The NAB Blog Archive

Confession time: I don’t listen to everything that we release before publication. When we started, I not only listened to everything but I also produced everything – or virtually everything – for many years. But now, when our new titles often run for 20 hours or more, I simply can’t get through them. I sample them, of course. But for the complete experience, I am always playing catch-up.

And, at the moment, I am playing catch-up with Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, read by David Horovitch which came out early last year.

WHAT A DELIGHT!

Classic comedy, I mused, may not seem as rich a seam as classic tragedy or classic romance. For every Pickwick Papers or Tristram Shandy we have two or three Tess of the d’Urbevilles or A Tale of Two Cities. Or Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Is this because comedy is less durable than deeper, richer emotive states engendered by the great epics of love and loss? Does time take its toll more severely – except, perhaps, in drama? After all, Mrs Malaprop can be very funny, even today. And so can Shakespeare’s Mechanicals.

But on the whole, comic novels do not last so well. Within the classics – within so many Dickens! – there are delightful characters that genuinely make you smile or laugh out loud. Then there are the evergreen Bertie Woosters for when the sky is dark, or The Wind in the Willows or Three Men in a Boat or The Diary of a Nobody. And Mark Twain.

Go abroad, however, and there is the added difficult (for English speakers) of translation – another hurdle which often trips up travellers in the genre.

However, if you don’t know it, I urge you to try The Good Soldier Švejk in our world premiere audiobook recording... though those who do know it will need no persuading.

My stepfather was Czech, and even though he spent decades in England, his English was larded with a strong accent. One of our great Christmas treats was to sit by the family fireside (yes! we did!) while Harry Samek from Brno read some of his favourite passages in the glittering Parrott English translation. Švejk pawning the piano to buy schnapps for the chaplain. Švejk doing nefarious deals to acquire dogs (he is a buyer and a seller of dogs) to pass on to his lieutenant or others.

Who is Švejk? The scene is Prague at the outbreak of World War I. The Archduke has been assassinated. Men are being drafted to the front. But not Švejk. He is not quite a glass full; he is an innocent, bumbling (with his smiling, open, honest face) through one scrape after another. Or is he really so innocent?

He is accused of sedition – but did he really traduce the Emperor or the state?

He is accused of being a malingerer – but has he really got rheumatism?

And there I was, only yesterday, on the cross trainer followed by the running machine, followed by some weights, laughing, laughing out loud even. My gym mates started to give me a wide berth. I tell you, laughing on a running machine is a contradiction in terms. And, frankly, dangerous.

But David Horovitch does an absolutely sparkling job. He has Švejk off to a tee. And the myriad of other characters who pop up along the way.

I went to the morning of the recording, produced by Roy McMillan. It was such an important novel from my childhood, I wanted to hear what David would make of it. I was slightly nervous, to tell the truth, because I had my stepfather’s thick Czech accent in my ears, even after all these years.

I need not have worried. From the start it was clear that this great comic book was in perfect hands. Funny, satirical, sardonic, the recording is a genuine pleasure. This is what the audiobook experience is all about for me.

What more could I ask? A classic comedy in a perfect translation read with imagination and real, pure fun. AND, therefore, furthermore, I remain longer in the gym, getting slimmer and fitter. Can’t say the same would be true for Heart of Darkness...

Christmas Ideas...

By Nicolas Soames
1 Dec 2008

Audiobooks make very good Christmas presents. Often, it is the kind of present that your mother, father, son, daughter... etc., ...didn’t know they wanted. And it certainly makes a difference to those mountain of books that come at this time of year, and that pile up ‘waiting for when I can get round to it.’ With audiobooks, of course, they can be listened to on the move, in the car, on an MP3 player, in the gym, or on a walk, or at home in bed when one is too tired to read... in other words, there are plenty of opportunities.

So, here are some Christmas ideas:

FOR MOTHER

1. Little Dorrit – unabridged or abridged by Charles Dickens
You saw/missed the TV drama - now listen to the original words read by Anton Lesser.

2. Villette – unabridged or abridged by Charlotte Brontë
Why should Jane Eyre dominate the CB landscape?

3. The Lives of the Artists – abridged by Giorgio Vasari
To inspire a visit to Florence and Rome and Italy generally.

4. Under Milk Wood – unabridged by Dylan Thomas
The greatest radio play ever in the original recording with Richard Burton and the superb cast.

5. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
A new recording of an always challenging play.

6. The Great Poets – William Wordsworth
A good selection of the best-known poems remind us of his quiet meaning.

FOR FATHER

1. Nostromo – unabridged or abridged by Joseph Conrad
Conrad’s masterpiece about a silver mine in South America, read persuasively by Nigel Anthony.

2. Under Milk Wood – unabridged by Dylan Thomas
The greatest radio play ever in the original recording with Richard Burton and the superb cast. For anyone!

3. The Essential Edgar Allan Poe – selections
A compelling selection – Detective (Dupin) Horror (The Pit and the Pendulum) Poems (including The Raven) and a fascinating biography... to prepare for Poe’s 200th anniversary in 2009.

4. Our Mutual Friend – unabridged or abridgedby Charles Dickens
David Timson’s energetic reading of Dickens’ condemnation of legal tangles.

5. The Wealth of Nations – abridged by Adam Smith
The classic look at world economics read by Sean Barrett.

6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – new verse translation, Anon
Jasper Britton reads this important stepping stone in English literature, an accessible medieval Arthurian poem that has drama, vivid imagery, finely-drawn characters and some delicate pastoral passages.

