Cut-Rate Prices, Not Performances

To judge by questions frequently asked of this column, listeners are more nervous about investing a small amount of money in an unknown recorded quantity than in plunking down in the vicinity of $15 for the products of known performers on so-called major labels.

But, spending a lot hardly guarantees satisfaction when it comes to the subjective considerations involved in musical interpretation.

So, don’t be excessively cautious with your $5 bills in the presence of those display racks devoted to Naxos, the super-budget label issuing new, as opposed to reissued, classical recordings.

Naxos, brainchild of a Hong Kong-based German named Klaus Heymann, has for the past five years been making a splash--particularly in Europe and the Orient, where base prices of CDs are considerably higher than here--with a catalogue affording the opportunity to build something resembling an entire collection at minimal expense on a single label.

The bulk of Naxos’ early issues were of late-Romantic orchestral music, including the symphonic oeuvre of Dvorak and Sibelius, then not readily available in quality performances at low prices, and a good number of symphonies by Haydn and Mozart.

Most were adequately played by orchestras based in the Slovak capital of Bratislava, under little-known conductors. But adequate proved no longer sufficient when some heavyweight competition, at only marginally higher prices, came along via reissues from Lorin Maazel and the Vienna Philharmonic (Sibelius) and Istvan Kertesz and the London Symphony (Dvorak), both on the London label, while Naxos’ Haydn and Mozart weren’t much to begin with.

To cut to the heart of this particular matter, Naxos has lately been excelling in the less populist forms of chamber music and in repertory for solo piano, performed chiefly by the Hungarian artists who have become closely identified with the label: the Kodaly Quartet, pianist Jeno Jando and, on the basis of auditioning portions of a soon-to-be released series of Haydn symphony recordings, a fine 20-odd member pickup orchestra under a gifted newcomer named Bela Drahos.

The Kodaly Quartet offers some of the canniest, most stylish and vital Haydn to be found in the catalogue. No admirer of this music should be without its Naxos editions of such marvels as Opus numbers 51, 54, 55, 74 and 76. Soon to follow, in the ensemble’s traversal of all 80-plus Haydn quartets, are Opus 33 and Opus 64.

Then, too, the Kodalys have launched a Beethoven cycle with the first two quartets of Opus 18 (550558), delivered with stunning panache and crispness, as befits the scores’ Haydnesque rather than Romantic inspiration, in model chamber music sonics: immaculately balanced, incisive in tone (i.e., not over-resonant) yet warm.

Pianist Jando, who once seemed on his way to recording the collected piano literature of Western Civilization, is settling into a more selective recording schedule and regularly providing brainy, committed artistry in repertory ranging from Mozart--start, perhaps, with the E-flat Concerto, K. 271 (550203) and a sonata program centered on the work in F, K. 332 (550446), and the powerfully astringent, Haydnesque Beethoven of the Opus 2 sonatas (550150)--to a deeply reflective and dramatic reading of Schubert’s incomparable Sonata in B-flat, coupled with the barely less striking C-minor Sonata, D. 958 (550475).

Jando may also create believers--as he did of this infidel--with his at once ruminative and shapely interpretations of Liszt: the B-minor Sonata (550510) and, on three separate CDs (55048/49/50) that mighty collection of travel souvenirs, “Annees de pelerinage.” Jando is a masterful organizer of musical materials, no matter how complex or seemingly diffuse.

Then, too, Jando proves the perfect partner to an excellent cellist, Csaba Oczay, the two offering finely integrated, propulsive readings of the five Beethoven Cello Sonatas (550478/79, two CDs).

And by all by means get yourself a copy of the just-released version (550391) of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in which a superbly accomplished clarinetist named Jozsef Balogh joins the four young women who make up the Danubius Quartet. This comes with the Trio, Opus 114--Balogh, Jando, Oczay--as the substantial makeweight.