Old meets new on the Santiago pilgrimage

Recycling is an essential part of the creative process. My photo above was taken last September and shows the West Portal of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, which is generally considered be the most outstanding example of Provencal Romanesque architecture in southern France.

Below is the magnificent portal recycled in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie paid the town of Gard 2000 gold francs to allow plaster casts to be taken of the portal. The casts were shipped across the Atlantic in 195 packing cases and assembled in Pittsburgh for the 1907 opening of the museum's Hall of Architecture.

The Abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard is one of the staging posts on the most southerly of the pilgrimage routes to Santiago in Spain, which starts in nearby Arles. In 2005 composer Joby Talbot indulged in some creative recycling when he incorporated the hymn Dum Pater Familias and other pilgrim tunes into his choral work Path of Miracles which celebrates the Santiago pilgrimage. Read more about Path of Miracles here.

On Sunday February 3rd I will be playing the final two of the four parts of Path of Miracles on Future Radio. My programme is broadcast at 5.00pm on Sunday afternoon, and will be repeated at 1.00am on Monday morning for transatlantic listeners, which is afternoon or evening Sunday in their time zones.

I'm framing Path of Miracles with two excerpts from the 1991 recording of music from the Pilgimage to Santiago made by the New London Consort directed by Philip Pickett. This draws on the 12th century Codex Calixtinus also used by Joby Talbot. The New London Consort disc is a classic release from L'Oiseau-Lyre's Indian summer, and it has recently been re-released at budget price - grab it while you can. Read the L'Oiseau Lyre story here.


Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday Feb 3 and Monday Feb 4 in real time here (convert to local time zones here). Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

When record shopping was fun

Telemann.live journal has a nice piece about my recent L'Oiseau Lyre article. I couldn't resist reblogging this comment posted there by a reader:

I can remember when record shopping was fun, and I think I could make the point that most of the advances in recorded music engineering and production were made for classical music up to the advent of the Beatles and their own production company.

I still have at least two of the first three classical LP's I bought in Boston at the Jordan, Marsh dept. store record dept. in the summer of 1969. My idea of an afterlife would be the Harvard Coop record dept. under the helm of manager Helga Newcomb, circa 1974. She knew everyone's tastes.

I'll partipate in the choral music scene here in Boston as long as it's still viable and buy their recordings. As for the rest, it's a lost world. . .

Now read about my first classical record.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Does anyone still care about the major labels?

Does anyone really still care about the "majors" anyway? Their astounding lack of imagination has hastened their own entropy. Example: the Cleveland Orchestra hasn't made a recording in nearly a decade, and when they finally get the wherewithall to do so, on DG no less, what do they announce? Beethoven's 9th. The yawns are deafening. I can't remember the last time I bought a major label recording." comments a reader on my recent post Classical music under different stewardship.

A good point, but some people do still care about the major record labels, not least the major orchestras. If you are the Los Angeles Philharmonic and you need a new music director, when the unquestionably talented Gustavo Dudamel comes knocking with a Deutsche Grammophon contract in his pocket you suddenly care. But it didn’t use to be that way, as this story tells.

Mrs Louise Hanson Dyer (photo below) was an enterprising and charismatic Australian millionairess who trained in Australia as a singer under Dame Nellie Melba before settling in France in 1927. Mrs Dyer’s lifestyle was definitely ‘A list’, and included haute couture, a house in Monaco, a flat on the Right Bank in Paris, and a Blue Period Picasso bought from the artist himself. She was passionate about baroque music, and committed to its promotion and preservation. To achieve this she founded Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre (Lyre-Bird Press) in Paris in 1932, and commissioned leading musicologists to produce accessible editions of then little-known repertoire, including Couperin, Lully and Rameau. The next logical step was to supplement the editions with authentic recordings. These were originally on 78 rpm discs, and L'Oiseau-Lyre went on to became one of the first companies to release long-playing records in France.

As the major record labels muscled in on the growing baroque market Mrs Dyer turned her energies to discovering new talent. Her extraordinary ability to identify the potential of musicians early in their careers resulted in some of the first recordings of Sir Colin Davis, Joan Sutherland, Janet Baker, the Melos Ensemble and Thurston Dart.

Louise Dyer had immense flair and style, but she was also a hard task-master. The first ever record made by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields was recorded for L'Oiseau -Lyre in the Conway Hall in London in 1961. No royalties were paid, fees were low and session time was limited. For 'A Recital by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields' the players each received £5 ($9) from Mrs Dyer in used banknotes notes from her handbag. The 40 minute programme of rarely heard works by Corelli, Torelli, Locatelli, Albicastro and Handel was recorded in just two three hour sessions, and the performing editions of the Albicastro and Handel works were prepared by the session's producer, Jimmy Burnett. Despite the pressures (or perhaps because of) this first release was rapturously received by the critics, and went on to become a best seller. It also launched the Academy of St Martin of the Fields on a career as one of the top classical recording ensembles.

When Louise Dyer died in 1962 control of L'Oiseau-Lyre passed to her second husband. The catalogue of recordings was sold to Decca in 1970, the label went on to make many fine recordings with Christopher Hogwood and others, but eventually became a baroque music sub-label in the faceless world of corporate recording. But the Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre publishing house continues to thrive today as a joint venture with the University of Melbourne.

The remarkable success in the 1950s and 60s of L'Oiseau-Lyre was down to Louise Dyer’s entrepreneurial flair, astute talent spotting, tight financial control, and above all passion for music. It was all snuffed out after Decca was bought by Universal Music, who also own Deutsche Grammophon, whose artists also include Gustavo Dudamel (left) and the Cleveland Orchestra, which is also where this overgrown path started. The thought of Gustavo Dudamel being paid in used dollar bills from a Gucci handbag round the back of Disney Hall is appealing - we can but dream.

Now read how a surprise appointment of a conductor by another top American orchestra went pear shaped.
* With acknowledgements to 'The Academy of St Martin in the Fields' by Meirion and Susie Harries, (Michael Joseph ISBN 0718120493), to Scott Belyea whose comment on my Howell's and Lambert's Clavichord originally sparked this article, and to the Los Angeles Philharmonic for giving me a reason to upload it. Image credits: Record label from Revolutions 33, do visit this site if you are interested in LP labels, Louise Dyer from Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre. Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk