Good question! I’m in the final dash to get everything done which will allow a clean conscience when I fly away to the Camino de Santiago next week. One of the major tasks at hand is production of sufficient weeks of my radio show, Classics a la Carte (CALC), to fill my Friday 7-9 pm spot on the dial. This does require listening to music, a sure perk of my business of producing classical music programming for radio, and I enjoy the process immensely.

I just finished up another hour of CALC which had me listening to recordings by John Eliot Gardiner. I’ve listened to Maestro Gardiner over the years and decades and he has grown on me. There might have been a time I would have asked what his business was conducting Brahms, Beethoven, and Berlioz, in addition to that other “B” (stands for Bach), but I’m thankful for Gardiner’s persistence and for my finding time to spend with his Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra, listening to Brahms symphonies in a fresh, new way over these last several days.

But now that the Gardiner/Brahms/Bach hour of programming has been produced I now find myself with a full out John Eliot Gardiner mania going on. It’s such great musicmaking that it’s hard to put it aside so I can get back to the task at hand of producing more segments of CALC.

So why AM I still listening to Bach, hooked in on the Brandenburgs now? Because it’s so much fun, even if the tempi are at times faster than I’m accustomed to. Gardiner and his musicians show such commitment to what they are doing! Don’t even get me started on his Bach Pilgrimage of years ago! And don’t think I haven’t thought of carrying some of that music along on my own “pilgrimage” which is a week away.

OH! And now I find this and a companion disc! Truth is, I’m already planning to carry within my playlist a great deal of Jordi Savall, plus Alicia de Larrocha’s Albeniz and Granados. This, of course, along with my normal running mix of a little of everything. It makes a quite eclectic mix. I won’t be listening to music the whole 33 days of the trek, but when I begin to meet the ghosts of pilgrims past these additions to the playlist may prove just right.