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]