Back this morning from a tour with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky Manfred Symphony - 7 concerts in 7 different European cities in 8 days..... including travelling days to and from the UK!


We had a few spare hours in Paris so managed to fit in a visit to the wonderful harp shop near the Arc de Triomphe, Le Magasin de la Harpe.

He also showed us a couple of Sylvain Blassel's harps which are kept downstairs. His small Erat harp is absolutely stunning to look at and has the most amazing tone.


Here is a video of Sylvain playing Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Tarrega on the Erat.

Check out his fingering of the repeated notes throughout, also his use of the little finger in the left hand. Very interesting!!!


I'm going to see if I can work out using this fingering and whether I can actually use my left hand pinky on my Salvis. I fear the tension on the Salvi will be too much for my little fingers alas!


It's very easy to just repeat what we have been taught and say that we don't play using our little fingers, but as Alexandre said, "why not?"


why not indeed.

Konghou Harp
47 + 47 strings，double-row strings with pedals
Height: 222 cm
Width: 110 cm 
Weight: 53 kgs
​
Joy Yu Hoffman performing her arrangement of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" on the Kong Hou (Chinese Harp).

So, I was playing in a concert with a chamber orchestra tonight and we had just played the Clarinet Concerto by Copland (great piece, loads of harp throughout) and I'm on stage during the interval giving the harp a quick re-tune before the second half starts.


This lady from the audience comes over to the side of the stage and doesn't appear to be visually impaired or drunk.


In all seriousness she calls me over to ask me....




"I've never seen one of those with a projection box on the back before.....


(me - ¿Qué? )






do they all have that?


(me - ¿Qué? )







I had to come over and ask you because I was curious......








do you use your hands to play?


?????




(wait it gets better)






because i can see you were playing with your feet"


?????

​

Wow - what an amazing harpist and singer!

Not being really up on the early music scene I hadn't come across her before, but stumbled across a video of her on YouTube.

Arianna is a fascinating musician, being an acclaimed early music opera singer as well as harpist and has an impressive back catalogue of CDs of early music both as a harpist and separately as singer.


However her latest CDs seem to be of her own compositions played with her band, with Arianna playing triple harp, gothic harp and celtic harps as well as singing. The rest of her band are playing various early and folk string instruments (not sure what they are because of the language on the website!) and also hand percussion.


The result is a very tasteful and sublime world music album which gets the thumbs up from everyone in my household - which is quite a feat as we all have very diverse tastes!


Very difficult to pick a favourite track, possibly Aurora as it's a harp only track. Suite Celtic has a more traditional vibe and shows the musical excellence of all the musicians. A "chill out" track with a very wide appeal is El Llenguatge dels ocells. Although every track on this CD is fantastic.


No UK dates in her concert schedule which is a shame, as I would love to see her live.

Started the rehearsals on nails, Petrenko then wanted picks, and on the final rehearsal on the day of the concert wanted nails.


I completely underestimated the time needed to grow my nails for this gig, and to be honest just didn't think about this piece coming up in the diary and just kept them usual short length.


Arghgh!! They were just too short at the start of the week.


So ended up having to get some false gel nails put on so that the nails were long enough to play with. My nails are very short and are slow to grow!


Only lost 3 false nails during the week which was quite a bizarre sight as they flew off as I was playing during rehearsals.


note to self - don't cut nails before Mahler 6 again.


BTW - In case you are wondering - they are definitely not my nails above. Can you imagine trying to do anything with those nails?