A Wrap up of the 5th Australian Harp Festival- Part 2

Hello all,

Time to continue my wrap up of the Australian Harp Festival that happened from 28^th September to 1^st October in Adelaide, South Australia. You can read the first part here.

The other international star who came out for the Festival was none other than the jaw droppingly good Catrin Finch. I’d heard and met her a few years ago at the Llangollen Eistedfodd in Wales where she delighted the hugely partisan audience not just with her playing but with her dress, which featured a large red Welsh dragon wrapped around her torso.

As well as conducting a masterclass, Catrin played a recital at Elder Hall late on the Sunday afternoon. Right from the first note of the first piece (Bach/Grandjany’s Partita No 3) her technical prowess shone. How can fingers move that fast? And accurately. This had ‘wow’ factor in spades.

The programme showed not just that she could play like nobody’s business, but that she is also A1 when it comes to stage presence. There are only so many players that can make Paul Patterson’s ‘Mosquito Massacre’ work so convincingly, a piece where you have to be as much an actor as a musician. It was originally composed for her, and you can tell why. She is a natural at playing the harp while swatting at imaginary mosquitos.

The rest of the programme was really broad- everything from Godefroid to Benjamin Britten with some Debussy and William Mathias thrown in for good measure. It all just made you want to go home and practice scales. Really  fast.

One other international visitor was harp technician Liza Jensen. Yep, a lady regulating harps. And she was great. Liza is a player as well as a technician which meant she handled the harps with prowess and a wrench with aplomb. And that can’t be said of everyone. I attended the pedal harp maintenance workshop and resolved to never, ever attempt to change a pedal rod myself, even though Liza kept assuring us it wasn’t as bad as it looked. I beg to differ.

An abiding memory of the event was seeing her sit astride a Salvi while putting some some pliers to work on the pedal mechanism. Wish I’d got a photo of that one. Instead here’s one of her demonstrating knot tying to an audience.

All up the Festival was a brilliant weekend of nerdy harp talk which I really loved. So much went on I can’t report it all without basically taking up so much of your time you may as well have come to the weekend yourself. And who knows? Maybe I’ll see you at the next one!

P.S. For more pics swing over to my Facebook page.

A Wrap up of the 5th Australian Harp Festival- Part 1

Well, it’s been a busy time around here- two performances of ‘The Queen’s Music’ in a week and then a paper for the 5^th Australian Harp Festival in Adelaide. And what a weekend that was.

The opening concert was held in the gorgeous Elder Hall at the University of Adelaide.

The guest international musician was Maria Luisa Rayan-Forero, a performer who I had heard much of but was still not adequately prepared for. She was amazing.

The programme was drawn from her latest CD ‘From Bach to Piazzolla’.

While I appreciated the incredible music and the skill that was required to arrange and perform the selections of Piazzolla, it was the Bach the caught me, and became the highlight of the whole Festival. It was one of the most exquisitely beautiful things I have ever heard. To describe it fully would see me descend into clichés and bucket loads of superlatives, so just take it as read that it was good. Very, very good.

Listening to Luisa play it I was reminded of a quote that I am fairly certain came from the great pianist Arthur Rubenstein and went something like: “The notes I play no better than anyone else, but the space between notes- there is the magic”. And so it was with Luisa’s playing- she commands not just the notes, but the space between the notes and there, definitely, is where the magic lies.

Saturday dawned crisp and bright and saw Rosemary Hallo deliver her presentation on the harp in colonial Australia with particular reference to Robert Nicholas Charles Bochsa, who of course famously died in Sydney in 1856. It’s great work Rosemary is doing in researching this and other early harp connections in Australia and fantastic to see and hear the single action harps being played. I had a particular interest in them after putting together the Marie Antoinette programme- it’s like hearing the sequel to that concert programme!

Following on from Rosemary was triple harpist Robin Ward who delivered a nigh faultless performance of music ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. I have only tried to play a triple harp once, and very briefly at that, mainly because I couldn’t cope. My eyes, fingers and brain went in to overload. There are 84 strings on that harp, people!

I really appreciated his later workshop as well looking at the use of ornamentation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, something which has remained a conundrum for a lot of my playing career. Having had a one on one session with Luisa on how she plays Bach, it was really interesting getting Robin’s take on transcriptions and the ‘modernisation’ of Bach and other earlier composers. Suffice to say the Bach/Grandjany etudes came up for discussion as did Grandjany’s arrangement of the C.P.E. Bach Sonata with some quite different viewpoints on the topic!

Saturday night’s Elder Hall concert featured two more international acts: I-Sis trio and Paige Su with Cody Byasse on percussion.

Here’s some YouTube clips to enjoy-

More from the Festival in the next post!