Or,
‘Are Naxos good?’
Getting back into CDs with a Dac purchase suddenly they’re sounding good. I do find myself attracted to the Naxos range often, they’ve often different stuff.
They’re on the budget end, so how do we feel Naxos stack up for sound and performance quality normally?
Or would I be better collecting elsewhere?
In early music Naxos are excellent. I think part of the reason is that they are a vehicle for so called
vanity publishing, specialist musicians, often academics, who love a work and who just want to put their ideas about how to perform it on record do deals with Naxos to get the music recorded and released. I’m thinking about artists like Glen Wilson and Lucy van Dael and Elizabeth Farr and Wolfgang Rübsam and Julia Brown and The Rose Consort and Tonus Pregrinus. All these people have produced excellent interpretations, some much more than excellent.
They also made some outstanding choices about music to relicence. I’m thinking of Sergio Vartolo especially.
They may have released some interesting contemporary music too, especially American and British - I say that because I’ve been really enjoying their release of Rochberg’s Circles of Fire, the Peter Maxwell Davies Quartets and Bobby Mitchell’s Rzewski CD.
In music written between 1750 and 1950 - which admittedly I listen to much less - I would single out Jeno Jando’s Liszt and Bartok, Idl Biret’s Schoenberg and Beethoven/Liszt, Hakon Austbo’s Debussy and Messiaen and Scriabin.
They had an initiative of producing remasters of early recordings, and many of them are wonderful. Things like the Rachmaninov performances of Chopin, and the Ignaz Friedman. They chose top engineers. I think it’s called Naxos Historicals.
There’s probably loads of other things - Tintner’s recordings for example. And the recording of Beethoven’s dances by Capella Istropolitana. And I was forgetting one of their most impressive achievements - a major high point without a doubt - Tom Beghin’s Haydn.
Sound is mostly fine. There are some unsatisfactory sound takes - Glen Wilson’s Louis Couperin is a clear example, but mostly it’s fine.