Livestream - June 11, 2022
Rewatch the live stream from June 11, 2022, of Odradek's 10th Anniversary celebrations! We want to thank everyone who was in attendance, in person as well as connected around the world via our app to the stream. A special thank you to Artur Pizarro for his unforgettable performance that marked the occasion, and to Valentina Lo Surdo for moderating the event so fluidly and effortlessly between English and Italian the entire evening. And to Mariss Lakstigala (son of conductor Atvars Lakstīgala) and Muriel Chemin for their opening performance of the Neapolitan traditional song which royally opened the celebrations by calling out to “Tu sei l’impero dell’armonia, Santa Lucia!” It was an unforgettable evening, and Odradek thanks our artists, our team, and our public for their work, friendship, loyalty, and encouragement these past 10 years. We've created a real musical family, and the future holds much promise.
ODRADEK believes that High Fidelity is being true to yourself. And for ten years, the label has been true to its mission, to music, and to its listeners. On June 11, 2022, ODRADEK celebrated its first decade with a concert by Leeds competition winner Artur Pizarro at its studio, The Spheres, with a presentation moderated by RAI Radio 3 host Valentina Lo Surdo. Press from 6 countries were in attendance, and viewers followed the live stream worldwide.
Ten years ago, two pianists seeking to record their first albums and dismayed by the options available set out with some friends after a utopian dream: to invent a new way of doing classical. The project they founded is ODRADEK. In its first decade, ODRADEK has established itself as an ethical producer of outstanding cultural products, representing hundreds of musicians worldwide and authoring multiple software projects with significant cultural relevance.
After a decade of work, and nearly 200 releases including now also jazz and world albums, the US/Italian label founded by John Anderson is still the only label that is non-profit and artistically directed by its artists. Its rosters democratically vote through a blind audition process on whether to produce the albums that we publish. That means that each publication is fresh and high quality and offers something new to the music world. Being non-profit buys the label the liberty to choose without regard to who, where, what race, gender, or background its artists have and allows the label to focus on producing only the best, most exciting projects. Peer review ensures equitable access to artists, the highest quality standards to their public, and transparently demonstrates its artists' merits. More than a label, it is a family. Its artists hold one another in mutual esteem and strive to make the musical world a more fair, varied, dynamic place, free from market-based considerations.
ODRADEK marked the opening of their new decade by adopting a new logo. Kafka describes Odradek in Cares of the Family Man as a "spool, and in fact, it does appear to be wound with thread; which, to be sure, is really only ragged, old, knotted together or simply tangled pieces of string of mixed color and description." The label’s Odradek is a spool that is a microphone. The thread is a mic cable. The A in the word ODRADEK even makes the tripod. This ties Kafka's highly symbolic Odradek in with the label’s core activity to tell its story even better than Kafka's original doodle had in its previous logo. For the label, Kafka's Odradek symbolizes the inherent value of things such as music: the sort of value that it is impossible to put a price on, the kind of inherited artefact that is essential to maintain to pass on to future generations; not because it is useful to some end outside itself, but because it is perfect and complete in itself.
For this reason, the label seeks ways of translating public cultural goods' inherent value into economically sustainable business activities that never betray their intrinsic worth for commercial ends. ODRADEK's products and services are focused on preserving and promoting music, the arts, education, and cultural heritage. Within the next decade, the label’s mission is to grow its commercial activities sufficiently to allow recording opportunities to its artists free of charge, finalizing the commitment to represent artists based purely on their talent with no discrimination for economic background.