FOR SON

1. The Lost World – unabridged by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The classic precursor of Jurassic Park has lost not one whit of its excitement and humour over the years, especially in the hands of Glen McCready.

2. Ivanhoe – abridged by Sir Walter Scott
One of the great knight in armour tales.

3. Stories from Shakespeare – The Plantagenets retold by David Timson
A very useful overview of the history plays from Richard II to Richard III (and the Henrys in between!) retold with the key speeches.

4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Volume I – unabridged by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
This includes The Speckled Band, one of the best stories. It is read by David Timson who has completed the whole Sherlock Holmes canon, a remarkable feat.

5. Great Scientists and their Discoveries by David Angus
Short, entertaining portraits of eight important figures, from Galileo and Charles Darwin (2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth) to Einstein and James Crick.

6. Treasure Island – unabridged or abridged by Robert Louis Stevenson
A classic tale of adventure and pirates brought to life by Jasper Britton.

FOR UNCLE/GRANDFATHER

1. The Rights of Man – abridged by Thomas Paine
A key political work written at a time when the world was changing at the end of the eighteenth century... but still relevant today.

2. The Essential John Milton
A special compilation to mark his quatercentenary, with selections from Paradise Lost ; Paradise Regained (unabridged); poetry, essays, and a short but direct biography. The ideal Milton overview.

3. The Good Soldier Švejk – abridged by Jaroslav Hasek
If you don’t know this it will come as a wonderful discovery. One of the great satires of European literature, it tells the delightful story of Švejk, an innocent (or is he?) caught trying to survive as the Austro-Hungarian empire gets embroiled in the first world war. Administrators and officials do not know what has hit them!

4. The Great Poets – Gerald Manley Hopkins read by Jeremy Northam
Many of the best-known works from the hand of the Jesuit poet.

5. The Odyssey – unabridged or abridged by Homer
Anton Lesser tells the story of Odysseus working his way home to Penelope, surviving the Cyclops, the Sirens and many other adventures and temptations.

6. The Third Policeman – unabridged by Flann O’Brien
A tale of murder, unlikely happenings, bicycles, love and fantasy... Irish! Especially in the hands of the incomparable Jim Norton.

FOR AUNT/GRANDMOTHER

1. To the Lighthouse – unabridged or abridged by Virginia Woolf
Juliet Stevenson is incomparable in this breathtaking portrait of a family and a lighthouse.

2. The Woman in White – unabridged of abridged by Wilkie Collins
Suspense and dangerous characters in the hands of a master author and in a strong cast.

3. Bliss, and other stories by Katherine Mansfield
No apologies for choosing another recording by Juliet Stevenson.

4. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – unabridged or abridged by Thomas Hardy
The abridgement is read by Imogen Stubbs, the unabridged novel by Anna Bentinck – both are compelling. And despite the television dramatisation, the original novel remains deeply moving.

5. Pride and Prejudice – unabridged or abridged by Jane Austen
The abridged version is read by Jenny Agutter and the unabridged version by Emilia Fox.

6. The Great Poets – Emily Dickinson read by Teresa Gallagher
A selection of the key works in idiomatic readings.

Byzantium, Edward Gibbon, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

By Nicolas Soames
1 Nov 2008

The grandeur of Rome and its Western empire, its history, architecture and literature, still casts such a dominating influence over Europe that it rather eclipses our awareness of the Byzantine Empire that succeeded it.

But not to anyone who has read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, it proved one of the major literary monuments of the English language, hugely popular in the time of the author, and still respected now.

This was partly because Gibbon (1737–1794) investigated his subject with great care and annotated his main narrative with thousands of references to the sources, an approach that became the norm for succeeding historians. But it has also been an enduring success because the subject was presented in English at its most grand – no historian since has matched the remarkable architecture of his sentences. While recounting the worst excesses and achievements of principal players in world history, Gibbon maintains a firm grip on his magnificent verbal domes and architraves.

Here is an example:

When Justinian ascended the throne, about fifty years after the fall of the Western empire, the kingdoms of the Goths and Vandals had obtained a solid, and, as it might seem, a legal establishment both in Europe and Africa. The titles, which Roman victory had inscribed, were erased with equal justice by the sword of the Barbarians; and their successful rapine derived a more venerable sanction from time, from treaties, and from the oaths of fidelity, already repeated by a second or third generation of obedient subjects. Experience and Christianity had refuted the superstitious hope that Rome was founded by the gods to reign forever over the nations of the earth. But the proud claim of perpetual and indefeasible dominion, which her soldiers could no longer maintain, was firmly asserted by her statesmen and lawyers, whose opinions have been sometimes revived and propagated in the modern schools of jurisprudence.
 After Rome herself had been stripped of the Imperial purple, the princes of Constantinople assumed the sole and sacred sceptre of the monarchy; demanded, as their rightful inheritance, the provinces which had been subdued by the consuls, or possessed by the Caesars; and feebly aspired to deliver their faithful subjects of the West from the usurpation of heretics and Barbarians. The execution of this splendid design was in some degree reserved for Justinian.

