Naxos (record label)

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Naxos Records is a record label for classical music compact discs and DVDs.

Founded in 1987 by Klaus Heymann, a German-born resident of Hong Kong, the label today is one of the biggest classical music labels, and has recently begun distributing DVDs as well. As of 2005, it is the largest-selling classical label in the world. In 2005 Naxos won the ”Label of the Year Award” at Classic FM/Gramophone awards. In 2003 Naxos started a paid subscription service (it had previously been free) offering their complete catalogue (as well as joint labels) for listening on the Internet as the Naxos Music Library.

The company became quickly known through its budget pricing of many discs, with simpler artwork and design than other labels. Naxos tries to avoid repertoire duplication. Compared to other major record labels, the Naxos selection may be shallower in terms of interpretations of a given masterwork. For example, the present Naxos catalog has only three orchestral recordings of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, with the conductors Bela Drahos, Richard Edlinger and Richard Strauss (the last a historic recording); compared with Deutsche Grammophon, which has Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, Carlos Kleiber and Christian Thielemann, some whom have recorded the piece on more than one occasion. On the other hand, their selection of classical repertoire is very broad - perhaps the broadest of any existing label - including fringe repertoire such as the Symphonies of Nikolai Myaskovsky, much of contemporary classical music, and pieces by Johann Pachelbel other than his famous Canon in D. Its enterprise is seen in series of little recorded works like Japanese classical music, Jewish-American music, wind band music, film music and early music.

In recent years, Naxos has begun to take advantage of the expiring copyright protections of other companies' official studio recordings, and remastering those recordings under the Naxos name. Notable examples of this activity can be seen in the studio recordings of Maria Callas, and in the release of the 1934 world premiere performance of Howard Hanson's opera The Merry Mount. However legal reasons prevent many of these recordings being sold in the United States. Several of these historic recordings are also available on the original labels, the principal difference being that Naxos master their recordings from discs as opposed to original tape masters.

In recent years the label has branched out into spoken-word audiobooks, Super Audio CDs and DVD-Audio, jazz, and world music (Naxos World).