MUSIC CAN HAVE such an effect on an audiobook. If you listen to our new Othello from the Donmar Warehouse, it must be said that Adam Cork’s incidental music plays a subtle but key role in supporting the drama. Much of the time we are so wrapped up in the tempestuous story that we may not notice the way the music is providing colour and edge. It was powerful in the theatre and is even more powerful in our audiobook recording.
And this is why music has been an integral part of Naxos AudioBooks since the very first release in 1994.
Beethoven Piano Trios and Hummel set the scene perfectly for Jane Austen’s novels (If I remember correctly, Hummel was to be found in her music book), drawing the picture of the Regency salon. And music of various kinds has given David Timson an exciting backdrop for the complete Sherlock Holmes. Sarah Butcher, who programmed most of the music, revelled in the challenge of matching another quartet or quintet from the nineteenth century repertoire to the next case of the master sleuth.
Some people don’t like music and words. I remember ringing one bookshop to ask if they had any Naxos AudioBooks on the shelves only to be greeted by the terse comment, ‘Are those the people who put music on books - certainly not!’
I understand the reservation. We don’t attempt to do it with unabridged novels on the whole, partly because I think people who want the complete text want only the complete text, and not additional production values; also, frankly, it would be a heady artistic challenge to put music effectively to a 28 CD Dickens novel such as Bleak House. We rarely put music to anything over 4 CDs, because sustaining it with taste becomes almost impossible!
And yet programming music for audiobooks is good fun! With something like The History of the Olympics we are directed by the context, of course: there is the national anthem, and then, if necessary, a defining piece of music. If it is Rome for the world cup (soccer), it must be Nessun Dorma (I know! I had the great fortune to be at the Three Tenors concert during the world cup, and I can tell you… in the balmy Roman night at Caracalla with the three singing their hearts out, it was an evening no one could forget!); And if it is Germany, it must be the Ride of the Valkyries or Beethoven. Subtlety is not the order of the day here.
For James Joyce, once again the text dictates the choice – Joyce was a fine musician himself, and music flows through a novel such as Ulysses or the short stories Dubliners: there is endless choice, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.
Sometimes, the unexpected happens. Only the other day Caroline Waight (who has worked in our production office after finishing her music degree) was putting music to some Oscar Wilde (for next year…). And she carefully selected some Rossini. Rossini, you may ask? Surely not!
Yet actually it works… as you will find next year (we are working quite far ahead). And as Sue Arnold of the Guardian wrote in a recent review, the opening of Mahler’s massive Resurrection Symphony works surprisingly well as a curtain raiser for Tales from the Norse Legends, introducing The Creation of the World!
When I look back over nearly fifteen years of matching music and words, I do have some favourites. For me, the viol music of John Jenkins always means, Paradise Lost – next month we release The Essential John Milton to mark his 400th anniversary, and you will see what I mean. On a completely different note, the Japanese classic Hojoki, opens with the koto - particularly appropriate as the monk Chomei talks about playing the instrument (also released next month).
This peroration was prompted by Sue Arnold’s kind words, but also over a lunch with Keith Clarke, editor of Classical Music, who spoke approvingly of the choice of music in the recording of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. The sensuous, impressionistic sound world of Debussy and Ravel with a touch of Piazzola expressed the cultural melange of pre-War Alexandria.
But what do YOU think? Do you like the music on our audiobooks? Classic literature with classical music was our strapline for many years, and I still feel a fondness for it, though our increasing involvement in complete texts means more releases without music. Let us know what you think.
ONE OF THE FEATURES of an independent publishing company or record label is that individuals or odd ideas suddenly appear and adroitly bypass procedures. This has certainly been true of Naxos AudioBooks throughout its fourteen years. Many contributions, large and small, coming from unexpected quarters have made it what it is: the list itself demonstrates that it was often created apart from committee or consensus!
I meet someone by chance, face to face or by some other serendipity… or someone writes on the off-chance… and we move into an unexpected direction. This has been such a feature of Naxos AudioBooks that to name all these occasions and/or people would tend towards a history rather than a blog. But just looking at a few writers shows how often it has happened.
