Paris harp shop 2

Back this morning from a tour with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky Manfred Symphony - 7 concerts in 7 different European cities in 8 days..... including travelling days to and from the UK!

We had a few spare hours in Paris so managed to fit in a visit to the wonderful harp shop near the Arc de Triomphe, Le Magasin de la Harpe.

Yet again, Alexandre Budin very generously gave up his time to show us the amazing historic harps he has in his workshop, a few doors down from his shop. Erards in the front of the photo below, and Pleyel chromatic harp at the back/middle.

And what a great collection of harp music he has to browse through!

He also showed us a couple of Sylvain Blassel's harps which are kept downstairs. His small Erat harp is absolutely stunning to look at and has the most amazing tone.

Here is a video of Sylvain playing Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Tarrega on the Erat.

Check out his fingering of the repeated notes throughout, also his use of the little finger in the left hand. Very interesting!!!

I'm going to see if I can work out using this fingering and whether I can actually use my left hand pinky on my Salvis. I fear the tension on the Salvi will be too much for my little fingers alas!

It's very easy to just repeat what we have been taught and say that we don't play using our little fingers, but as Alexandre said, "why not?"

why not indeed.

Japanese style Erard harp - only around 7 ever built!

HARPO AND DALI

LA Harp Blog: HARPO AND DALI: "Creative pairings between like-minded thinkers is vital, in particular for artists, writers and musicians. The three co-exist splendidly. S..."

Five Take Fives

My husband, as well as being a composer, is also an amazing jazz musician. So having been to so many jazz gigs and listened to so many amazing jazz musicians over the years I've always been a bit wary of jazz played on the harp...

But here are 5 very different harp versions of Take Five, commonly attributed to Dave Brubeck, but was of course written by Paul Desmond, the sax player in his group.

All of these harp versions are great, but I have a soft spot for Joy Yu Hoffman's version played on the chinese harp. I really like the middle section of her version, and it just sounds great on the Konghou.

Park Stickney - solo harp

Jakez Francois - harp with piano, drums & bass

Amanda Whiting - solo harp (nice video!)

Polish harpist Małgorzata Zalewska & flugel with orchestra

Sarah Deere-Jones - celtic harp & guitar

Eagle Harps

Holy cow - a whole new world of neurosis for harpists!

Konghou Harp

47 + 47 strings，double-row strings with pedals
Height: 222 cm
Width: 110 cm
Weight: 53 kgs

Joy Yu Hoffman performing her arrangement of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" on the Kong Hou (Chinese Harp).

look - no hands!

So, I was playing in a concert with a chamber orchestra tonight and we had just played the Clarinet Concerto by Copland (great piece, loads of harp throughout) and I'm on stage during the interval giving the harp a quick re-tune before the second half starts.

This lady from the audience comes over to the side of the stage and doesn't appear to be visually impaired or drunk.

In all seriousness she calls me over to ask me....

"I've never seen one of those with a projection box on the back before.....

(me - ¿Qué? )

do they all have that?

(me - ¿Qué? )

I had to come over and ask you because I was curious......

do you use your hands to play?

?????

(wait it gets better)

because i can see you were playing with your feet"

?????

Arianna Savall

Wow - what an amazing harpist and singer!

Not being really up on the early music scene I hadn't come across her before, but stumbled across a video of her on YouTube.

I've recently bought her album Peiwoh from iTunes and it's been played non-stop since in our house.

Arianna is a fascinating musician, being an acclaimed early music opera singer as well as harpist and has an impressive back catalogue of CDs of early music both as a harpist and separately as singer.

However her latest CDs seem to be of her own compositions played with her band, with Arianna playing triple harp, gothic harp and celtic harps as well as singing. The rest of her band are playing various early and folk string instruments (not sure what they are because of the language on the website!) and also hand percussion.

The result is a very tasteful and sublime world music album which gets the thumbs up from everyone in my household - which is quite a feat as we all have very diverse tastes!

