Re: What are you listening to?
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 11:54 am
Ah yes, the finest things in life (along with music of course!)
<Pepe only went to meet these people Simon because there were probably great meals involved LOL!!! Who could argue with great food and great company?!?!>
That´s absolutely right Fergus, he, he, because there were GREAT meals involved!!!
The distributor from Denmark, a jolly fat guy called Birger, called them "Eatings & Meetings".
As you know my sister-in-law used to have the distribution in Mexico of several independent labels including Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi, Naïve, Naxos, OPUS111, Opera Rara, etc.
Every year all the independents and their distributors used to meet at Cannes, in the gorgeous South of France for the MIDEM held in the Palais des Festivals. While Yolanta Skura owned OPUS111 she used to have her meeting in Paris a few days before Cannes, and it was a treat, because she put us at the Paris Hilton (not the babe of course, the hotel) and she rented a floor at the Eiffel Tower to introduce the new releases, and there I met all the guys who were recording for OPUS111: Fabio Biondi, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Antonio Florio, Grigory Sokolov, etc.
Yolanta was an enormously knowledgable woman, having worked for Archiv and ERATO before founding her own label (she produced ALL of the Gardiner recordings in those labels). She knew that there was an important bulk of music that the major labels were ignoring just because they thought it was unmarketable, so she hired Antonio Florio to record all the glorious Treasures from Naples, Alessandro De Marchi for the Piedmont, and Biondi and Alessandrini to make the $$$$ to fund those projects. Of course, eventually it proved too expensive and sold the label to Naïve.
After the Paris OPUS111 meeting we (the distributors, it was the same people for almost all the labels), went to Arles for the truly fabulous Harmonia Mundi meeting, hosted by the no less glorious Bernard Coutaz and his wife Eva, for Harmonia Mundi France, and Robina Young for Harmonia Mundi USA (they kept it internally as different companies). They lodged us at the beautiful Jules Cesar Hotel in Arles, just some 20 minutes from Mas-de-Vert where were the HM headquarters. They also brought some of their stars, so I had wonderful dinners seating next to the likes of René Jacobs, Philippe Herreweghe, Andreas Scholl, Konrad Junghänel, etc. And the lovely Eva Coutaz favored me in the sitting plan because I was one of the few distributors who actually listened to the recordings, most of the rest only did it for business.
Oh Lord, the distributor from Colombia, a very nice guy by the way, called his company Foot-Ball Music because he was such a fan of sports! And in a private concert that Andreas Scholl gave us he almost burst into laughter because he had never heard a countertenor in his life.
The late Ted Perry only gave us a wonderful dinner in Cannes, and sadly he never brought Hyperion artists, but he was such an adorable fellow! His big misfortune was his good for nothing son, a rather repellent fellow, but in young Mike Spring, he had the best support ever to run the label. Mike was a big piano fan, so it was he who devised the sensational Romantic Piano series.
I went for over a decade to these meetings starting around 1994, unforgettable experiences as you can imagine. Then my sister-in-law sold the business because she and my brother moved to Boston.
It was certainly great while it lasted.