There is Ian Johnston, a remarkably prolific translator of Ancient Greek and German: his Homer has proved extremely effective on audiobook; his translation of sections from the Nichomachean Ethics in Aristotle: An Introduction is extremely clear; and all praise to his Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil comes in July. More Johnston translations will appear on the Naxos AudioBooks list, I am sure.
And sometimes I have been fortunate in coming across a hidden talent while working in the studio. David Timson is a fine example: clearly an accomplished actor, supreme in Sherlock Holmes, he also proved to be accomplished in other areas: he directs, writes and even sings! Just last week he recorded a song for our new recording of The Merchant of Venice due for release in October with Anthony Sher as Shylock.
This month sees the release of Volume 3 of David’s ongoing series Stories from Shakespeare. Essentially, this is intended to introduce Shakespeare’s plays to a younger audience. I remember well being given Charles and Mary Lamb’s précis of the plays – a dusty book which only too often I found rather unsatisfactory, even at the age of ten. Other, more modern, versions have been written, but never one designed for audiobook – and, frankly, there can be no better way to introduce plays! David (for whom Shakespeare has been the principal thread in a busy performing life) pays careful attention to the plots and characters but also incorporates many of the main speeches (unadulterated!) into his re-telling of each play. This third volume contains Much Adoabout Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, and others…
This month also sees the start of a new series – actually, a free series! Peter Whitfield, a prolific and interesting writer, has written a volume of introductions to major works of world literature and world figures. It is, it must be said, a rather gentlemanly diversion in an eighteenth-century way: diverse essays on topics which have clearly meant a lot to him.
Peter sent me his collection of essays called A Universe of Books and it sat on my desk for a bit, along with other unsolicited material and (many) demo CDs from actors. Being of large format, and taking up a lot of space, it demanded attention… and at the end of one day I dipped into it. I was quickly hooked: the easy writing style allied to an intelligent view on the subject made these more than just a set of workaday introductions.
We set up a meeting in Oxford during the Literary Festival and discussed a series of short recordings. By coincidence, Peter had recorded his pilot at the same studio (just outside Oxford) as that in which Anton Lesser has recorded many of his recentunabridged Dickens. Peter proved a natural reader, and some of his essays are now available for you to enjoy via the website. More will follow each month.
I urge you to download! I am sure it will encourage new readers/listeners to the topics he discusses; and those who have already read or listened to the works chosen will find it worthwhile to spend some time with Peter Whitfield.
UNABRIDGED VERSUS ABRIDGED. It is a discussion as old as audiobooks.
It is partly about simple commerce – unabridged audiobooks can seem high priced, though the hours fly by. But it is also about convenience: I think there is still a place for abridged texts, for not everyone wants to listen to twenty-eight or thirty hours of a novel.
However, I am glad to say that the advent of downloads, and a greater appreciation of the full work, has seen the audience for unabridged texts on audiobook grow.
This has resulted in trips down memory lane for me, because I find that not only are we doing novels which we did in abridged form in the early years of Naxos AudioBooks, but we are recording them, often, with the same actors – though sometimes a new voice takes up the baton.
It is a coincidence that we are releasing new unabridged recordings of these masterpieces with the original readers, but in both cases, the abridged recordings were the first to introduce us to readers who have featured regularly on Naxos AudioBooks in the decade and more that followed.
To The Lighthouse was the first recording we made with Juliet Stevenson, and I well remember her coming into the studio with the script and putting it on the table. I glanced down and saw that there wasn’t a mark on it. Of course I knew she knew the book, but I wondered quietly to myself, ‘Crumbs, is she going to sight - read Virginia Woolf?’
I need not have worried. Ms Stevenson read as consummately as it sounds on the CD, not once… NOT ONCE making an error over who is speaking, though occasionally one needs to be halfway through a sentence before the context explains clearly who it is.
When I asked her afterwards, she explained that she rarely marks a script. ‘I don’t need to… I just seem to remember when I prepare it,’ she said. That was in 1995, and I still recall her words.
Her reading had a profound effect on me because the subtlety of her presentation made Virginia Woolf come alive to me in a way she never had on the page, and she went on to do the same with many other works, including many of the Jane Austen novels and evenLady Windermere’s Fan.
