9/10
Jacinta Dennett, harp. Move Records, 2022.
Jacinta Dennett characterizes the remarkable variety of soundscapes she accesses in her new disc of music by female Australian composers as “swimming with sound.” She’s got that right; Fable is brimming in variety with shades all the way from shadowy to brilliant and everything in between, and is a distinctive and valuable addition to the recording library.
Dennett traces 66 years of composition beginning with the title track by Helen Gifford. This Fable is a first in many categories—first harp solo written by an Australian living in Australia and first to be premiered there as well. In this piece filled with extended techniques like portamento and près de table, Dennett searches out the story line, lingering on the spare, shocking sonorities and allowing the menace to unfurl.
Her skill is all the more impressive in the second work, more classical in style, Sonata by Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Dennett offers a particular poignancy to “Saeta,” a song in the flamenco style filled with longing. In fact, this is what Dennett does best, reaching inside the music and extracting its deeper meaning, offering more than a mere performance, rather an entirely new perspective, like Miriam Hyde’s Sunlit Waterfall where we’re transported to the serenity, wonder, and awe of a natural setting by subtle shifts in timing and dynamic variation.
In Chamber of Horrors by Elena Kats-Cherwin, Dennett delights in all that the harp can be—and more—relishing every crunchy chord, each rattling bass note, and all the jagged tremolos. Same for a piece new to me, Eve Duncan’s sparse and mysterious The Sun Behind It, Burning It. It’s a short work based on a stanza of poetry from Esther Theiler where the sun is compared to a “blood coloured poppy.”
Dennett impresses in Jennifer Fowler’s Threaded Stars, a series of motifs like streams, exerting a gravitational pull on the surrounding notes (or stars?). Similarly, Johanna Selleck’s Spindrift becomes a showcase for the painting of evocative images through sound. Based on the story of the “white goddess” Leukothea who came to the aid of Odysseus as he was on the verge of drowning, Dennett transforms the harp into a silky and diaphanous magic veil of protection amidst a vast and dispassionate sea.
The theme of the ocean returns in Alicia Grant’s Three Pieces for Harp, including a nod to Debussy’s La Mer. Dennett is highly skilled at constructing a place in time and inviting all of the requisite sensory pleasures like the astringency of salted air, the light scrunch of feet through sand, and the startling underwater world when viewed through a dive mask.
This is a superb collection of seldom-heard works that deserve a platform by a virtuosic performer taking the time and dedication to bring all the possibilities of their sounds to our ears—and the ideal musician to take on that challenge is Jacinta Dennett.