I was reminded of the grandeur of Gibbon by the new exhibition that has just opened in the Royal Academy, London: BYZANTIUM 330–1453. It brings back into centre stage the Empire that began with Constantine’s new city overlooking the Bosporos, founded in 330, and which lasted until the Ottoman Empire, in 1453, finally broke through the thick and multilayered walls of what is now Istanbul.

Room after room at the Royal Academy is filled with icons large and small, illustrated psalters, intricately carved ivory, bells, paintings, gilded chalices and silverware. Rightly, it only refers to Gibbon in passing, for the point of the exhibition is to make us more aware of the unique nature of the Empire that lasted for a thousand years.

But having once spent spent a week recording an abridgement of The Decline and Fall with the Welsh actor Philip Madoc, he of the imperial voice, I heard in my memory the great sentences and phrases of that remarkable eighteenth-century historian.

Gibbon’s great work starts with the death of Augustus in Rome in AD 14. Augustus advised his successors not to expand the borders of the Roman empire because, he said, it had reached the furthest extent which was practical to maintain. But, argues Gibbon, stasis is no state for an empire – it must either expand or contract.

However, Gibbon’s main thesis was that the Empire declined and fell following the ‘degradation of civic virtue’ and the loss of martial spirit, perhaps affected by the Christian attitude of pacifism. He also contrasted the age of reason in which he himself lived with the supposed Dark Ages of the medieval period.

Though he, too, encountered ignorance: when presenting the second volume of The Decline and Fall to the Duke of Gloucester, the said duke laid the big book on the table and remarked, ‘Another damn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?’

Gibbon acknowledges the role the Byzantine empire played in world history. Latin was gradually superseded by Greek so that by 700 AD it was the language of the law, government and religion; and artistic and religious expression were affected as much by Eastern as by Western influences. Interacting with Persia, Egypt and the growing might of Islam, both in terms of military expansion as well as science and the arts, the Byzantine culture developed a very different character from its Roman origins.

Gibbon’s account of this second phase of the ‘Roman’ empire is laced with a certain disdain: ‘a degenerate race of princes’ he writes, and certainly it can seem so with its succession of emperors who died or were dismembered in unpleasant ways, and their misbehaving consorts. Even Justinian (484–565), one of the strongest figures, chose for a wife one Theodora, a woman whose public sexual activities were the stuff of common knowledge and experience.

I have returned to our recording (in two 6-CD volumes) of the useful abridgement of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and found it is as hypnotic as I had remembered. This is due in part, of course, to the magisterial Philip Madoc, who has just the right amount of hauteur; but mostly to Gibbon himself who is always so clear despite a staggering vocabulary. I certainly recommend it as a fine adjunct to the Royal Academy exhibition: if you listen to the whole 12 CDs of the two volumes, you will have a better grasp of the Roman Empire in its two phases, and English at its apogee.

Nicolas Soames

Drama on Audiobook

By Nicolas Soames
1 Oct 2008

The Merchant of Venice, which we release this month in a new production with Sir Antony Sher as Shylock and Emma Fielding as Portia, is our eleventh Shakespeare title. Actually, we have thirteen Shakespeares, because we also have the remarkable John Gielgud Hamlet and the, I must say, equally remarkable Donmar Warehouse production of Othello with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the title role and Ewan McGregor as Iago.

We have other dramas as well, including Pygmalion, Oedipus, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Blithe Spirit, and Hedda Gabler (outstanding performances from Juliet Stevenson and Michael Maloney). And, on a regular basis, we are asked for more drama, both classics and more modern plays. Only today, we had a call from a Naxos AudioBooks collector suggesting that we do Sheridan’s The Rivals.

Quite often, when I go to the theatre, I come away thinking about how striking the play would be on audiobook, or that here was a remarkable performance that should be preserved in one form or another. For drama on audiobook can be something very special: the listener is drawn right into the intimacy of theatre, giving an experience which is akin to but different from performance in a playhouse.

I thought this only last week, when I went to the Donmar Warehouse production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, at Wyndham’s Theatre in the heart of London’s West End. The big draw, not to put too fine a point on it, was Kenneth Branagh playing the title role; but it is the total effect of the evening that, a week later, still rings in my consciousness.

Branagh gave a completely committed performance, on two occasions breaking down in a way that was totally believable – wholly in keeping with the play’s Russian intensity and the heightened emotional expression of its characters. But he and Grandage, with the help of a new version by Tom Stoppard, have perfectly matched the Russian-ness of the production – the gestures, the sentiments – with the English theatre context.

They managed a truly remarkable juggling act between deeply felt emotions and high (and sometimes low) comedy. At one point, on one part of the stage, Ivanov was in turmoil, and at the very same time there were little comic turns going on elsewhere. The conjunction, somehow, worked – perfect timing on the part of the actors and director.

As so often with productions in which Branagh is involved, Ivanov is not a start vehicle but a company production... frankly there was a perceptible richness of presentation even in the non-speaking servant roles!

I would love to give you Ivanov on audiobook... but alas commercial pressures make that impossible. It would come out as a 2- or possibly 3-CD set, and very regrettably it is unlikely that it would break even in five years or more. It is as simple as that. Even a co-production with BBC Radio 3 (as we did with Othello) would be of questionable commercial sense. Shakespeare has a far greater worldwide audience than an early Chekhov – in translation!

So all you who would love to listen to new productions from the theatre of Sheridan or Shaw, let alone Molière or Goethe or Miller, I am afraid it is a question of patronage! Or it is a question of turning to some of the great historical recordings that we are starting to release, such as The Playboy of the Western World or the Gielgud Hamlet...

