Harmonia Mundi was even more swamped with orders. It was still only 1991. The majors responded with the accusation that Naxos exploited Eastern European artists. Heymann and Denton countered it but already they were beginning to plan the next stage: recording in the UK. Naxos was offering fair fees and most orchestras had no basic objection to working for a budget label. One or two majors (and even an independent or two!) tried to stop this by saying that any orchestra or artist who worked for Naxos would never be welcomed back to them; but, regardless, a number of orchestras came on board, including the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Northern Sinfonia, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, English Northern Philharmonia and BBC Philharmonic. They were joined by a group of capable freelance recording engineers who were all given due credit on the CDs: Andrew Walton, Tim Handley, Chris Craker, Gary Cole, John Taylor and Michael Ponder. They were all needed, too, because the UK was becoming an important recording centre for both standard repertoire and specifically English music (broadened, from time to time, to a ‘British’ music series).
The UK was a hive of Naxos activity. As 1991 progressed it was clear that Naxos was outgrowing Harmonia Mundi, whose French founder, Bernard Coutaz, looked in disbelief at some of the sales that his satellite company was achieving. He was less than happy to discover that a Hong Kong-based budget enterprise was outpacing his distinguished label. He instructed his company’s UK directors, Graham Haysom and Fergus Lawlor, to discontinue distribution of Naxos, even though it made an important contribution to the company’s turnover. Haysom contacted Heymann and informed him; but, confident that Naxos could be the label of the future, Haysom suggested that the three of them (Heymann, Haysom and Lawlor) set up their own joint-venture distribution company. Matters moved swiftly, and in October 1991 Select Music and Video Distribution Ltd began trading from an industrial estate in Redhill, Surrey, with the primary purpose of distributing Naxos and a broader aim of bringing other labels on board to enable greater economies of scale.
It was the right decision. Every year between 1991 and 1997, sales of the Naxos label increased dramatically. This was partly because the catalogue itself was growing with astonishing speed. Denton instigated a busy programme of recordings, at times with two a week somewhere in the UK. Helped by a good review and excellent sales of Elgar’s First Symphony conducted by George Hurst, he had convinced Heymann that English music could sell. In a typically expansive manner, Heymann asked Denton to prepare programmes for his top 100 English music CDs and record them. (Denton notes that only in 2008 was this at last finished, the final recording being two volumes of Tippett’s string quartets.) There was the Walton series from the English Northern Philharmonia; the Bax symphony cycle from David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; a variety of Bliss recordings; and the series of English chamber music that was begun by the Maggini Quartet. With good reviews resulting from these recordings, Naxos was beginning to be respected specifically for its contribution to British music. It was a reputation that even travelled abroad to other Naxos territories and helped to feed the international profile of the company.
Denton also advanced the label’s expansion into period performance. It was not of particular interest for Heymann, whose focus was the central classical repertoire played on conventional instruments. However, as with English music, he listened to Denton and agreed to trial a few recordings, notably those of the Oxford Camerata and the Rose Consort of Viols; these proved their worth commercially and musically. Denton and his wife went to concerts countrywide, searching out players who could record specific repertoire for Naxos. He only suggested to Heymann musicians whom he had personally heard (and vetted) in concert, and whose performances he felt assured could be replicated for the microphone.
Hand in hand with these imaginative A&R pursuits, which were totally unexpected from a budget label based in Hong Kong, went lively commercial development. Naxos CDs had originally been displayed variously in shops’ general classical racks but people had started to search for the white label with the £4.99 sticker. So HMV began to rack Naxos on its own in long bins, and the spread of white covers resulted in what became known as the ‘Naxos White Wall’. No other label was displayed like this and it established a strong brand identity. Sales followed. Customers would browse the Naxos White Wall and go to the tills with not just one or two but often a handful. They saw Naxos as a real bargain. This migrated to other retailers. Haysom remembers distinctly that in September 1993 Select Music received its biggest single order thus far: £250,000’s worth of Naxos CDs sold to Our Price, one of the leading record chains, which had decided to stock the label in every one of its shops. It was the first time that Our Price had committed itself to a classical budget label in this way: it was recognising the demand.
Select Music was proving a success and other full-price labels decided to join the company, despite some apprehension about its link with a budget label. Of course it had started with its own full-price label, Marco Polo. Although Marco Polo was perhaps overshadowed by the sheer commercial success of Naxos, Heymann continued to invest in it, and its principal aim of providing premiere recordings of Romantic and late Romantic music continued. It was a label full of interest and still prized by collectors. Among those which joined it at Select was one of the finest in the UK: in 1995 Ted Perry decided to take a risk and came on board with his star classical label Hyperion. European labels such as BIS and CPO, and new initiatives such as Clarinet Classics, were followed by another leading English independent, ASV. By that time Select had already taken up the challenge of Naxos AudioBooks, distributing recordings of classic literature on CD and cassette into bookshops in the UK.
