便宜有好貨：Naxos打敗拉圖與柏林愛樂

Newsweek雜誌網路版二月初專訪歐巴馬時代的「新文化沙皇」（New Culture Czar）作曲家John Adams，談新政府應該如何提倡精緻藝術，其中有一段針對廉價唱片廠牌Naxos的評語：

Newsweek：The budget-label Naxos label seems to be doing well.

John Adams：Yeah, they do [all right], but their product is so mediocre.They must have made … seven or eight CDs of my work. They're poorly produced. In some cases, the performances are OK, and in some cases the performances are disgraceful. It's like going to Costco and buying toilet paper with no brand on it.

Newsweek：Which recordings would you steer people away from?

John Adams：Well, I wouldn't say it for the record.

購買量販店或連鎖商店的自有品牌商品並沒有甚麼不對！省掉中間大筆行銷費用，但一樣是由市場上領導品牌的製造商代工製造；舉例來說，屈臣氏的衛生紙一樣是由大廠永×餘代工，在不景氣的現在，實在沒有理由只為了迷信品牌而浪費錢吧。購買自用品牌商品反而是一種非常划算的聰明消費行為呢！

更何況，若非Naxos公司「平凡的二流錄音」，大量20世紀現代作曲家罕見曲目根本沒有機會灌錄成唱片，讓更多愛樂者以最低的代價欣賞到這些連音樂廳都不一定有機會演出的作品，John Adams此番不識時務的評論，不禁讓人聯想到「何不食肉靡」囈語....

舉例來說，樂評家Andrew Clements 於英國衛報評論近期兩張拉威爾《小孩與魔法》（L'enfant et les Sortileges），便是最好的一個例子。一張是EMI出版，由Simon Rattle指揮柏林愛樂，另一張則是Naxos出版，由Alastair Willis（從沒聽過？！）指揮 Nashville Symphony（連B咖樂團，恐怕都算不上吧！？），表面上看起來似乎無法相提並論，但樂評是這麼說的：

No composer has evoked the world of childhood more magically than Ravel, and the two works in which he did so most potently - the ballet Ma Mère l'Oye and the one-act opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, with its deft, tender text by Colette - make an obvious pairing. Both pieces bring the best out of Simon Rattle, too, and throughout this disc, recorded in Berlin last autumn, his graceful grading of the orchestral textures and perfectly paced unfolding of its melodies is a pleasure in itself.

But despite Rattle's beautifully realised evocations, and the Berlin Philharmoniker's exquisitely coloured scene painting, the performance of L'Enfant never quite takes off. Magdalena Kozena's Child is more grande dame than naughty youngster, while the rest of the cast, including Annick Massis, Nathalie Stutzmann, José Van Dam and François Le Roux, never really get into their collections of cameos either. It's all a bit too genteel, too refined in the wrong sense of the word. And though the playing of the Nashville Symphony on the Naxos disc can't begin to compete with the Berlin sound, there's something about the spirit of that performance under Alastair Willis, with Julie Boulianne as the Child, that seems closer to what Ravel might have had in mind. The performance of Ma Mère l'Oye may be worth the price of the EMI disc alone, but the delicate flavour of the opera comes across far more effectively in the Naxos account.