Nicolas Soames

Dance Dance Dance

By Nicolas Soames
1 Sep 2008

Last month, in AudioFile, the American audiobook magazine, the reviewer praised Rupert Degas’s reading of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. It is not, I think, immodest to print the review in its entirety, as it was given an ‘Earphones’ award, a gong of particular distinction.

DANCE DANCE DANCE
By Haruki Murakami
Read by Rupert Degas

The unnamed hero of Haruki Murakami’s sixth novel is a somber, lonely writer whose dreams call him back to a run-down Sapporo hotel where he once lived. But when he tracks down the hotel, he finds a newly refurbished luxury high-rise. He falls for the receptionist, becomes guardian to a clairvoyant teen, and is transported to a haunted hallway, all while trying to solve a mystery of dead or missing prostitutes. British actor Rupert Degas is masterful in his reading of Dance Dance Dance. Degas performs the entire novel in a flawless American accent, with Japanese names, phrases, and place names read with a believable Japanese accent. Once Degas starts reading, it’s nearly impossible to stop listening to this oddly brilliant psychological thriller. S.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: August 2008]

I entirely agree! When Rupert first read The Wild Sheep Chase, he set the character of Murakami’s narrator perfectly, and in the continuance of the story Dance, Dance, Dance he went even deeper.

But I thought I would highlight this review because I think it raises other issues.

Reviews are important to audiobook publishers – there is no doubt about that. We publish a number of titles a month, and we want them all to get noticed, but the reality is that only a handful can possibly be reviewed in the general press... only a specialist magazine like AudioFile can possibly cover a wider range. It is one of only a few magazines dedicated to audiobooks – I only know of two others in Germany, as it happens. And there isn’t one in the UK!

So we depend on reviews in newspapers to reach a wider public, and there, with all the competition from the main book world, we can only possibly hope for a handful each week. In fact, I must say that Naxos AudioBooks’ new releases get very well served by newspapers such as The Times and Sunday Times, The Guardian and Observer in the UK, and a variety of newspapers and library journals in the US. If you look at the news/reviews section above, you will see many recent examples.

But what is interesting about this particular review of Dance, Dance, Dance is the amount of space given to the actor and his performance. The reviewer sets the scene with an introduction to the novel... but then concentrates on the reading.

And, in a way, this is the MOST important part of the review to my mind. In classical music (and Naxos AudioBooks comes from the Naxos family of classical recordings), the critics will discuss the interpretation and the performance of a new recording of an established classic and perhaps compare it to existing recordings. This is what the prospective buyer wants to know about.

Now, Naxos AudioBooks concentrates on the classics mainly, of course, and the same should apply. How do the readers of Bleak House treat the main characters? How does Glen McCready present the characters of Professor Challenger and Malone in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World? In the case of a contemporary novel like Dance, Dance, Dance, more background about the novel is necessary undoubtedly, though, as in this case, it is balanced by reflections on Rupert Degas’s work.

The difficulty can be that many of the reviews appear on the book pages, and the tone of book reviews is very different to music reviews. This is another occasion where we find that audiobooks exist in the no man’s land between performance and the printed word. For there is no doubt that an audiobook is a different beast to the original book as anyone who has decided that the reader is NOT to his taste (and this can happen in minutes!) knows.

The most experienced audiobook reviewers understand this and the actor gets his/her fair due which, when the recording may have taken a week or more, is appreciated!

Nicolas Soames

Recording for the Dustbin

By Nicolas Soames
1 Aug 2008

The other day, we ditched two new recordings before they even got to the CD pressing plant, and got different actors in to read them afresh. It is an expensive business to do that, but they were both part of a new box-set scheduled for next year, and to have two average-to-poor CDs in a 6 CD box was simply unacceptable.

I am not sure how often this happens in other audiobook companies. We have found it necessary to do this from time to time over the fourteen years since we started, but I use a simple yardstick: if I can’t bear to listen to it, why should anyone else? And, frankly, I don’t have to buy it!

But it is a problem with the way the audiobook world works. We decide on the book to be recorded, and consider the ideal voice or voices: young, old, fresh, mature, light, substantial, classic or contemporary. Do we want someone with a chameleon of characters at their disposal like Rupert Degas, or do we want someone who just touches the character yet conveys 3D – like Juliet Stevenson?

There are many good audiobook readers in the firmament, yet when you look down the Naxos AudioBooks list of actors you will see (and our loyal fans know) we go back again and again to particular voices: Juliet, Anton Lesser, David Timson, Neville Jason, Sean Barrett, Emma Fielding for the classics; Garrick Hagon, Liza Ross for Transatlantic texts; Teresa Gallagher for the junior range (and adult classics also); Jim Norton for literature from the Emerald Isle.

Although there is the danger of over-familiarity, the bottom line is that they have remarkable talent. But we can’t use them all the time. And we want to discover new readers – new talent that is pouring out of the drama schools and interested in reading despite the allure of TV and film. I have particularly enjoyed Glen McCready’s recent recordings for us, including The Lost World, which I thought tremendous fun. Clare Willie did something rather special with Cranford, and I am glad to say she is back in the studio next month.