The company could clearly manage all these new ventures: it had proved profitable from the start and exceeded its budget every year. In 1996, for the first time, it sold over one million discs and had a turnover of £4 million. Naxos was the jewel in the crown, commercially speaking, and in the early years accounted for 80 per cent of its turnover. By 1997 this had balanced to 60/40, though the unit split weighed more highly in Naxos’s favour. As the Naxos label consolidated itself, its UK market share continued to increase. Although prejudice persisted it was lessening with every year, as artistic enterprise, in the fields of both British and international repertoire, could not be ignored. Haysom and Lawlor started Select when distribution for independent classical labels had recently gone through an uneven period, with a number of companies appearing and then going to the wall. Select succeeded both because it was efficiently run and because it had its own top-selling record label to promote. It was a winning formula. Throughout the 1990s not only was turnover going up at least 20 per cent per annum but the budget was exceeded every year too. By the mid-1990s Naxos’s market share of CD sales in the UK was approaching 13 per cent at a time when EMI’s was around 30 per cent and Universal’s (Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and Philips) was 30–35 per cent.
Naxos was everywhere – and not always under its own brand: for a few years, a selection of Naxos titles (some deleted and some new) appeared under the brand of the leading bookshop chain Dillons. Graham Haysom says, ‘There is no doubt that during this time Klaus had upped his game, improving the standard of artists, the recordings, the production, the presentation and the promotion. This increase in the quality of the label is what made the success of Select possible in the 1990s.’
By 1997 a difference of approach had emerged between Haysom and Lawlor on one side and Heymann on the other. Haysom and Lawlor had ambitious plans to diversify: they saw Select first and foremost as an efficient distribution company which could, potentially, distribute anything that their target shops would buy. Haysom admits, ‘I didn’t want all our eggs in one [classical CD] basket, not least because the classical music world is relatively small.’ Heymann, however, was keen to concentrate on the distribution of purely classical music. It was another turning point for Naxos as a label because it underpinned Heymann’
s principal goal at the time: to make Naxos into a sound encyclopedia of classical music without being distracted by other money-making ventures, however attractive they might be. He had no idea, at this juncture, that the world of recording was soon going to be turned on its head by another advance in technology. The use of the Internet in the industry was beginning to appear, but classical music’s future still appeared locked into the CD, despite glimmers of DVD and other formats.
In the autumn of 1997 Heymann took over control of the production and distribution activities in the UK. Haysom and Lawlor left Select, and at the same time David and Rona Denton retired (they had been concentrating on new recordings and they were ready to pass on the busy schedule). The UK had become possibly the single most important Naxos centre outside Hong Kong, with three strands to its activity: production, mastering (at K&A Productions, set up by Heymann with Andrew Walton in 1995) and distribution. Heymann needed someone to oversee it all and he turned to Anthony Anderson, then Naxos classical label manager who had been based in Hong Kong for eight years. A classics graduate with a wide knowledge of music (and son of Keith Anderson, the company’s main writer of liner notes), Anthony Anderson returned to the UK in July of that year to become managing director of Select and represent Heymann in all other Naxos activities in the country.
It was a challenging appointment for Anderson: the company was by now the leading independent classical distributor in the UK; Naxos AudioBooks was winning awards but experiencing sales and distribution problems; the amount of mastering work going through K&A was increasing beyond all expectations; and the A&R centre, formerly in Hong Kong and briefly New Zealand, was moved to the UK too. ‘My main memory of that time is that it was a tremendously hectic period, but I was also very driven by the new responsibility,’ says Anderson. ‘The basic aims were to keep a reasonable level of profitability and increase Naxos’s market share. We increased the investment in the marketing of Naxos, including, for a while, advertising in the national press. From 1997 to 2000 Naxos CD sales increased by around 35 per cent and they reached their height in 2002.’ That was the bottom line; but in the decade following his arrival Anderson had to encounter the widespread effects of enormous changes in the record industry itself.
In Select he found a well-organised distribution company that was still looking to expand. At its centre was Naxos, a label that was already exceeding its original brief of providing reliable recordings of central classical repertoire at budget price. In the release schedules could be anything from John Cage and Pierre Boulez to Rameau on period instruments; Arnold, Bax or Stamitz; Korngold, Josquin Desprez or the complete chamber music of Poulenc; works by Einojuhani Rautavaara or waltzes by Johann Strauss II. Important also for many years was the Naxos Historical catalogue, with its highly praised transfers providing anew some of the finest classical and jazz recordings of the past. Naxos was fast becoming a label with the highest aspirations of any existing classical record company, though often it seemed an uphill task to convey this position to both the classical press and the classical collectors. The collectors got there first, voting with their purses and buying the new releases in bulk; but perhaps it was the very success of Naxos as a popular budget label that made it so difficult to shift the prejudices maintained by the established press, despite a handful of champions. Even well into the 2000s there still appeared the familiar line that damned with faint praise: ‘Excellent recording for a budget-price CD.’
