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Help for a harp music beginner

ex brickie

ex brickie

pfm Member
I’m interested in trying out an album of harp music but no idea where to start.

I’m not really into Celtic type music so that genre won’t do it for me. Some relaxing pieces will do - preferably a variety rather than one concerto

Decent pressings and recordings preferable (CD or LP) so that the instrument sounds realistic and airy - not compressed

If there’s a thread Ive missed on this topic, happy to be guided elsewhere

Thanks
 
I thoroughly recommend the following two albums by Lavinia Meijer, with both featuring the music of Phillip Glass:

Metamorphosis and The Glass Effect

Whilst I listen to The Glass Effect more often, the track below from Metamorphosis is arguably the best transcription Meijer and Glass have produced.

 
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Tantris said:
I quite like the way Debussy and Ravel used the harp in chamber music settings. Ravel's Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet, for example; this piece popped up in the interval of a recent Radio 3 concert (BBC Radio 3 - Radio 3 in Concert, Berlin Philharmonic), and I thought it was rather good.
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I very much agree.
Tchaikovsky’s occasional but prominent use of the harp in his ballet music made me,as a young teenager in the middle 60s, fall in love with both his ballet music and the liquid, magical sound of the harp itself.
 
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For early music check the two recordings by Maria Galassi - Il viaggio di Lucrezzia and Portrait of a Lady with Harp.

For very early music check out Benjamin Bagby’s Lost Songs of a Rheinland Harper (with Sequentia.)

For baroque music, check out Andrew Lawrence King’s recording called La Harpe Royale. Maria Galassi is also part of Jean-Marc Aymes’s Frescobaldi series - in the Fiori Musicale for example. Lawrence King has recorded a lot, sometimes with his ensemble called The Harp Consort, but I haven’t explored it.

But best of all, check out Stockhausen’s Freude, which is Day Two of Klang, it is available from Stockhausen Verlag, and Berio’s second Sequenza, which is for solo harp. Boulez used harp a lot too.
 
The Impromptu, op.86 by Fauré is a wonderful piece of music in its version for solo harp. There are lots of good recordings, including Lavinia Meier's, but my favourite is the one by Marisa Robles on her Decca "World of the Harp" album. I had it on LP: SPA 348, on Decca's subsidiary Argo label. Superb analogue recording quality from 1974.
 
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