Opéra Émoi

Emaho Duo: Primor Sluchin, harp, and Maud Renier, piano. Paraty, 2021.

Marie Antoinette may deserve our scorn for living a lavish lifestyle while French peasants starved, yet her true love and innate skill—playing the harp—caused a kind of harp-mania. Because of her, every fashionable salon of the day contained a harp, along with what was already de rigueur, the piano. Emaho Duo explores this instrumental combination in its excellent new disc, Opéra Émoi, performingrepertoire that sought to highlight stage hits of the day and showcase the virtuosity of the musicians of the house, as well as their good taste in both high art and expensive instruments. 

The CD rounds up well-known composers like Bizet, Mozart, Verdi, Rossini, and even Gershwin as interpreted by contemporary harpists including John Thomas, Jean-Baptiste Cardon, the little-known Belgian harpist Félix Godefroid, and Giovanni Caramiello, a composer who knows how to bring out the very best in the harp. Emaho Duo performs each piece with the abandon and acrobatic athleticism required of show pieces, while still highlighting the drama of the underlying stories. 

Metamorphoses

Tasha Smith Godinez, harp. Centaur Records, 2022.

Tasha Smith Godinez’ new disc Metamorphosescomprises a superbly crafted set of six new compositions.Each composer wrote specifically for her expressive and risk-taking style. Right away we feel ourselves transported outside the ordinary in Sidney Boquiren’s pointillistic and mysterious “Hidden,” a meditation on the treacherous landscape that is immigration in the U.S. As if in response, Michael Vincent Waller’s lyrical “Obsessive Journey” offers a peaceful respite. Then it’s off again with the jagged and punctuated chromatic riffs of Jose Gurria-Cardenas’ “Born on Wednesday,” and his angular “Mobile Active Simulated Humanoids” in which Smith Godinez embodies precisely a frantic and nihilistic existentialism. A favorite is the off-beat duet with khaen, a Lao bamboo mouth-organ, “Diomedea.” The track’s narrative is that of the Greek hero who was turned into a white bird and set loose on the ocean. The CD ends with “Transfigured Verse” by Jon Forshee, another myth, this time of Amphion who plays his harp to move stones into place and raise the Seven Gates of Thebes. The harp is the builder and healer and answered in a magical kaleidoscope of computer-generated sound.  •