So what happens when it goes wrong? It varies. Choices can be made, often on recommendations or because actors have been seen on stage or screen. Yet when they sit in that booth in front of the single microphone, the magic is not there. Or they simply can’t read. Or they can read narrative but not dialogue, or the other way round.

Sometimes, it is our mistake: we put a hundred-metre runner in a 5,000-metre race. We were wrong to ask. Sometimes, the actor should have declined... but work is work!

Generally, actor and producer don’t meet before the day of recording. There is no long rehearsal period as there is for the stage, and you can’t have a read-through as for TV and even film. Actor and producer may speak beforehand and arrive at some common view on the book.

But the business begins at 10 a.m. when the green light goes on. And only then do you know! Adjustments can be made – and often are – in that first crucial hour, when tone and pace are set. Occasionally, the reading seems just okay, and we have to give it time to settle. If necessary, we can come back to the beginning at the end.

With the recent examples where we had to rerecord, we had decided, at first, to try new voices. It was rather hard work in the studio – very far short of electrifying – but the producer decided to soldier on. It was only some time later, when the editing process had virtually finished, and I listened as a fresh ear on the proceedings, that a halt was called. Can we really release this? There was simply no life. The words were all there in the right order, but no sparkle came out of the speakers.

And as this set is designed to represent one of the major American writers who celebrates an anniversary next year, back we went to the studio – with John Chancer and Kerry Shale, two very experienced readers – to do them again. The difference was dramatic.

We do this kind of thing with caution for obvious economic reasons. But it is done from time to time. Naxos Audiobooks comes from a classical music background, so we have always felt (and especially as we do literary classics) that we have to justify every recording we make on a performance basis. Is it really a lively, faithful representation of a classic? Does it bring something new to the view of a book? Will the performance hold the listener’s attention, not just provide words in the ear? These are the criteria used in Naxos classical recordings – not least because often a new CD of Mozart will be judged against existing recordings!

So... sometimes a recording does go into the dustbin. And so it should!

Nicolas Soames

Music and Word

By Nicolas Soames
16 June 2008

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.

Nicolas Soames

Voice Recognition

By Genevieve Helsby, deputy publisher, Naxos AudioBooks
16 June 2008

This NAB blog is about voice recognition. I don’t mean the sophisticated software that allows you to bellow hopelessly into your mobile while remaining technically in control of the car. I’m referring to the listener’s identification of particular voices and exactly what this means.

‘Oh, it’s that one from The Archers – you know – don’t know her real name’: so how does an actor get past this? On TV or on stage, they have the tools of costume and make-up to spark the immediate mental gear-shift of anyone watching. Being ‘in character’ involves a whole lot more than a dressing-up box, but without it our generally spoon-fed imagination would be struggling. Besides, for any stragglers in the audience, there are the physical movements and gestures of a character to sever any remnants of a connection to a previous role.

But on the radio or in an audiobook the voice alone must do the work. There are actors remarkable for ‘doing’ voices (just take Teresa Gallagher narrating an entire novel as a 12-year-old boy and giving us five other distinct children’s voices in Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers) but this is different.

How does Juliet Stevenson, for example, stop us thinking ‘that’s Juliet Stevenson’ – if she does at all? Does the quality of the literature play a significant part or could she do it with the blurb on a cereal packet?

In fact, if you watch an actor record an audiobook – whether a novel or a play – it is an oddly visual experience. There will be particular physical gestures and movements, and these translate into all kinds of vocal nuances.

Generally, we like recognising a voice. The default voice on your sat-nav may sound like the disembodied woman at Luton airport... but you can pay money to have John Cleese telling you to turn around as soon as possible. In fact, John Cleese is a case in point: he has struggled to divorce himself from Basil Fawlty, or more generally an element of the ridiculous – but does this mean that the employment of his voice alone is less successful, or just that it carries certain connotations? The casting of it in the film Valiant for a terribly British pigeon – a squadron leader – who babbles nonsensically when captured was surely an intentional nourishment of the image.

In the narration of stories this element of recognition is often just as appealing. It’s the comfort of familiarity. Fireside family story-telling involves people you know and love – it contributes positively to the experience if you feel you’ve made some sort of connection with the reader, however superficial it is in reality. From then on, it is a mixture of the story itself and the reader that transports you elsewhere...

Yet in a play, perhaps the recognition is undesirable. In order to ‘be’ someone else, you don’t want to be recognised either for yourself or for the last or most well-known role you took on. And this is where the skill of an actor is so remarkable. If you listen to Anton Lesser playing Hamlet you simply don’t think about Mr Pickwick, Thomas Gradgrind or all the other characters he has depicted so beautifully on Naxos AudioBooks. He is Hamlet now. And the fact that you can’t see him – that you have to simply close your eyes and let your imagination do the work – makes this all the more astonishing.

Conversely, the problem of a voice not being recognised can also be a challenge in producing an audio version of a stage play. No doubt you’ve experienced at some point that comprehension blur near the beginning, where too many voices are speaking and you’ve not had time to attune your ear to individual characters... in such cases, the off-switch is usually waving a welcome hello.

It is quite a staggering thought that every single person’s voice is recognisably different. But it also hints at the sheer scope of vocal production. Actors can play the voice like an instrument; that it is the only instrument when it comes to audiobooks merely refines the listener’s experience of a very special art form.

Genevieve Helsby

The freedom of being independent!

