Review Text
Recently, a student asked harpist Anne Sullivan if there were any particular harp-related things she should do while on a trip to Vienna. "I gave her my best advice - find a good music store." This wasn't a case of "do as I say, not as I do." On a 2002 trip to Germany, Ms. Sullivan found such a store in Munich and sent her husband and son wandering around the city while she pored over all the harp music they had. It was in that store that Ms. Sullivan discovered the German folk harp tradition. "You can learn so much about a local music tradition - both concert music and folk music - by seeing what is in stock." In the Munich store, Ms. Sullivan marked the absence of the Celtic folk music that a customer would find in an American store (albeit with a smattering of folk music from other cultures). Instead, she found only German and Austrian folk songs written or arranged for the German folk harp, along with concert music - many of the usual harp standards, plus other publications less well-known and difficult to obtain in the United States. Ms. Sullivan muses, "I think musicians are drawn to all the different facets of their instruments. It's fascinating to consider that the essential harp (regardless of the size, number of strings, or levers or pedals) can be at home with Irish jigs, Paraguayan galopas, or German ländler. The technical requirements of each style are so interesting and the approaches to the instrument so different, it's almost like rediscovering the harp." Her discovery of the German folk harp tradition while browsing in that Munich music store, then, opened up a vista of new challenges and inspired the creation of this disc, in which she shares her discoveries. Art music often draws on a folk music background, refines it with education and in the process becomes more cosmopolitan. Like their counterparts in literature, art and philosophy, the composers of the Romantic era believed that not all truth could be arrived at through reasoning and logical deduction. Rather, they held that there were deeper realities which could only be reached through emotion and intuition. The Romantic composers not only used folk traditions as inspiration for their subjects but also borrowed and adapted folk musical forms and colors in their composed music. Czechoslovakian harpist Hans Trnecek (1858-1914) composed his Fantasie as a meditation on a number of melodies and themes by Austrian composer Franz Schubert. Ms. Sullivan recommends comparing the Trnecek Fantasie with the other two 'fantasy' pieces on this disc - Schuëcker's Barcarole and the Spohr Fantasie, pointing out that each uses the form in very different ways. Here, Trnecek uses the fantasy form to weave together his free-form interpretations of the Schubert material. Louis Spohr (1784-1859) was a German violinist, conductor and composer who wrote solo harp works for his wife, Dorette Scheidler, the most accomplished German harpist of her day. Spohr's Fantasie is a real classical/romantic style fantasy, with clearly divided sections that are very different in tempo and feeling but that repeat thematic material. Viennese harpist Edmund Schuëcker (1860-1911) seems to embody German/Austrian romantic harp music. His pieces are typically romantic in form and content, and it is certainly harp music, written by a harpist. "To me, the virtuoso passages are more like the butter in a Viennese pastry than like the sugar icing on a French cake - more substantial, more underneath than just on top." The Barcarole (a piece composed in the style of the folk songs sung by Venetian gondoliers) uses fantasia quasi-improvisatory sections to develop each theme in the piece. Born in Berlin in 1834, Albert Zabel toured Germany, Russia, England and the U.S. as a concert harpist, before becoming solo harpist with the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg in 1855. He was the harp instructor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (the model for Ms. Sullivan's alma mater, the Curtis Institute of Music)
