On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 19:15:47 -0500 "Steve Smith" wrote:
You're right about Vox, of course, and lots of those performances (Brendel, Horenstein, Skrowczewski, even Slatkin) still hold up. But what I'm interested in knowing is, was the rest of the recording industry in as much of a panic then as they are now about Naxos? I'm genuinely curious about that: I've been pondering the differences between the two scenarios.
I think that Naxos succeeded completely whereas the other labels only had some limited success. Naxos is all over the place! At Tower Records, for the past 5-6 years, there has been a Naxos special section that is getting almost as big as one third of the classical section... What I find hard to believe with Naxos is what motivated them to attack obscure/modern composers the way most high-brow labels barely touch (which makes me wonder how squeamish they are). The net result for me being that I bought plenty of Naxos records not because they were cheap, but simply because they were only available on that label (and I would have been willing to pay more for them!). Thanks to that, Naxos acquired a reputation which put it completely apart from other bargain price label. On the other side, what happened with their jazz label? Does anybody know if the second duo Ehrlich/Nock finally came out? Patrice.