Camac Harps is delighted to announce a fourth series of online harp concerts: Les Jeudis de la Harpe, season IV!
Our online concerts were initially born of necessity, and indeed emergency. We devised Season 1 in under a week, immediately after l’Espace Camac had to close. However, we soon discovered that top-quality recitals online did not simply respond to the pandemic, but in some ways transcended it. Harp recitals became accessible to audiences and geographies who would never normally have the chance to hear them, or who need shorter or different formats in order to do so.
Fast forward to season 4: the concert halls are open again, and we are making the most of it. We continue to develop our partnership with J. Hanck Production, and this time we’re filming in Paris’s magnificent Salle Colonne. To transport yourselves there virtually, just click on CamacHarpsOfficial on YouTube, every Thursday at 19:30 CET.
The 4th series of Les Jeudis de la Harpe concludes in style with a great young modern trad duo, from our home region of Brittany.
Klervi Rouyer (Celtic harp) and Malo Ar Gall (wooden flute) both began playing traditional Breton music as small children. Klervi started the harp at the age of 5, while Malo began his musical life playing the bagpipes in a band in the northern Finistère region. Both also went to Breton-medium schools (Diwan), before continuing at the Brest Conservatoire of Music.
Klervi, now studying traditional music in Rennes, is the first prize winner of our “Dasson an Delenn” (“The resonance of the harp”) Breton music competition, which last took place in 2019. You can read about that here on the Camac blog.
On our programme: original compositions, Irish and Breton trad, for both solo harp and Klervi and Malo’s duo. You’re going to love it!
This week, Les Jeudis de la Harpe are delighted to present a harp concerto for the very first time! Claudia Lamanna will perform Glière’s Concerto for Harp and Orchestra in E Flat Major Op.74, accompanied by Roberto Corlianò at the piano.
The Glière Concerto will need little introduction to classical harpists, for it is one of the most important in our repertoire. Of Belgian origin, Reinhold Glière was born in the Ukraine and subsequently held teaching positions in Kiev and Moscow. From 1920 he made his permanent home in Russia. His music is characterised by classical forms, Romantic timbres and Russian musical accents.
We are looking forward to welcoming you all to this beautiful musical moment. Join us over the airwaves on YouTube, this Thursday at 19:30.
Happy New Year! The Camac team wish you all the very best for 2022 – may it bring us all joy, success and good health.
We’re delighted to welcome harpist and singer-songwriter Pia Salvia, with her husband the percussionist Noam Israeli. It’s a speedy return to the Camac stage for them, after a wonderful performance at our recent festival in Nice. We’re looking forward to music from Pia’s latest album, Blissful Sigh, together with beautiful covers of Bill Withers, Richard Rodgers, Charles Aznavour…and Britney Spears!
December 16th marks our final online concert in 2021 (they’ll continue in the New Year!). It is a very special end to the year, with a solo recital from Anneleen Lenaerts.
Anneleen will need little introduction to many of you. Principal Harpist of the Vienna Philharmonic and one of the world’s most celebrated solo harpists, she won no fewer than 23 international prizes in her early career.
Anneleen is an exclusive recording artist with Warner Classics and this programme is all music from her latest album, “Vienna Stories”. All Anneleen’s own transcriptions and compositions, they perfectly evoke the world of opera and symphony orchestra alike, so characteristic of Vienna. If as a harpist you’re inspired to learn what you hear, more good news: Anneleen has recently started working with Universal Edition to release the sheet music.
Marta Power and Elizabeth Jaxon met while studying music in Paris and have been playing together ever since. Both native to the Great Lakes region of the United States, they have made their lives in France and the Netherlands.
Marta and Elizabeth will follow their own arrangement of Ravel’s “Mother Goose” suite with two original works, both by Caroline Lizotte. These are Raga Op. 41 for two harps and percussion, and Stellae Saltantem Op. 49 for acoustic and electroacoustic harp.
Stellae Saltantem was commissioned by the Atlantic Harp Duo for their Ariadne Rediviva program, inspired by Greek gods and mortals.