By Nicolas Soames
01 June 2008

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 Benedict Flynn: translator of Dante, author of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, The Junior Homer and, more recently, the widely praised translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (among other things). We met when he was (briefly) manager of the classics department of Foyles in Charing Cross Road, London and got into conversation...

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 Ado about 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 recent unabridged 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.

Nicolas Soames

Down memory lane – unabridged!

By Nicolas Soames
01 May 2008

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.

This is true of two of this month’s recordings: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse read by Juliet Stevenson and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer read by Garrick Hagon.

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 even Lady 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.

Nicolas Soames

AudioBook Reviews

By Nicolas Soames
15 Apr 2008

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!

Nicolas Soames

James Joyce, Milton, Shakespeare and Alice Meet in Oxford...

By Nicolas Soames
3 Apr 2008

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 former BBC 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 RADA and, 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.

Nicolas Soames

NAXOS AUDIOBOOKS AT THE SUNDAY TIMES OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, a week-long literary banquet held at various venues in the city, but centred on Christ Church, is one of the leading events of its kind in the UK. Eminent authors of a wide range of fiction, non-fiction, adult and children’s literature give talks, discuss topics and are generally around.

Naxos AudioBooks gave four presentations at this year’s event, highlighting particular aspects of its catalogue, three of them in the elegantly musty environs of the Upper Library, with late afternoon sun streaming in through the end window. These three talks – on James Joyce’s Women, Shakespearean performance and John Milton’s effect on the English language – drew rapt audiences; while the final presentation on classic children’s literature was held in the more informal environment of the Marquee in the Meadows.

If you missed the talks, or if you would like to hear them again, here they are!

Click on the links below to listen to/download the files. Alternatively, control-click (Mac), or right-click (PC) on a link, and choose ‘Save linked file as...’ to save the file to your computer.

James Joyce’s Women
Roger Marsh, director of Naxos AudioBooks James Joyce recordings introduces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake with particular emphasis on Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle. With stunning readings by Marcella Riordan.

Listen/download: James Joyce’s Women (MP3, 58 mins, 20.2 MB)

Speak the Speech...
David Timson, director of four Naxos AudioBooks Shakespeare recordings and author of Shakespeare Stories, surveys the changing styles of Shakespeare performance through recordings starting with Henry Irving in the 1890s through to Kenneth Branagh in the twenty-first century.

Listen/download: Speak the Speech... (MP3, 58 mins, 20 MB)
Accompanying notes (PDF, 120 KB)

John Milton and his English Language
John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature in Oxford University, looks at John Milton and his use of the English Language through the main works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Lycidas, Comus and Samson Agonistes. With exceptional readings from the works by Anton Lesser.

Listen/download: John Milton and his English Language (MP3, 18.1 MB)

When The Magic Began
Nicolette Jones, childrens’ book reviewer for The Sunday Times, discusses classic children’s literature, why it endures in a time of Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling,and introduces some of her favourites through lively and entertaining readings by Teresa Gallagher and Anton Lesser.

Listen/download: When The Magic Began (MP3, 14.8 MB)

The Gathering

By Nicolas Soames
1 Mar 2008

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.

Nicolas Soames

On the Road

By Nicolas Soames
2 Feb 2008

I live in Welwyn, a pretty village in Hertfordshire. My home is very close to the Naxos AudioBooks office – too close even for an audiobook fix in the morning. (I am repeatedly told I shouldn’t be in the car in the first place... that my legs would serve!)

So, although I am kitted out with an in-car iPod transmitter, I don’t often have the chance to use it. I spend more time listening to audiobooks (both NAB’s and my colleagues’) when going into London on the train, or even walking in the countryside.

But the other day I drove to Birmingham, which takes a couple of hours (or a bit more with one stop). I kitted myself out for the drive. I knew I would listen for a while to BBC Radio 3, which was reviewing The A–Z of Conductors, an amazing new Naxos release written and compiled by David Patmore. Actually the programme, CD Review, spent over forty minutes on it, interviewing David and the English National Opera conductor Edward Gardiner, and generally – generously – giving it the thumbs-up. It is a box set with a 250,000-word booklet surveying the careers of 300 conductors, four CDs of key music tracks, and an unbelievable website with hundreds of hours of free streamed music, showcasing the work of many of those conductors so that listeners can make their own judgements. A milestone release.

Before that, I slipped in the first CD of one of our latest releases, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (unabridged), read by Glenn McCready with an easy informality disguising real skill – you will hear more of him on NAB.

The road was still unfolding, and somewhere north of Coventry I decided I had better move on, and slipped in an MP3 listening copy of the ’final edit’ of Neville Jason (he of War and Peace and Proust fame) reading the abridged version (aimed at a junior audience) of The Sword in the Stone. Actually, this is not due for release until later this year, but it has been pre-empted by the first installment of the unabridged recording of T. H. White’s masterpiece The Once and Future King. There is no music with the unabridged recording of The Sword in the Stone (eight CDs, just out), but there is with the abridged version (three CDs, to be released in June).

Then came Radio 3.

And then it was iPod time. I am currently listening to The History of India by Michael Wood (rich and interesting) on BBC AudioBooks, read by Sam Dastor, who does a very good line in authentic pronunciation. I plugged the transmitter into the lighter power socket, slipped in my iPod, and off it went.

When I first got the transmitter I was hooked. At last, I would be able to move from iPod at home to iPod on the train to iPod in the car seamlessly, never losing my place in the story. But I do recognise that this method has some serious limitations.