It is ten years on and more since that first day and I was intrigued to find out if the decade would make a difference.
I am glad to report that the answer is an emphatic no. There is a slightly more leisurely tempo which is required from an unabridged reading, but the ebb and flow of event, enquiry, inference and surprise remains the same. Why, I have to ask myself, did we wait so long to ask Juliet Stevenson to do the full version?
And the same applies to Garrick Hagon’s Tom Sawyer. When I presented the abridged version to the sales team in the mid-1990s, I played the opening, with Tom’s aunt expressing all her frustration with the boy she loves regardless of the exasperation he causes her. The salesmen were entranced by the voice of the aunt which opens the book, and Tom’s little ploy which allows him to slip past his persecutor without feeling the weight of the switch.
Garrick Hagon has read many books for Naxos AudioBooks since then, including the unabridged Huckleberry Finn, Classic American Poetry and Classic American Short Stories. He has become one of the leading American voices living in the UK (though actually Canadian by birth) and spends as much time directing audiobooks as acting (he is Philip Pullman’s preferred director!) – he directed our unabridged multi-cast versions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.
Once again, the luxury of having the unabridged text to work with (and what a wonderful text) meant that Garrick could take time with the humour and rumbustious fun… and as musicians know, you can take time without going more slowly!
This month also sees a third unabridged version of a major classic novel which we did in abridged form years ago. Anna Bentinck presents Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and it took her back to the familiar world (for her) of the English West Country.
Finally, there is more unabridged work from marathon reader ‘War and Peace’ Neville Jason, who continues his Arthurian saga care of T. H. White.
Unabridged recordings do take more time… but one savours them all the more.
HOW IMPORTANT – HOW TRUE? – are newspaper/magazine reviews of new audiobooks? After all, they are but one person’s response to a book and its performance.
Since we began, Naxos AudioBooks has received a continuous stream of good reviews, and 2008 has been no different: there have been numerous plaudits worldwide, but particularly in the UK and US.
I have a special interest in reviews for a number of reasons. Before starting Naxos AudioBooks, I was a classical music journalist, mainly writing about music generally but also reviewing the latest CDs for a number of magazines. Now, of course, I am more on the receiving end – but this has given me (I hope!) a balanced perspective.
The leading UK vehicle for classical music CD reviews is Gramophone. It has a worldwide reputation for the authority of its comments, but there are also other magazines – in Germany, France and Japan, for example.
Regrettably, the audiobook world has only one magazine with a similar standing: Audiofile magazine, based in the US and run by its enthusiastic editor Robin Whitten. Its monthly survey of the medium is de rigeur for anyone who listens regularly. But it is mainly the once-a-week newspaper reviews – often just 40 words! – that highlight new recordings for the general public. It is good, of course, that newspapers allot the subject some space, but they hardly touch the breadth and depth of what is going on.
We who love audiobooks know the power of this medium in presenting literature great and small, and we can only mourn the fact that more people don’t know about it. By its very nature, we rarely see the effect it has on its followers.
However, at the Sunday Times Oxford Literature Festival early this month, I did see the effect of the spoken word on an audience of people who mostly, I presume, do not regularly listen. Frankly, when Marcella Riordan and Anton Lesser got up to read the words of Joyce and Milton, the audience was spellbound.
Don’t take my word for it. Here is Susannah Herbert, Literary Editor of The Sunday Times, in her round-up of this year’s Festival
Although it was tempting to treat the festival like a non-stop conversation, even the most argumentative fell into awed silence at the great actor Anton Lesser’s readings from Paradise Lost and Marcella Riordan’s performance of Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses, two highlights from the Naxos AudioBooks strand. Both events took place in the Christ Church upper library – surely the most beautiful book-lined room in Oxford.’
Now, this was more reportage than a review, but it was exactly what happened: the audience reaction was unequivocal, and by the interest shown in the CDs on sale at the end, I think more people now appreciate the magic of audiobooks.
Something else also prompted me to muse on this topic of response and reviews: it was the recent article in The Times – by its regular audiobook correspondent Christina Hardyment – about three recordings of the great medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (You can see the full review on our Gawain page.)
Now, Ms Hardyment is herself a medieval historian – she has written one of the finest biographies of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur – so her response to new recordings of Gawain are of particular interest.
