One Composer's Edition Took Forty-Two Years. Bridge Records Has Been Sold, and the Buyer Is Assembling a Second Empire.

George Crumb died in 2022. The recorded edition of his music, made under his own supervision with him at the piano, on percussion and reading aloud, was finished two years later. It runs to twenty-two CDs and a DVD, and the label that made it, Bridge Records, describes them as "composer supervised recordings made during the past 42 years".

Forty-two years is longer than most record companies last. It is longer than most marriages, most careers and most strategic plans in the recording industry survive. It happened because one man in New York kept deciding to make the next volume.

This week he and his wife sold their label.

The document

David Starobin, the guitarist and composer who founded Bridge in 1981, put his name to a message alongside the Chandos announcement, carried by Slipped Disc on 4 September:

"After 45 years in the record business, our label, Bridge Records, has been bought by Chandos Records, to be run from London and Hong Kong. We're delighted with the sale, and know the Bridge catalog is now in excellent hands, with much improved reach."

Here is what changed hands.

Six hundred and ten records in forty-five years is around fourteen a year, every year, since 1981. Starobin set out, in the label's own account of itself, to build "a home for the exceptionally interesting and challenging personality- performer and composer alike". The catalogue is the evidence that he meant it.

The buyer, and the company he built

Klaus Heymann founded Naxos in 1987, undercut the major labels on price, and built it into one of the largest classical catalogues in the world. Control of its holding company passed to other hands last year, in a transaction he disputes.

On 25 September 2025, Kuke Music Holding announced that, under agreements signed on 17 September, it had acquired roughly 70.43 per cent of Naxos One Holding Limited, the company that in turn controls Naxos Music Group. Kuke put the total transaction value at about $106.35 million and, in the press release it filed with the American securities regulator, said the deal was "settled entirely through the issuance of Kuke's Class A ordinary shares" rather than in cash. Kuke's chairman and chief executive, Peixian Tan, called it "a landmark transaction that will significantly enhance our position as a leading classical music services platform". Kuke's shares rose sharply on the news.

A month later the picture changed. On 21 October 2025 the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in Kuke's American Depositary Shares, and on 17 November it removed them from listing altogether, citing price levels it called abnormally low. Kuke did not appeal. Its shares now trade over the counter.

Heymann did not accept it. On 22 October 2025 he and Takako Nishizaki, Naxos's co-founders, together with Classical Music Museum Limited, issued a press release disputing what they called the "Purported Acquisition": "We have never given our consent to the Purported Acquisition in circumstances where certain information requested by us was not provided." Heymann's account adds that on 4 August 2025 the board of Naxos Music Group's holding company voted unanimously to terminate the group's collaboration with Beijing Kuke Music, specifically the hosting and marketing of Naxos's digital services in China, over that company's "long-term arrears in paying NMG's licensing fees", effective 30 September 2025. The founders remain shareholders in the holding company. The dispute has not, in public, been resolved.

What Heymann did next is the part the trade has reported piecemeal and nobody has added up. He bought Chandos personally in 2024. Chandos then bought the German labels Oehms Classics and Orfeo earlier this year. And now Bridge.

What the new group holds

Add the published figures, Chandos's "over 3000 titles", Orfeo's archive of more than 1,000 items and Bridge's 610 numbered releases, and the total passes 4,600, though the three are not counted on the same basis. Oehms publishes no total of its own; Naxos lists some 800 Oehms titles. Three of the four labels were founded within three years of each other, between 1979 and 1981. Chandos calls its founder "the late Brian Couzens". Starobin has just sold.

That looks to us like the pattern underneath this story, and it is not a scandal. It is a demographic problem with a deadline.

The founder problem

Characteristically, an independent classical label is one person's judgement, sustained for decades. Starobin's Bridge, Oehms's label and Couzens's Chandos were all built that way, and Orfeo began the same way in Munich in 1979. It is a structure that can produce things a committee would be unlikely to authorise, which is one reason a forty-two-year Crumb edition exists and the Carter edition ran to nine volumes.

It is also a structure with one point of failure. When the founder stops, the catalogue has three futures: someone buys it, someone licenses it, or it goes dark. The third is quiet, and on our reading it is common. Recordings do not announce their own deletion; they simply stop being available, and a composer's primary recorded documents go with them.

Read Starobin's statement again with that in mind. He is 45 years in, and the words he chose were "delighted", "excellent hands" and "much improved reach". Chandos said the additions strengthen its commitment to "preserving significant classical repertoire and making it accessible to audiences worldwide". Read one way, both parties are describing the same thing: the Carter and Crumb editions now have a distributor instead of a proprietor with a birthday.

For the musicians on those records, and for the ones who will make the next ones, that is the good news, and it is real. The hope, and it is a reasonable one, is that a catalogue inside a group with global distribution stays in print, reaches the streaming services properly, and keeps paying whatever it pays.

There is a question underneath the good news, and it is worth putting plainly rather than pretending it is not there. Consolidation preserves what exists. It is much less clear that it starts things. The Crumb edition was never likely to have been a commercial proposition, in 1982 or in 2024. It happened because the person who decided was the person who owned the company, and he wanted it to exist.

One detail Cadenza could not resolve, and will not guess at. Orfeo's own website says that "since 2015 ORFEO has been integrated into the Naxos Group as an independent limited company within Naxos Germany", and still describes the label as a member of the Naxos Music Group. Naxos Music Group's corporate site continues to list both Orfeo and Oehms Classics among its own labels; Chandos and Bridge are not on that list. Neither site has been updated since the Chandos purchases, and neither Chandos nor the trade reports of this year's deals says who sold the two German labels. If the answer is Naxos, then Heymann has begun buying back pieces of the group he built, which would be the most interesting sentence in this entire story. Neither company has said, and Cadenza is not going to assume it.

What to listen to while you think about it

The Complete Crumb Edition is still sold as a set by Bridge, twenty-two CDs and a DVD, with the composer's autograph while supplies last. The performers on it include Jan DeGaetani, Gilbert Kalish, Lambert Orkis, Robert Shannon, Tony Arnold and Susan Narucki, and Crumb's daughter Ann sings the early songs with her father accompanying. Bridge also runs a series drawn from historic concerts at the Library of Congress, recorded in the Coolidge Auditorium pictured above, with tapes reaching back to the 1940s.

Cadenza has written this season about who chooses conductors, about what the summer festivals counted and about where the money in American orchestras actually sits. This is the same subject from a different angle: who holds the assets, and what they decide to do with them. The people who make the recordings are on the jobs board, free, as always.

David Starobin recorded Elliott Carter and George Crumb for four decades because he could decide to. The question for Chandos, and for whoever ends up owning these catalogues after Chandos, is not whether the back catalogue survives. It is who, in a group of four labels run from London and Hong Kong, is now allowed to start a project that will not finish until 2068.

Sources: Slipped Disc, 4 September 2026; Pizzicato, 5 September 2026; Bridge Records, About Us; Bridge Records, The Complete Crumb Edition; Bridge Records, catalogue; Chandos Records, About us; Slipped Disc, 26 September 2025, on the Naxos sale; Press release issued by the co-founders of Naxos Music Group and Classical Music Museum Limited, 22 October 2025; Orfeo, About; Naxos, Oehms Classics label page; Naxos, About us; Kuke Music Holding, press release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, 25 September 2025; New York Stock Exchange, Form 25-NSE for Kuke Music Holding, filed 5 November 2025.

Cover photograph: The Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, where Bridge Records draws its Great Performances from the Library of Congress series. The Borromeo Quartet playing there on 24 November 2025. Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress. Library of Congress Life, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.