'Heymann’s Naxos was to the record business what Allen Lane’s Penguin Books was to publishing'
One of the stranger experiences I have had during half a century of writing about music was walking into Tower Records in Piccadilly in the spring of 1994, and seeing one of my lengthier lucubrations suspended from the ceiling on a 10ft-high board. Not, mind you, a few choice phrases opportunistically extracted from a review of Naxos’s theatrically thrilling recording of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, but all 950 neck-straining words. The perpetrator of this all-or-nothing approach to advertising was Naxos’s founder, the Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and music-lover Klaus Heymann. At the time of Naxos’s launch in 1987, the most likely place to find these modestly designed yet scrupulously annotated £3.99 CDs was Woolworths. (How we sophisticates scoffed!) But Naxos’s rise was precipitate. By the time of the release of that Budapest-made Il barbiere, the company was already selling getting on for a fifth of the world’s classical CDs. Thirty...
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