The Life and Death of Classical Music Read Online Free Page A

bought thirty orchestral tapes from a Slovak in Paris and pressed them for his client, who went bust. ‘So there I was, stuck with thirty classical masters. I couldn’t sell them at full price because these were unknown East European orchestras, although the performances were not too bad. I had to put them out on a budget label. That’s how Naxos Records was born.’ 18
    Priced at $6, Naxos were the cheapest classics by far, a third of the price of a premium DG. They sold across Asia in 1987, then in Woolworth’s in Britain and in gas stations up and down Scandinavia, a slow-moving landmass where classical CDs had only ever been found before in smart city shops. Soon, Heymann was selling more classics in the north than all the majors put together. In three years he counted 4 million sales. By 1994, adding the US and Japan, he had 10 million with annual growth of 50 per cent. One in six classical records sold anywhere in the world was a Naxos.
    ‘Basically a record collector who loves music,’ 19 Heymann laid no claims to artistic vision. ‘I sat down with a catalogue and marked everything that had more than ten recordings. That was our initial policy: record the hundred most recorded things in reasonably good quality, reasonably good sound, and make them available’. 20 In Slovakia and Slovenia, he paid orchestral players $100 a disc, for which they were duly thankful. Conductors and soloists got $500 or $1,000, no royalties, no frills. Every contract was for a single disc, no long-term exclusivities. The biggest name on the box was the composer’s, followed by the work. Performers got small print at the back. Bucking the rules, Heymann reduced the artist to a cipher and sold entirely on piece and price. If one of his artists won an award, he refused to spend on publicity, arguing that the big labels had been ruined by the star system. Promoting an artist would only swell heads and increase fees. The Scrooge-like side of Heymann was balanced by a puritan work ethic and a complete lack of flam. Any money he made on records, Heymann would say, went back into repertoire-though there was enough left over to buy him a $10 million estate overlooking New Zealand’s Mellon Bay, where he moved his family ahead of Hong Kong’s return to China in July 1997. Artists, unaware of his prosperity, churned out Naxos CDs for $1,000 a go, reckoning that the volume of work would keep them occupied and in the public eye. A disc of Beethoven sonatas by the Hungarian pianist Jeno Jando sold a quarter of a million. On any other label the royalties would have built Jando a house in Budapest. On Naxos, publication was its own reward.
    Heymann never argued with artists; he preferred not to meet them at all. Musicians, he said, ‘have a certain charisma that lets them push you into doing things that don’t make artistic or business sense’. 21 Performers who tried to obtain better conditions-the Franco-American conductor Antonio de Almeida, and the British cellist Raphael Wallfisch – were bluntly dismissed.
    At Naxos’ price, most things sold-abstruse Hindemith, in a performance by Franz-Paul Decker and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cleared 18,000 in a year where, on DG or EMI with Abbado, it barely managed three figures. Naxos classical clips crept into such US television series as
ER, Sex in the City
and
The Sopranos
, paying Heymann hundreds of times with each episode’s repetition around the world and nothing to the artists. Heymann, in one territory after another, bought out his distributors and acquired an overlordship of cottage labels that came to him for warehousing. If he saw an esoteric item selling well on Swedish BIS or German CPO, he would swiftly have it recorded for Naxos.
    Pigtailed and sport-shirted in a wrinkle-proof business suit, Heymann was refreshingly transparent about the record business, quick to mock the vanity of artists and competitors whose designer items he replicated on the cheap. Musical likes and