Unlike Malory, who wrote in an English which presents few difficulties to the twenty-first-century ear, Gawain does need a translator; in her article, Ms Hardyment discusses the three audiobook versions now available: Tolkein’s version read by Terry Jones, Benedict Flynn’s new version made for Naxos AudioBooks and read by Jasper Britton, and Simon Armitage’s version read by the poet himself on Faber. It is an exemplary review for it compares both the texts and the performances with particular clarity.
Because Naxos AudioBooks is a label dedicated primarily to the classics, our recordings are often competing with others (take, as a recent example, Cranford, or our Austen and Dickens titles). I am glad to say that much of the time they are matched very favourably (though it would be inelegant to trumpet this too much).
This weekend has in fact been busy for Naxos AudioBooks reviews. In addition to Christina Hardyment’s article in The Times, Sue Arnold was saying nice things in The Guardian about two new Naxos AudioBooks recordings: David Timson’s final volume of the Sherlock Holmes canon (Timson’s portrayal is regarded as ‘brilliant’) and the multi-voice abridgement of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.
The bottom line is that it is always pleasing to receive affirmation!
THE SUNDAY TIMES OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL is in full swing. There is a constant stream of literary events – some thirty-five a day – involving such literati as Philip Pullman, Sebastian Faulks, Richard Dawkins as well as TV business pundit millionaire Peter Jones, famed formerBBC India correspondent Mark Tully, and author/philosopher Baroness Warnock discussing death – Life’s End – For Better For Worse.
There are food events – an Italian Lover’s Banquet in the Great Hall at Christ Church (the setting for the dining hall of Hogwart’s in Harry Potter). At £45 a head, it was sold out before the Festival started!
And there are four programmes presented by Naxos AudioBooks. We started with an exceptionally enlightening talk by Roger Marsh on James Joyce’s women with Marcella Riordan reading passages from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Presentation Two is David Timson, known best as the Naxos AudioBooks Sherlock Holmes reader… But now he appears in his guise as theatre historian. David, who has directed four of our Shakespeare recordings (Henry V,Twelfth Night, Richard III and Othello), teaches at RADAand, as his audiobook The History of the Theatre shows, is deeply interested in the development of acting styles.
How did Henry Irving’s delivery of the great soliloquies (in the nineteenth century) differ from that of the generations which followed, through John Barrymore, early Gielgud, later Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and on to our own generation of Kenneth Branagh and Anton Lesser? David will explain and illustrate with numerous recorded extracts.
And talking of Anton Lesser – he of Dickens, Hamlet, Homer and more… – he appears on 4 April, in a programme celebrating the quatercentenary of John Milton’s birth. John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, Oxford University, explains that John Milton re-made the English language. ‘If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, he introduced more words to our tongue than any other writer, including Shakespeare,’ says Professor Carey. He will explain more, and Anton, who has read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained unabridged for Naxos AudioBooks, will read illustrative extracts.
Finally, on Sunday, the focus shifts to children’s classics. In ‘When the Magic Began’, Nicolette Jones, children’s books editor for The Sunday Times discusses the great stories that fostered our literary imagination: Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Heidi, Alice in Wonderland (which was born in Christ College!) and many more.
Recordings of these talks are now available below for the enjoyment and interest of a wider international audience! It can’t quite match the experience of actually being there – in the grandeur of the Upper Library of Christ Church, with its lines of leather-bound volumes. But it will give an insight into the personalities and works from which springs our audiobook collection!
The private hub of the festival is the Green Room at Christ Church where all the presenters meet before going to their various venues. Stimulated by the unforgettable Joyce presentation by Roger Marsh and Marcella Riordan – you wait until you hear it! – we retired there and bumped into Philip Pullman, about to go and discuss the place of religious satire. I happened to be carrying our box of the unabridged Ulysses – not an inconsiderable package. Philip has been very complimentary about our recordings of Anton Lesser reading Milton, and I could see his eyes alight on the box. I was only too glad to hand it over to him, feeling that James Joyce himself would have been pleased to see his revolutionary novel being taken into a forum on creative freedom lamenting the silencing of religious laughter.
