Loft Vinyl: Alan Stivell's classic Renaissance of the Celtic Harp
July 01, 2024
Breton blood runs deep. Alan Stivell, venerated master of the Celtic harp, is widely considered an ambassador for Brittany culture. He learnt his music from an equally passionate father.
Yet neither was born in Brittany.
Stivell’s father took his first breath in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, Alan in the Auvergne region of central France. But their Breton heritage was solid. Papa, Georges Cochevelou, was a soldier, interpreter and banker and worked as a civil servant in the French finance ministry.
But his heart lay in Brittany and he eventually achieved a personal ambition to reconstruct a traditional harp in his father's small native Breton town of Gourin. With a concert harpist, Denise Megevand, he taught his son to play the instrument.
Alan also set about learning Celtic mythology, art and history as well as the Breton language. He added Scottish bagpipes and the Breton bombarde to his instrumental armoury and was performing at concerts by the time he was 11. He also studied British and Irish folk music, learning to play other instruments and drew on rock and other influences as he developed a distinctive style and sound of his own.
Stivell was 80 in January and this year has brought another milestone anniversary, the 60th since the release of his first album Telenn Geltiek in 1964.
At a distance of 1,400km from my own loft, I cannot say with certainty that I also own any of Stivell's albums in vinyl form, though it is likely that I do.
For this edition of Loft Vinyl, the rediscovery or long-playing records consigned to attics, my Salut! Live colleague Andrew Curry unearthed his old copy of Stivell's groundbreaking classic, Renaissance of the Celtic Harp.
And what a find.
This is how one music critic, Bruce Elder, described the album:
People who hear this record are never the same again. Renaissance of the Celtic Harp, one of the most beautiful and haunting records ever made by anybody, introduced the Celtic harp to many thousands of listeners around the world. To call this music gorgeous and ravishing would be the height of understatement—indeed, there aren't words in the English language to describe this record adequately.
The cause of Celtic and for that matter Anglo-Saxon folk music owes a great deal to Alan Stivell. This entry to the Loft Vinyl series is therefore important to all who share Salut! Live's enthusiasm.
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See also: an old Song of the Day entry featured the Stivell's spine-tingling version of Bro Goz ma Zadoù whoch we know far better as the Welsh anthem Land Of My Fathers but is essentially the same as used by the Bretons and Cornish. Stivell superimposed sounds from Cardiff Arms Park of the most natural of Welsh male voice choirs, a rugby crowd, belting out the song in hope of striking fear into the hearts of whoever Wales were playing that day.
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