Caroline Lizotte writes: “Stellae Saltantem is about Ariadne’s mortal life coming to an end. Her husband Bacchus (an immortal god), in order to celebrate their love, casts Ariadne’s nuptial crown into the firmament where it becomes a constellation – Corona Borealis, the Crown of Ariadne. Ariadne, loved by the gods, is transported and immortalised in the celestial sphere. I decided that one harp would represent the gods (electroacoustic harp) and the other one would represent the mortals (acoustic harp). I titled the piece Stellae Saltantem in Latin, meaning “dancing stars”.
Evelyn Huber is one of Germany’s best-known jazz harpists. She is the recipient of the the Bavarian Cultural Award, a multiple winner of the Jazz Award of the German Phonographic Industry, and – as a former member of the band Quadro Neuvo – “Live Act of the Year” at the German Music Awards in 2010 AND 2011.
At 19:30 on December 2nd, Evelyn Huber will be performing standards, her own compositions, and many tracks from her latest album, “Calm”. “Calm is about musical stories,” says Evelyn. “You can close your eyes and immerse yourself in the music. I also wanted to evoke a sense of finding peaceful ways to sweeten the time. That was the plan.”
Léo Doumène (harp), Marie Laforge (flute) and Raphaël Pagnon (viola) are longtime friends who all met while studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. They are now also all members of the Appassionato Chamber Orchestra, a dynamic and flexible ensemble based in Paris.
Debussy’s Sonate en trio is a late work (1915). It is part of a planned cycle of 6 pieces after French baroque sonata form: “Nothing can excuse our having forgotten the tradition of the works of a Rameau, which is almost unique in the abundance of its ingenious ideas,” the composer wrote. The homage is backlit by the First World War and Debussy’s fading health.
From the opening “Pastorale”, the delicacy and clarity of French baroque textures is clear, and a wistful quality which intensifies in the plaintive F minor of the second movement, “Interlude” in a slow Tempo di Minuetto. The third movement begins with powerful rhythms on the harp, evocative of the Javanese gamelan music that first so inspired the 27-year-old composer at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. The finale oscillates between pensive, poetic motifs and wild, quasi-ritualistic passages. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the sonata, perhaps both”, Debussy wrote.
Takemitsu’s And Then I Knew ‘Twas Wind is also a late work, written four years before the composer’s death. It is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “Like Rain it sounded till it curved”.
Takemitsu wrote that it “has as its subject the signs of the wind in the natural world and of the soul, or unconscious mind (or we could even call it ‘dream’), which continues to blow, like the wind, invisibly, through human consciousness.”
We have often worked with Ben Creighton Griffiths; we love his creative and wide-ranging mastery, from jazz manouche to his famous “one man band” sets. He’s performed for us in his home town of Cardiff, and much further afield: a tour of the Netherlands, several times in Spain, Hungary, Zagreb, Prague and at the Cambridge Jazz Festival. If you haven’t yet discovered his work, Ben has an excellent YouTube channel of his own: check out his fusion collection, standards collection, pop collection, gipsy jazz collection, and more.
We’re thrilled that Ben has made it across the Channel from Cardiff to join us in Paris, and he’ll be performing many numbers from his latest album – La Vie en Rose!
This Thursday, November 11 at 19:30 CET on YouTube, it’s the turn of the classical harp – in the talented hands of young artist Mathilde Wauters from Belgium. Mathilde has won several national and international competitions, including the Godefroid Competition, Harpegio, and Belfius Classics. In 2013, she won the first prize at the Martine Géliot International Harp Competition. At the 11th USA International Harp Competition in Bloomington, she won the third prize as well as the special prize for the best interpretation of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.
Mathilde will be performing virtuoso works by De Falla, Attahir and Zabel, in a musical half an hour that is not to be missed.
Born in Dublin, Dr. Janet Harbison is equally at home in traditional Irish and classical art music. Her Irish programme, broadcast on Thursday, November 4 2021, includes many of Janet’s own compositions.
