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The stars were aligned when Amy Turk came up to chat to me after a concert I had given in a rural church in Cheshire last July. She had recently moved and now lived only 20 minutes away from me. We had to meet up and have dinner! After many long chats & meals together we found out that we were both near to completion on our respective new album releases. So we made a plan to work collaboratively to promote our releases together. We set it so that Amy’s debut EP “Syzygy” and my second album “Sea of Stars” would be released on the same day, 19th April 2024.  As we both had composed harp duos, playing these together naturally framed a carefully curated concert of our own compositions and arrangements. Whereas Amy’s compositional focus has been on pedal harp and mine on lever harp; we both share an imaginative and creative approach to our writing. Invented techniques meet beautiful melodies, fused by our collective influences from classical, rock, jazz, film music and video games. Our first collaborative video together ! In true pioneering style our joint album launch party was a live online event hosted on Amy’s YouTube channel where she is one of the most watched solo harpists and has over 30 million views. As well as performing live we had an interactive Q&A as well as listening to a couple of tracks from our respective releases. We gave a series of concerts and workshops in May in the UK and we wanted to take the spirit of ‘harpists helping each other” a step further, so it was important for us to share our concert platform with local harpists as much as possible. Our London concert featured performances from Trinity Laban harpists, our Alton concert featured harpists from Bedales School & Southampton University and our Manchester concert featured RNCM harpists. A huge thank you to the harp teachers for their support in this project and allowing their students to perform: Gabriella Dall'Ollio, Kate Ham, Cecily Beer and Anne-Marie O'Farrell. Here is a clip from our performance in London A chance encounter after a concert has created a friendship built on mutual respect and we look forward to more projects together and sharing our Harp Alchemy with the harp community.
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