First of all, there is the sound quality. The basic sound from the transmitter is not very good. It is as simple as that. I certainly find it an unacceptable compromise when I want to play music. Very poor. So, although I have a nice range of my personal delights – from David Bowie to the St Matthew Passion to Music for Two Cellos played by NAB editor Sarah Butcher (an unashamed plug) – I don’t listen to them in the car.

Then there is the interference from the packed airwaves in the UK. Only too often, I have to change frequency. This is both annoying and– at seventy miles per hour – dangerous, even though actually it only involves pressing a couple of buttons.

I also find that if I want to change tracks or move to a new playing choice, it is again a dangerous manoeuvre, because the transmitter in the lighter socket is situated rather low in my BMW – as with most cars, I suspect. I confess I have swerved a couple of times to adjust direction...

SO – it is time to ditch the transmitter and get a new radio, with a direct iPod input, so I can work it all from the car radio. I have felt some resistance to upgrading the hardware when my radio works perfectly, so I have delayed the change – but for many reasons (including safety’s sake!), it has to come!

By the way, I came home with more of The Sword in the Stone, a gem in the Arthurian canon which started, really, with Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur) by Sir Thomas Malory, and from which T. H. White took the overall title of his epic.

Nicolas Soames

A Jane Austen Month – Again!

By Nicolas Soames
1 Jan 2008

The appetite for film and TV adaptations of the classics continues unabated. Neither Jane Austen nor Charles Dickens would be nearly as popular in the twenty-first century were it not for some truly memorable performances on the big and small screens.

As proof, just a few years after Emma Thompson’s intelligent and faithful re-working of Sense and Sensibility, for the director Ang Lee’s venture into English literature, here is Andrew Davis’s reworking for BBC TV: though whether Thompson’s wonderfully sensitive portrayal of Elinor can be truly matched remains to be seen.

This constant reworking of the classics demonstrates a public appetite which cannot be denied, encouraging producers to cast a wider net. It has been heartening in recent years to tread not only the highways – such as the pops from Austen and Dickens (Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend), the Brontës (and more than just Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre!) and Thackeray (Vanity Fair) – but also the byways, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, which proved an indubitable hit.

Purists can rail against the way they are done (blatantly luscious kisses in Jane Austen... even a sex scene!; contraction of events from the Cranford novels etc.). But more often than not the period, the sensibility and the point of the works are retained. This was certainly true of last year’s delicious Fanny Hill, though for me A Cock and Bull Story, the reworking of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, surely gets the prize for the most imaginative screen presentation of a wildly wacky novel.

And back we all (or many of us) go to the original...

This was true last year of Cranford, which previously registered low on the classics scale. The Naxos AudioBooks unabridged recording by Clare Willie proved very popular (supported by a stream of outstanding reviews!) and the paperback publishers found themselves rapidly reprinting to keep up with the demand.

When it comes to audiobooks, the question often arises whether to go for the abridged version or the unabridged. Of course, the faithful throw up their hands in horror.

’My dear, I wouldn’t TOUCH an abridged version.’

In some cases, the decision is easy. Cranford runs for just eight hours unabridged, so we didn’t even consider doing it abridged.

But Bleak House read so affectingly by Sean Barrett and Teresa Gallagher runs for thirty-six hours unabridged – and that is a serious audiobook commitment. So many will prefer our (generous) abridgement, which runs for just over eleven hours.

Similarly, Great Expectations, read by Anton Lesser, runs for over eighteen hours unabridged, so we offer an alternative four-and-a-half hour version on four CDs.

And what about Sense and Sensibility? Well, the full version runs for just under fourteen hours. For many, the pairing of Jane Austen and Juliet Stevenson means fourteen totally absorbing hours. But others will prefer the three CD version, running for nearly four hours. They may also prefer the inclusion of classical music which makes these abridgements more of an atmospheric production, perhaps even closer to the TV adaptation. The main point, of course, is that you get the real words of Jane Austen – and (shock, horror!) you neither find any lubricious corners, nor do you miss them.

Of course, time is not the only factor. There is price as well...

For this month, we are offering the unabridged version of Sense and Sensibility for just £19.99 AND a free recording of a biography of Jane Austen.

Juliet Stevenson has had a close working relationship with the novels of Jane Austen, being a memorable Mrs Elton in the film version of Emma; but she is, perhaps, peerless when reading the original... Listen to her talking about her feelings and continuing respect for Austen in her podcast, and you will see why... and why fourteen hours of Sense and Sensibility is an unalloyed joy.

Nicolas Soames

The play’s the thing – you too can be Cyrano and Roxane and...

By Nicolas Soames
3 Dec 2007

5.15 p.m., Wednesday. Approaching post-work time. The afternoon had been fairly quiet in our offices in the English Hertfordshire village where Naxos AudioBooks HQ is situated. So Genevieve Helsby, who runs Naxos Books, and Caroline Waight, the latest arrival to the team, sat around my desk... and we read through a play.

We pulled off the shelves Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in the Anthony Burgess translation, a gem of world drama with a curiously powerful emotional punch. It was given an international platform on film by the larger-than-life Gérard Depardieu; and recently, in New York, Kevin Kline gave, by all accounts, a mesmeric performance.

