to many of the sessions in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Budapest, and advised on new orchestras to record, as and when they were needed.
The opera recording programme, which Marton started in Bratislava, was particularly demanding administratively. ‘We had to make a very detailed plan so that the singers knew exactly when they were required: they had busy schedules which meant that as soon as they had sung their arias they would leave immediately for their next job.’ Marton worked closely with the relevant conductor and scheduled the sessions to the minute. They had to decide how long a scene would take to record and ensure that all the singers would be there at the right time. There was very little room for error. ‘We knew that if we got seriously behind, we were unlikely ever to make it up!’ The pressure was considerable. ‘It was exciting and exhausting.’
From the late 1990s, as Naxos began to record more regularly in Western Europe and elsewhere around the world, much of the A&R administration went to Hong Kong, where it is now looked after by Edith Lei. Marton’s work concentrated on the contracts. Clear contracts have been the bedrock of Naxos, right from the beginning. Each musician must have a signed contract in place before the start of any recording so that there are no misunderstandings at a later stage. After more than two decades Marton continues to work from Bratislava, doing all the key contract work and advising on certain specialist projects, such as the recording of Martinu’s Piano Concertos by the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra with pianist Giorgio Koukl, released in 2010.
Booklets and Designs
Every Naxos and Marco Polo CD and download recording comes with booklet notes (or ‘liner notes’, as they are often referred to in the trade). Their existence is so ubiquitous that they are an expected part of the CD package. But they have played such an essential part of the Naxos story that they have become, in their way, extraordinary. Their existence in the very early days demonstrated that although this was a budget label there was no need to stint on giving the customer the basics that he or she would expect from any good classical label. This helped enormously as Naxos closed the gap on the majors, showing that this budget company from Hong Kong provided everything that the full-price labels did. The trouble was the presentation of the notes: they simply didn’t look impressive enough. They were laid out in the simplest of typefaces in the simplest of ways, with little attempt at interesting design. Clarity was the watchword. There were between 1,000 and 1,200 straightforward words of information about the composer and the work, plus something about the performer. And that was that.
The early Naxos releases concentrated, of course, on the most popular classical works; neither critics nor collectors who picked up the CDs were likely to feel newly informed about the background to Eine kleine Nachtmusik or Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Heymann was often told that notes were not really needed, that money could be saved here; but he had his eye on his main customers – the newcomers to classical music who wanted to build up a basic classical CD collection, and the students who were eager to learn. They were being given exactly the right amount of information at the required level. So he persisted.
W
ithin a relatively short time, there started to appear works slightly off the beaten track. Suddenly the notes were being read even by collectors, who couldn’t quite recall the provenance of the piano quintets by Schumann or Brahms, for example, and found themselves usefully and reliably enlightened.
For followers of Marco Polo this was nothing new. For more than five years they had been reading and relying upon the notes accompanying those recordings. Many of the composers were relatively obscure and the works even more so. There were several composers from Eastern Europe and the Baltic; and even when well-known composers were represented, it was by works that were just lines in the history books. Collectors of Marco Polo would put on the LPs (and then CDs) before turning straight to the liner notes for information – and there they were: at least 1,000 words of clear, informative text explaining how the works came to be written, in what context and when. At the bottom was the bland line, ‘Notes by Keith Anderson’. They were always by Keith Anderson. When Naxos began producing hundreds of recordings a year, that line was still there: ‘Notes by Keith Anderson’. For years and years it was the same. So who was, or is, Keith Anderson?
The Story of Naxos Page 33