Very difficult to pick a favourite track, possibly Aurora as it's a harp only track. Suite Celtic has a more traditional vibe and shows the musical excellence of all the musicians. A "chill out" track with a very wide appeal is El Llenguatge dels ocells. Although every track on this CD is fantastic.

No UK dates in her concert schedule which is a shame, as I would love to see her live.

Mahler 6 Finale

nails or picks?

picks or nails?

Started the rehearsals on nails, Petrenko then wanted picks, and on the final rehearsal on the day of the concert wanted nails.

I completely underestimated the time needed to grow my nails for this gig, and to be honest just didn't think about this piece coming up in the diary and just kept them usual short length.

Arghgh!! They were just too short at the start of the week.

So ended up having to get some false gel nails put on so that the nails were long enough to play with. My nails are very short and are slow to grow!

Only lost 3 false nails during the week which was quite a bizarre sight as they flew off as I was playing during rehearsals.

note to self - don't cut nails before Mahler 6 again.

BTW - In case you are wondering - they are definitely not my nails above. Can you imagine trying to do anything with those nails?

Albeniz paper in strings

Just finished doing some work with RLPO, a pretty full on programme of Spanish music with loads of harp throughout, and one of the pieces was El Albaicin from the Iberia Suite by Albeniz.

I hadn't played that piece before so I wasn't quite sure about the direction on the music Mettez un papier entre les cordes especially as I was playing right up to the last note in the previous piece and there was only a very short pause before the start of this piece. Which didn't leave much time to turn the page, change the pedals and then thread some paper through the harp strings! But checking with the conductor in the rehearsal he definately wanted the paper between the strings.

What a racket!

It makes a really loud, raucous and horrible sound. I was very unconvinced at the start, but actually by the end of the week I quite liked the effect.

However you need to play very quietly because it makes an incredibly loud sound which cuts straight through the orchestra sound. Plus you have to play extremely rhythmically with very full articulation with as much damping as possible.

Sounds a bit like a buzzing mosquito when you get it right and sounds completely rubbish when you don't!

Farewell to Stromness

I had a really lovely day yesterday. Andy and I were playing at friends wedding, and it was great combination of good company, good food and a fabulous setting.

So feeling rather fuzzy today, it seemed a good time to chill out and video Farewell to Stromness. I was inspired to learn this piece recently after listening to Ruth Wall's CD and especially wanted to play it on lever harp rather than concert harp.

I think the sound of the lever harp is well suited to this piece. Although the middle section is a bit chromatic and it would be a lot easier on the concert harp.

for legal reasons

Complicated and very tedious story in a nutshell.

My Duo Mandala CD was originally released on Black Box records who were subsequently bought by Sanctuary group who were subsequently bought by Universal Music Group.

So who owns the rights to our CD?

Not had a royalty statement or payment for years and despite trying to chase up who owns the rights for at least 4 years, phone calls and emails have never been returned and just could never find out who to speak to sort this out and kept hitting a brick wall each time when trying to find out.

I've been in touch with other Black Box artists, and they have no idea either.

So last year, Ali and I decided that we were going to re-release our Tapestry CD ourselves so that it could at least be available on the UK iTunes and we could sell them after gigs.

After Ali died last October, I contacted all the composers on the CD and got permission from them that they would be ok with all sales and royalties from the CD going to Ali's memorial fund. All agreed.

What a surprise then to find that it's suddenly available on UK iTunes in December 2010 listed as being released by ASV!!! Up until then it had only been available in the US iTunes.

So if anyone from ASV reads this, could you get in touch with me to explain what is going on? I sent emails to you in 2009 which I never got a reply to.

I've put one of the tracks from the CD on YouTube, with the request that if the viewer enjoys it to donate to Ali's memorial fund.

Got a problem with that? Then sue me....

It's me and Ali playing, Black Box didn't pay for the recording of the CD and I have permission from the composers so as far as I'm concerned I'm not infringing copyright.

Hopefully this legal saga can now be finally put to bed.

It's a lovely track on the video and hopefully it will encourage people to donate to Ali's memorial fund which will help support future young musicians.