WE WERE ALL EXCITED when the possibility of recording Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering emerged, with the help of Julian Batson (of Oakhill Publishing – the NAB library supplier).
All authors will tell you that it is difficult for them to know who should read their novel, for the author inevitably hears the words already. This is especially true of Anne Enright, who was, for many years, a radio producer and therefore accustomed to working with the spoken word.
Surprisingly, she knew exactly who she wanted to read The Gathering – Fiona Shaw! Fortunately, with Macbeth and a wonderful recording of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels for Naxos AudioBooks behind her, Fiona was only too pleased to pick up the challenge – especially as she had a few weeks’ break from her world tour in the National Theatre production of Beckett’s Happy Days.
Fiona was finishing in the States when we contacted her, and she bought the novel and read it on the plane. She was totally absorbed by the lively, imaginative writing, as well as stirred by the intensity of the family story, and looked forward to getting into the studio.
So did Anne, who flew over especially for the occasion.
Now, most recordings happen as planned. The actor meets the producer in the studio, and off they go! But sometimes it doesn’t happen quite like this, and sometimes unplanned interruptions happen at the worst time – when the author is present!
Our normal studio in north London was full and couldn’t make space, so we went into another studio which we have used successfully before. Fiona settled in and we did the normal sound check. Her main concern, she admitted, was how her natural Cork accent would sound to Anne, who was due about an hour later – after all, The Gathering is very clearly about a Dublin family, and Dubliners have a very different way of speaking to natives of Cork.
She need not have worried. When Anne arrived, she settled into the control room and listened with pleasure as her prize-winning novel came to life. As an experienced radio producer (as well as the author!), she was able to contribute meaningfully to the proceedings, rather than intruding.
But then came the steel pipes. Opposite the studio was a building site. And on that very day, they were taking a delivery of ten-metre steel pipes. At about 11.30, everything started going. Long lorries arrived with pipes and men; cranes swung round with great steel manacles which clanged on to the pipes and lifted two or three, jangling, into the air.
Cacophony.
The men called, a cement lorry with an exhaust issue trundled down the mews – and so it went on. An edginess entered the studio. Great things were happening, only to be undermined by the interference.
After a morning of this, which was long enough for author and reader to exchange ideas and come to a harmonious understanding, we gave up.
We started again the following day in our normal studio, Motivation Sound, which had now miraculously cleared its decks.
The curious thing was that neither Fiona nor I minded going through those opening pages again. It is the sign of a well-written book, of course. But it was highlighted by the number of times that Fiona would read something and stop, as she turned a page, and comment: ‘that was a Man Booker Prize-winning sentence!’
We felt a particular satisfaction because this was an unabridged reading. It is sometimes necessary to abridge for audiobook: occasionally because the novel is just too big to do commercially, and sometimes because some listeners do not want to be faced with twenty or more hours.
But The Gathering, while certainly substantial, is not very long at seven and three-quarter hours unabridged.
And in the voice of Fiona Shaw, there is an extra dimension.
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MUSIC CAN HAVE such an effect on an audiobook. If you listen to our new Othello from the Donmar Warehouse, it must be said that Adam Cork’s incidental music plays a subtle but key role in supporting the drama. Much of the time we are so wrapped up in the tempestuous story that we may not notice the way the music is providing colour and edge. It was powerful in the theatre and is even more powerful in our audiobook recording.
For James Joyce, once again the text dictates the choice – Joyce was a fine musician himself, and music flows through a novel such as Ulysses or the short stories Dubliners: there is endless choice, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.
Tags: NaxosAudiobooks 
ONE OF THE FEATURES
This month also sees the start of a new series – actually, a 
UNABRIDGED VERSUS ABRIDGED
It is ten years on and more since that first day and I was intrigued to find out if the decade would make a difference.
THE SUNDAY TIMES OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL
Presentation Two is 
Finally, on Sunday, the focus shifts to children’s classics. In ‘When the Magic Began’, Nicolette Jones, children’s books editor for 
She need not have worried. When Anne arrived, she settled into the control room and listened with pleasure as her prize-winning novel came to life. As an experienced radio producer (as well as the author!), she was able to contribute meaningfully to the proceedings, rather than intruding.
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