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Craig Zeichner
It's a considerable achievement for a family-run business to exist for half a century. For a record label it's even more impressive, bur for a classical label it's almost miraculous. And the really amazing part is that for Lyrichord Discs it ali began with a jingle -- a little song about ice cream.
"My father, Peter Fritsch, was an executive at Music Craft Records in New York but wanted to start his own label," says Nick Fritsch, president of Lyrichord Discs. "My mother won $10,000 in a jingle contest for Lipton ice cream. This was in 1949, and with that money they were able to start the company." Lyrichord will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2000.
The Lyrichord catalog includes almost 150 recordings, approximately two-thirds devoted to world music and one-third to early music. Nick Fritsch runs the company from a landmark brownstone in New York's Greenwich Village, the label's home since its birth.
Lyrichord started out as a classical label focusing on repertoire not covered by the major labels. That included 20th-century organ music and oddities like a world premiere of Virgil Thomson's A Peaceable Kingdom . In the early 1960s the attention turned to early music when Lyrichord acquired Experiènces Anonymes,...