Agenda
Agenda
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Camac Harpen Nederland are going on tour! You can visit our duplex showroom in Rotterdam throughout the week, but also we will be coming to you in 2018. Between February 23rd – April 21st, we will be running five touring events: in Zwolle, Tilburg, Gouda, Deurne and Deventer. This is a collaboration between Dutch professors, and international guest artists. Our French technicians will also be in attendance, carrying out free regulations of Camac harps in Tilburg, Gouda and Deventer.
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We are happy to be providing instruments for the 8th competition of the Verband der Harfenisten in Deutschland e.V. (VDH). The competition takes place every three years, providing a national competition opportunity in the years when harp is not featured in the famous Jugend Musiziert. This year, the VDH-Wettbewerb will be in the scenic environment of the Landesmusikakademie Sonderhausen, across 5 days of competitions.
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The Académie Camac is a special project for advanced students and young professionals, which we hold every two years.
A smart way to get the best out of really good people is to give them a lot of one-to-one tuition, provide them with great study conditions – and then, to leave them alone. The best universities have done this for centuries. It is however a method under ever-increasing pressure to justify itself. If you glance at it cursorily from the outside, it appears to offer little and cost a lot, and so you see classes get larger and larger, and the range of supplementary classes and courses (which students have to go to) also get larger and larger. The result is what every college professor today will tell you: there is no time. No time to practise, no time to teach through the big competition programmes, no time to work on what you’re going to do after college. No time, either, for the professors’ own work, be that performance, research or both.
Go back to the elite model, and suddenly your time is your own again. It isn’t cheaper: instead of paying for classes, you are paying for time, and time is precious. What political establishments find even harder to swallow is that you are also paying on trust. Left alone to do as you please, you might do nothing at all. But the fact that something could sometimes fail, does not necessarily mean that it should not be done. If nobody entertained the possibility of failure, it would be very difficult to do anything, and there would certainly be no music.
Our Académie Camac, now in its third edition, is a special sponsorship project investing in the elite of tomorrow.
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The North London harp competitions will take place in Muswell Hill, London on May 6th – 7th, 2018. We have sponsored these competitions for over a decade. They include recital classes from Grade 1 to Grade 8 (any age), study classes for <13 and <18, <18 and open chamber ensemble classes, and the Camac Competition for advanced students and young professionals. Jurors will be Heidi Krutzen and Eleanor Turner.
The Camac Competition also features a paid recital opportunity for the winner at the Proms At St Jude’s, on June 29th 2018. This prestigious concert series is a community festival of music and culture which takes place annually in Hampstead Garden Suburb. It invites a wide range of top national and international artists, and gives all its surplus funds to charity.
Past PASJ programmes have featured John Lill, Nicholas Cleobury with the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge, The Chillingirian and Brodsky Quartets, Daniel Lebhardt, The Tallis Scholars…and, now for the fifth year running, the lunchtime harp recital. This sort of repeated engagement in the musical mainstream is invaluable in developing interest in and awareness of the harp, and competition prizewinners can look forward to a warm welcome as a favourite lunchtime event!
Helen Leitner, Artists Relations Manager
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We’ll be in Lahr with Camac Harfen Deutschland, over the long weekend of May 10th – 13th. Marion Navarro, teacher at the Städtische Musikschule Lahr, has organised a wonderful, packed programme of events! We are sponsoring François Pernel, the inspiration behind our Excalibur harp, with his Trio Galexya: they will open the festival on Friday, May 11th at 20:30 in the Schlachthof Lahr.
Following this, you won’t want to go home, and there is plenty to keep you busy! A large harp ensemble of professionals and students of the region will perform on the Seeparkbühne (“Zauber im Garten), on Saturday at 4PM. Next up is a recital by Mirjam Weschle and Stephanie Wunsch, two of Marion’s former students, now promising young professionals studying in Stuttgart and Munich respectively. There’ll be musical comedy with Barbara Draeger and Sophie la Harpiste (who we have also invited to our next Camac Festival) – and a very interesting range of workshops.
Kirsten Ecke, professor of harp at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe, is also a performance coach. She will give a class on stage fright. I was lucky enough to see this in Ingolstadt last year; it’s really worth attending, and the sort of thing many of us wish we’d had the chance to go to when we were studying, instead of just trying to work it out on our own. Kerstin will also give a masterclass together with her colleague Maria Stange, professor in Karlsruhe and also in Stuttgart. Marion Navarro will give a class on teaching pre-school children the harp: there is more and more interest from this age group, and they need their own methods and literature.
We will be present with an exhibition, and our head technician Enric De Anciola will be delighted to service your Camac harps, free of charge for the duration of the event. Regulations are subject to reservation, so please book one directly with Julia Becker of Camac Harfen Deutschland: [email protected] / +49 30-21971176.
Sign-up form available here.
To book a free regulation of your Camac harp, please contact Julia Becker at Camac Harfen Deutschland: [email protected].
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Members of our French team will be accompanying Camac Harpen Nederland at the Dutch Harp Festival in Utrecht, May 12 – 13 2018. As always, the DHF will offer a particularly creative and innovative programme, and we also wish all Dutch Harp Competition semi-finalists toi toi toi and the best of luck! Don’t forget to find the time to come and see us on our exhibition stand, try out our instruments, beat those waiting lists and offer us your feedback.
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Harpes au Max is a special festival organised by the COMPA, the civic authorities of our home in Brittany, in partnership with us and the town of Ancenis. It began after we threw a big fortieth birthday celebration in the town – after which, the elected local councillors decided to do it again, in 2016 and now between May 17 – 20, 2018.
Harpes au Max is a party for the harp in all its forms, and in all our instrument’s twenty-first-century energy and diversity. For this weekend in May, the harp will be all over Ancenis and surrounding villages – in the town theatre, in the famous Chapelle des Ursulines, in the Château (where our historical harp collection is also currently on display), in front of the Château in the market square – and in the town library, the shopping centres, in hospitals and schools. We’ve invited artists and ensembles from all over the world – presided over by festival patron Isabelle Perrin – to enjoy the festival together with the artisans from our workshops, their families, friends and our local community.
You can download the full programme on the festival site.
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Our new concert grand harps, Canopée and Art Nouveau, continue their tour! Following the success of their presentation in Wallonia, we will take them to Flanders on June 2nd and 3rd.
Our exhibition will be set up all weekend in the de Singel international arts campus, Antwerp. You can try the new harps, and discuss them and other instruments with representatives from both our Belgian and our French teams. At 5PM on Saturday, June 2nd, our artistic programme will begin. We are delighted to welcome firstly an all-Belgian line-up: young talent Mathilde Wauters, followed by the Belgium Harp Quartet (Sophie Hallynck, Eline Groslot, Aurore Graillet and Emma Wauters). After a dinner break, we are delighted to welcome our guest artist Patrizia Tassini, to give a recital at 8PM.
On Sunday, you have the chance to take part in a masterclass with Patrizia: please reserve your places directly with Pro Arte Antwerpen.