Head out of Arles in the direction of Nimes, take a small road that runs parallel to the autoroute and within minutes you'll turn down a dusty, plane tree-lined avenue and you could be in a novel by Marcel Pagnol. Actually you'll be drawing up in front of Le Mas de Vert, the Provençal home of Harmonia Mundi. There can be few more idyllic settings for a record company, as HM's employees and those who call on them would all agree. A couple of years ago, just before the recording of the Brahms German Requiem under Philippe Herreweghe was released (11/96). I visited the office of HM's A&R Director Eva Coutaz and, with the windows of this large old farmhouse thrown wide open, sat listening to the edited DAT as the sounds of bird-song mingled with Brahms's music. It seemed a perfect fusion between the warmth of the south and the spirit of the north. 

Harmonia Mundi this year celebrate their fortieth anniversary, an impressive achievement for a label that remains fiercely independent after all that time. The company is the creation of Bernard Coutaz, who at 74 is still very much its president, a man of great cultivation and, as the longevity of HM will confirm, vision as well. Not a trained musician, he has – as one of his colleagues attested – an innate sense of musical judgement: play him half a dozen takes and he will unfailingly pick the 'right' one. As a journalist, based in Paris, Coutaz came up with the idea of Harmonia Mundi out of a desire to educate as well as entertain, and with the help of some student friends the first records were made. 1958 was the perfect birth date for a record company: the LP was in its infancy and its potential was immense and obvious. The company grew slowly: first one, then two, then four, then six people. And at that magic half dozen, Coutaz had the thought that few record companies would have dared entertain: to leave Paris and get as far away from the capital as possible. A glance at the map revealed a destination that fulfilled that goal ideally, so the six of them moved into a large disused farmhouse in Lubéron. 

It was during the company's Lubéron period that Coutaz made his first recordings with a musician who was to form one of the comerstones of the Harmonia Mundi catalogue – Alfred Deller. Coutaz tells an amusing anecdote of how, after a Deller concert in some small French church, he and a colleague went 'backstage' to meet the renowned countertenor. They suggested dinner and, under the impression that they were the organizers of the concert, Deller accompanied them; it was only after they had been driving for quite some time that the misapprehension came to light. A long night of wine, bread, eggs and cheese resulted in plans for a recording. One led to two and Deller had found his first musical home. In so doing he gave the world a recording – the first recording – of Purcell's King Arthur, which became not only a bestseller for HM but a calling card for Purcell in the record shops of Europe when little besides Dido and Aeneas was generally known. 

The royalties from a number of books Coutaz had written meant that he did not have to draw a salary for the first few years, and he recounts with pride that the company has never paid out a dividend to its original investors: all the money is ploughed back into the development of the organization. Now, with 250 employees and Le Mas de Vert supplemented by a number of satellites around the world, Coutaz's original vision has been realized. 

Harmonia Mundi are more than a record company. Drawing on Coutaz's roots in the written word, the company embraces books – as publisher as well as distributor – and the book trade generates some 34 per cent of the French company's turnover. In addition Harmonia Mundi are one of the classical record world's largest distributors both in France and elsewhere (the UK and the USA being two major markets). The latest project to occupy the company has been the opening of 27 boutiques, record stores devoted to the sale of HM and HM-distributed recordings. When they were launched Coutaz envisaged that they would be confined to large towns where there was no sizeable record store (a FNAC, for example), but in time Harmonia Mundi boutiques were established in cities where, to an outsider, competition looked fierce. Coutaz cites Toulouse: when the HM boutique opened people pointed to FNAC as a powerful rival; yet Harmonia Mundi's sales in the first year have matched those at the FNAC and in addition the company's sales through FNAC have increased, the result being doubled sales within the city. In France, a country that has seen the decline of independent classical record retailers from 2300 eight years ago to 400 now, the HM boutiques have become a substantial force in the independent retail sector (there are also two outlets in northern Spain). 

Harmonia Mundi have always maintained their 'centre of gravity' in the fields of early, renaissance and baroque music and – with the contribution of two single-minded women of considerable musical taste and discernment, Eva Coutaz in Arles and Robina Young at Harmonia Mundi USA in Los Angeles – the pioneering philosophy has been maintained and built upon. Eva Coutaz has built a strong roster of artists that includes Herreweghe, René Jacobs, Davitt Moroney, Dominique Visse, Josep Pons and Andreas Scholl (not to mention William Christie, who made dozens of extraordinary recordings for the label before moving on to Erato). Robina Young has attracted names such as Anonymous 4, Nicholas McGegan, Paul Hillier, Paul O'Dette, Frederic Chiu, Andrew Manze and The King's Noyse to the US wing. Both see the collaboration with their artists as a fusion of pure musicality and great scholarship from the artist with a commercial approach and the recognition that a great concert programme does not automatically make a great record. Both, too, have seen their fair share of recognition, with major awards greeting their releases. To cite just two successes: Gramophone Awards have rewarded Handel's Susanna under Nicholas McGegan and René Jacobs's magnificent version of Giulio Cesare. 

If you accidentally drive on past Le Mas de Vert – and it's easy enough to do – you will end up in Nimes where, in the heart of the city, a Roman temple, in a remarkable state of preservation, stands alongside the city's Carree d'Art, a beautiful glass-fronted art gallery by Sir Norman Foster. The juxtaposition is so French and so characteristic of that nation's ease at balancing the old and the new. And that equilibrium seems to permeate Harmonia Mundi too: their outlook is decidedly forward-looking, the repertoire they primarily concentrate on centuries old. Their philosophy, too, embraces a cherishable and reassuringly old-fashioned belief in the handcrafted: 'Our aim has always been and still remains, to produce recordings that are unashamedly not industrial products subject to the rules and regulations of marketing. We aim rather to share our tastes and passions alike with the public...Our motto: to make good music with musicians who go beyond the mere score, or, to put it even more simply, to make the music we like with musicians we like.' 

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