10/10
Claire Augier de Lajallet, harp.
Klarthe Records, 2023
It is with delight that I am reviewing another disc that offers a kind of dreamlike journey. In her wonderful disc Memories, French harpist Claire Augier de Lajallet introduces us to new music inspired by nature, particularly the power of water.
This remarkable album is built around the debut of Canadian composer Eileen Padgett’s four-part suite “Memories in Water.” It was born of her personal response to water as “a cultural phenomenon, and as metaphor. Beautiful, life-giving, sacred, political, transformative and restoring.”
Augier de Lajallet bids us join her in the first movement of Living Stream with droplets as if from a distance, the water then building and coursing. Her style is an open book, expressive and present as if she herself is standing in an eddy with water splashing about her. She draws out the playfulness of the stream as well as its constant motion, reminding us of our own movement through life. In contrast, Weight of Ice is played as a heavy, frozen sarabande, as tense as winter with spring far away.
While The River Remembers is an elegy of sorrow, it’s in a hopeful major key. Augier de Lajallet offers a glimpse of light past all the tears that the world’s rivers have sustained through human tragedy and suffering. And finally, playing with simplicity and a full heart, Augier de Lajallet emphasizes the wonder and awe of the suite’s final movement, Waterfall Under Ancient Stars.
Encircling this magnificent addition to the harp literature are lesser known works including Ludovico Einaudi’s wistful Elegy for the Arctic. Augier de Lajallet mines the nostalgia for a place that is rapidly disappearing, emphasizing the work’s minimalist qualities while pausing with exactly the right amount of reverence to contemplate the disaster we have created.
She then introduces another world with Turkish harpist Çağatay Akyol’s mesmerizing and nostalgic Hittite Suite. It’sbased on the remarkable discovery of a 3,000-year-old vase with the depiction of a harpist playing. Israeli composer Ami Maayani’s Maqamat is based on an Arabic poetic genre. His work spins out verse alternated with rhetorical extravagance which are presented as if spoken dialogue, at once percussive and repetitive. Augier de Lajallet shines on this “wild and headstrong” piece, bringing her gusto and bravura to the fore.
Rarely performed is the mysterious tribute to the harp, Pour le tombeau d’Orphée by Marius Flothuis. Augier de Lajallet exploits the chromatic and unsettled quality of this dance-in-the-dark with unparalleled style. Also intriguing is the Rapsodie by Louise Charpentier, a vagabond harpist who played her harp from a truck bed in the countryside of post-war France. Augier de Lajallet gives this elegiac and folk-inspired piece special treatment since she credits Charpentier with her desire to become a harpist herself. This piece alone makes owning the disc a must.
Also included are Giovanni Caramiello’s song-based Rimembranza di Napoli and Corentin Boissier’s L’Enfance de l’Art who describes his lovely four-part suite this way: “Nostalgia presents the ephemeral aspect of everything; time passes too quickly for us to tire of it.”
And you, too, will never tire of the alluring newness of this splendid album.
