Bernard Chasan:

>I think of Naxos prices in terms of movie admissions.  As long as I can pay
>about the same for a Naxos as I do for a movie it is a great bargain.  In
>response to another comment on Naxos, most Naxos cds stand well on their
>own and I don't think of them as previews before purchasing the "real" cds.

I must have given the wrong impression when I used the Bax series as an
example.  I don't intend to replace the Lloyd-Jones Bax discs with any
others.  They are fabulous.  But now that I have all three of the Naxos
Bax issues, I am hungry for more and will probably explore some of his
other compositions on full-price labels (I don't think Naxos will be
recording all the tone poems and concerted works.) There's many other
examples of Naxos performances that satisfy me to where I don't need any
further recordings of the pieces in question, as well as instances where
the Naxos has "beaten out" a full-price equivalent in my collection and
sent it to the trade-in bag.  I never buy a Naxos release unless I feel
from the reviews and hearsay that there's at least a decent chance it will
take up a permanent place in my collection.  Anyway, I guess the point is
I may never have checked out Bax in the first place if not for the
inexpensive entree.

Also, Kevin Sutton's insider observation that Media Play has been in
financial trouble for some time explains a lot for me.  When I first moved
to Gainesville, I'd go there every couple of weeks and be sure to find
something surprising and appealing in the Classical section.  But in the
last couple of years the section has atrophied more and more to where it
now takes up half the number of aisle-sides as before and many composers'
sections consist almost exclusively of cheapo in-house Excelsior discs and
the very highest-profile of the new releases like Pollini's Debussy disc.
The same thing happened even more severely at Spec's here-- when I moved
here they had two full aisle-sides of classical, not as good as Media Play
at that time but still willing to range as far afield as Kurtag, Crumb, and
the odd micro-label release.  Now classical gets 2/3 of one aisle-side,
with the bins only about half-full, and Sibelius and Mahler for example
getting about three discs each, and new items almost never added.  Borders
opened in January, and they are pretty thorough with Naxos, the 2fer
labels, and new releases, so that's nice.  I just get the rest online
as I've been doing since the local atrophying started.

Jon Lewis
[log in to unmask]