Anderson’s recording schedule helped considerably to change Naxos’s image in the UK. During his tenure at Select, most years have seen between fifteen and twenty new UK recordings produced under his aegis. These were not all of British music though the series was a continuing and important thread in the release schedule, incorporating both orchestral and chamber music. The Maggini Quartet recorded works by Alwyn, Rubbra, Rawsthorne and other composers; and the group’s fifteen-year contribution to Naxos was crowned by the unique project of Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten Naxos Quartets written specially for the label. Also significant was Anderson’s work in bringing outstanding young English musicians into the Naxos studio. A good example is the pianist Ashley Wass. Anderson recalls: ‘I first heard Ashley Wass in 1997 when he won what was then the World Piano Competition (by a country mile in my opinion). Part of the prize was the chance to make a recording for Naxos and he chose repertoire by Franck. A few years later he contacted us and we began talking about other repertoire, ending up with Bax and, subsequently, other British composers. I think Ashley may have been a bit reluctant to tackle British repertoire, much of which was almost unknown, for fear of being typecast as a performer of British music. However, through the process of living with the music and recording it, he has warmed to much of it. I believe now as I did in 1997 that he is one of the finest young pianists in our country.
‘Ashley also featured in the British Piano Concerto series, which was born from an idea by the pianist Peter Donohoe. Initially a British Piano Concerto Foundation was established. However, when the Foundation ceased to be through lack of funding we continued the series (which is still a work in progress). I think the recordings have managed to get much music out there which wouldn’t otherwise have been heard, and in that sense one of the Foundation’s original objectives has been achieved.’
The strong English choral tradition had already been harnessed by David Denton (with Jeremy Summerly and his ensembles Oxford Camerata and Schola Cantorum of Oxford) and Anderson continued to foster it, bringing on board the Cambridge choirs of St John’s College and Clare College. The most surprising commercial success was a new ‘ensemble’ version of John Rutter’s Requiem with the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge conducted by Timothy Brown, which sold over 60,000 copies in the UK: it is one of the best-selling new ‘homemade’ recordings. Anderson comments: ‘A large part of the success of that recording was due to John himself, who kindly produced it – particularly magnanimous as there was a risk that the Naxos release would cannibalise sales of the same work on his own Collegium label.’ This unusual collaboration showed how a distributed label such as Collegium could work together with Naxos under the Select banner, to the benefit of all. These British recordings – Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, for example, or Vaughan Williams’s Sancta civitas and Dona nobis pacem, or the evergreen Spem in Alium – frequently featured in Select’s monthly Top Ten Naxos recordings, having reached very respectable sales figures. The commitment to British music was deepened by the acquisition of certain recordings from the defunct Collins Classics label, notably music by Benjamin Britten and ‘The English Song Series’.
Also from Select came a number of popular compilations that opened classical doors for a very wide audience. These ‘lifestyle’ and introductory concepts include the ‘Best of’ and ‘Meditation’ series as well as ‘Chill with’ (Chill with Mozart, Chill with Vivaldi etc.), a series of twelve titles that has sold over one million copies worldwide. For many years these popular compilations amounted to as much as 10 per cent of Naxos’s turnover in the UK, and as they were based on existing Naxos recordings and were therefore very economical to produce, they were particularly worthwhile. These UK concepts were often picked up by Naxos companies abroad, from the US to Asia, and achieved further, considerable sales.
There were imaginative diversions into other popular areas, including titles aimed at a younger audience. Peter and the Wolf narrated by the actor Barry Humphries (in the voice of Dame Edna Everage) was the first of these. It was released with an entertaining cartoon cover design by the children’s illustrator Tony Ross (best known for his work on the Horrid Henry books) and was among Select’s bestsellers in the UK for many years, reaching over 100,000 copies. This highly successful children’s series went on to feature Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, with the late Johnny Morris reciting his own verses, and other titles narrated by such UK household names as June Whitfield, Brian Cant, Angela Rippon and Bernard Cribbins; it sold in its thousands both in the UK and international
ly.
The most high-profile compilation may have been The Sven-Göran Eriksson Classical Collection, a three-CD set of tracks chosen by the manager of the English football team for a campaign in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup. It attracted considerable publicity, including a presence on peak-time television, and sold a healthy number. It followed the Naxos principle of taking classical music to a wider audience and it earned its keep in terms of exposure; but over-enthusiasm on the initial pressing as well as the early exit of England from the tournament in South Korea and Japan resulted in a lot of leftover stock. That is one of the dangers of boldly venturing beyond comfortable classical confines.
Despite the commercial success of Naxos over the first decade, it was not until 1999 that it made its mark on the Gramophone Awards, which were seen as the premier UK accolades for recordings: its British music series received an Editor’s Choice award from James Jolly. Two years later came the first award from the Gramophone critics for a particular disc: the Maggini Quartet’s recording of works by Vaughan Williams. In 2009 the Orchestral Award was won by Tchaikovsky’s Manfred symphony played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under the charismatic Vasily Petrenko; and another Editor’s Choice went in the following year to Bernstein’s Mass conducted by Marin Alsop. Naxos was simply too big to ignore.
Shortly after his arrival in 1997 Anderson began actively and successfully to recruit additional important labels for distribution, starting with the composer–conductor John Rutter’s Collegium label. Many others followed, including Chandos, Gimell, BBC Legends and Opera Rara, as well as house labels such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker, The Sixteen (Coro) and the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra (Soli Deo Gloria). Other composers followed John Rutter’s example and brought their labels to Select too, including Michael Nyman and Carl Davis.
The Story of Naxos Page 37