Cyrano de Bergerac has a large cast, so at first we chose our roles lightly. I used the privilege of my position and chose Cyrano, Genevieve was Roxane, Caroline Christian de Neuvillette and we agreed to share the rest – de Guiche, Le Bret, Ragueneau, the duenna and all the others as they came up.

That didn’t last long. Roxane doesn’t appear for some time and after a couple of grand speeches from me, Genevieve had had enough of silence and elbowed me out of Cyrano; I moved over to Carbon de Castel-jaloux and a cadet, and it wasn’t long before characters were batted from one reader to another.

It started as fun even if slightly self-conscious. Though we spend our working lives in the environs of the spoken word, stepping into the spotlight is a very different matter. It is thirteen years since Naxos AudioBooks recorded its first title (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando read by Laura Paton) and I have lost count of the hours I have spent in the studio. Genevieve, too, has produced audiobooks from Edith Nesbit to Wagner’s The Ring: An Introduction. And, when at school, Caroline produced an audiobook adaptation of The Lord of the Rings!

But here we were, actually at the business end even if no microphone was in sight.

And Cyrano de Bergerac, with its flamboyant French declamatory character sustained by Burgess, is no easy read. Here is a sample – in a visit to the theatre, Cyrano, swordsman and poet, ridicules the (over-the-top) pompous actor Montfleury:

CYRANO:   Stay in your stalls,
You vaccine marquises. Your mooing calls
My cane to rummage through your folderols.

SPECTATOR:   Continue, Montfleury.

CYRANO:   Discontinue, rather, unless he,
Unwilling to retire to sty or trough,
Needs disembowelling and his jowls cut off.
Off, off, you offal. Lug your guts away,
You mortadella. Very well, then – stay,
And I’ll remove you slice by slice.

(MONTFLEURY summons up the remains of his dignity.)

MONTFLEURY:   Monsieur, In insulting me you insult the Tragic Muse.

(There are some murmurs of agreement and admiration.)

CYRANO (equably):   If the Tragic Muse had the dubious honour, fat sir,
Of your acquaintance, she would not abuse
Her pious duty. Seeing the blubber ooze
Into your collar and your belly round as a clock,
She’d kick your buttocks with her tragic sock.

SPECTATOR (leading the pit):   Carry on, Montfleury – let’s hear the play.

CYRANO (kindly):   Consider my poor scabbard, please, I pray.
She loves my sword and wants my sword to stay
Inside her. Off that stage!

MONTFLEURY:   I, I –

Rapidly, the power of the drama took hold. We three, chopping and changing through the characters, saw the events unfold from a changing situation. One moment Genevieve understood Roxane’s love for the beautiful Christian de Neuvillette because Genevieve was reading Roxane; a little further on, we had swapped the roles and she was now Cyrano, and feeling his worldly understanding for the young, beautiful lovers overtaken by his passion, his urgency and his eloquence.

You may say you can get the same effect by reading the play silently to yourself or seeing a performance: you can empathise with each character’s situation. But it isn’t the same. Because it is very different experience actually speaking the words out loud. There is a sharper level of reality, of understanding, of participation.

The actor knows his expression is through body, speech and mind. It is his training. Those who have had good drama teachers at school will have an inkling of this, remembering when they were cajoled or coerced to take parts in a read-through of Shakespeare, for example. Of course, some people come naturally to performance, but most of us (myself included!) shuddered at the thought of having to perform. But what an enriching experience it proves to be.

And so was Cyrano de Bergerac in the Naxos AudioBooks office.

Of course, it is only for the office on a late Wednesday afternoon when the phones are mercifully quiet! We are privileged to work with some of the greatest actors in the world. Our experience makes us all the more appreciative of their remarkable talent. In her Christmas review round-up in The Times, Christina Hardyment’s favourite audiobook of 2007 was Bleak House read by the ‘mesmeric’ Sean Barrett and Teresa Gallagher remarkable for her ‘freshness and honesty’ as Esther Summerson.

And both Sean and Teresa have said to me (as so many others as well) that they love to read a big classic ‘because we get to play all the parts!’

So, listen and enjoy the wondrous talents of our readers, presenting the greatest classics.

But how about, one day over Christmas, persuade the family and friends to turn off the television, turn off the CD player or iPod or radio; then take a play – a Noël Coward, or Bernard Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, or a Chekhov, even a Shakespeare – and read it through. Even if there are only two of you!

It probably doesn’t matter what it is – something grand, funny, light or exciting; something old, something new.

So long as it has life, the performance doesn’t matter. The spoken word will bring the art alive.

It will be enriching, you will have fun, and you will appreciate the greatness of great actors all the more!

Nicolas Soames

Big novels, audiobooks and the north face of the Eiger

By Nicolas Soames
01 Nov 2007

Recording large novels unabridged is a massive undertaking. When we recorded War and Peace (which runs for 61 hours) with Neville Jason reading, we put aside twenty-one days for recording. It actually took about twenty-four, and then there were a few retakes as we re-considered interpretation and pronunciation.

Neville has never quantified the amount of time he spent in preparation – considering the characters, the tone of the narrative, the flow and pace of the whole book. And that is before the major task of preparing the reading! Many of the very finest readers read their books out loud first of all, before they get into the studio. Certainly David Timson did this with Our Mutual Friend (36 hours): he reckons he has read it out complete at least three times.

Their work is certainly appreciated. Neville received this a few days ago: ‘After listening to your absolutely lovely reading [of