twang twang twang - MUNICH

Return of the Native

It’s all so quiet… a close hush has fallen on twang twang twang, and my only excuse is that I’ve been coaching flute and harp music and wondering with 4G4H what colour to have our new electric harps done in (mint mother-of-pearl, living up to Ben’s remark that “Helen’s harp quartet is the gayest thing in the world”). There was even constant internet access in Dublin, but I was engaged in too many harpist thingies to go near it – trying and buying, kissing and waving, queueing and rueing the extra-long interval queues for the ladies’.

The Ninth World Harp Congress was great: congratulations to the board of directors, Cliona Doris and her Irish host committee for a superbly organised and wonderfully put together week. It covered too much to list everything here, but to give you an idea here’s a selection - Contemporary Improvised Music; New Works for Tenor and Harp by British Composers; Paraguyan Harp Music; The Venezuelan Repertoire, from Lecuna’s Sonata to Izarra’s Folias de Espana. The Lesser Known Gems of Hasslemans; transcriptions of Mozart, Scarlatti, Poulenc and Brahms; Ornamentation in Bach and Handel. Contemporary Australian and Japanese-Icelandic Fusion Music; Kong-Hou Performance; Bax’s Chamber Music and Composer’s Intentions & Public Demand in Peggy Glanville Hicks’ Concertino Antico.

Not only was there a broad and beautifully-presented palette of events, but it blew apart any still-wafting notions that harpists either lack rigorous musicianship or lag behind the times in the sort of music we promote. On the one hand playing for 500 assembled harpists is terrifying, but it’s also good, because you never get a more critical audience, and if they cry bravo!, you know you deserve it (I mean, there were also a few works I never want to hear again, well played though they were).

So, here I am, no longer in Dublin, but buoyed up by it as I hare about the rest of the summer festivals. There’ll now be a series of Harp Posts, starting tomorrow with Alvarez Javier, Stephen Andrew Taylor, Michael Alcorn and Victoria Jordanova for harp and electronics.

some are born...

As I set up to play in one of London's smarter hotels, the Duke of - (as they write it in eighteenth-century novels) made a fuss about my TUNING UP!  He said it was ANNOYING! 

Well, I suppose harp tuning might be a bit annoying, but in turn I'M ANNOYED:
1) That you can be employed to come and play a harp but they want you without any tuning first.  What am I, a magician?
2) That if you are a duke 10 minutes of your lunch is more important than the wedding day of the couple probably shifting forty grand in the same hotel
3) That you can be born high and privileged and remain no gentleman, particularly in comparison to the perfect courtesy of the cab drivers and hotel staff I deal with all the time.

I played extra loudly and annoyingly in his, er, Grace's direction. 

While Rome burns

The road back into London was eerily quiet, in stark contrast to the cars streaming past me on their way out of town.  At least 50 people are dead,  21 of those where I live in King's Cross, 13 where my father works in Russell Square. 

I was out of town with my harp quartet when the bombs exploded.  After hearing the news, we had to carry on rehearsing in order to ready everything for the World Harp Congress in Dublin next week.  At times like these I don't know if what we do is strong and professional or fiddling while Rome burns.

Back at home, I am preparing Philip Venables's Canto, written for Florica and I to premier at the Cheltenham festival on Monday.  It is always a privilege to play a new work and particularly to be given one (the Cheltenham recital is part of my prize for a competition I won last summer, and the festival has a wonderful scheme where they commission a work for their young artists from a rosta of young composers).

Philip explains:  "Canto is related to a piece titled When the house is rotten, the rats must fly.  This rather bizarre line is from The Last Suttee by Rudyard Kipling.  The Canto is a lament to the Suttee - a widowed woman who, in keeping with an ancient custom, burns herself on the funeral pyre of her husband." 

With innocent people murdered on my doorstep, I wonder if suttee is not only custom but also partly the desperate desire to do something for one's dead. 

stuck in the mud

Summertime, and the livin' is...muddy.  Forget Wimbledon, Pimms on the lawn, unslightly red burn lines and all that.  'Tis the season of the Outdoor Firework Prom - or, 'muddy field date'.

In Madrid I learnt that this is something of a British phenomenon, so for a little piece of England, this is roughly what happens.

6am.  Morning of Firework Classic Spectacular Extravanganza.  Load car in a manner befitting a proud member of the Royal Philharmonic Symphony Chamber Pops Orchestra.  Car groans under the weight of your black thermals, sunblock, sunglasses, sunhat, huge bonkbuster novel, food, water, umbrella, clothes pegs and fourth best harp.  Drive for four hours in pissing rain deep into the English countryside.  After you have circled Little Ineedthecash for the sixth time, perceive through the mist a tent half-way up a mountain above a winding footpath, cattle grid and fast-flowing ravine.  Crawl through Ineedthecash village centre, passing six olde tea shoppes, one souvenir stall selling tea towels embossed with poems on being a "senior citizen", and Mushroom World selling quaint fungus ornaments.  Arrive outside tent entrance.  With brightest, blondest smile, offer cash and sexual favours to be allowed to drive right up to the stage.  Agree you will, of course, move your car back to the carpark 60miles away once you have unloaded the harp.  Drive through swamp, running over six senior citizens and the central power cable.   Hide car round back of single portaloo provided for the orchestra, choir, soloists and 650 000 classical music lovers.  Unload harp, in the dark.  Grovel to wrathful techies, who have spent all morning setting up the power supply.  Mollify techies sufficiently to have them winch harp 75 feet onto precarious sloping stage.  Tune harp several octaves sharper than normal.  Oboeist arrives.  Harp has gone flat in the howling gale.  Receive pad of music to sightread through, mostly on loose photocopies.  Conductor arrives and shouts:  "for the Gold and Silver Waltz, the repeats are yes no yes yes no no yes DC yes no no and cut to letter 69 yes no yes.  OK? We don't need to run that."  Rehearse all bits harp is not in.  Pay 7.99 for madcow burger and warm coke.  Don crumpled selection of black clothes appropriate to the boiling/freezing weather.  File onto stage.  Hear orchestral union rep objecting that the popular opera star's fee means the orchestra cannot afford enough players for the 1812.  Play concert.  Conductor cocks up National Anthem.  Start packing up before realising haven't yet done 94th encore.  Finally leave stage.  Car blocked in by portaloo queue.   Overhear what singer is being paid. 

musical muse

Ooh!  I am the subject of one of Ellen Gilbert's prizewinning pictures at the Garrick-Milne competion for artwork of performing artists in rehearsal or performance (the other picture is of the Endellion Quartet).

There will be an exhibition of the prizewinning works at either the Garrick Club or Christies in September.