Canadian harpist Teresa Suen-Campbell released her concerto album My Voice on July 11 on Navona Records. Recorded with Sinfonia Toronto and conductor Nurhan Arman, the album features two concerti written for Suen-Campbell, including the Harp Concerto by two-time JUNO Award-winning composer Chan Ka Nin (premiered in 2022) and the Concerto for Harp and Orchestra in D “Atonement” by James W. Campbell (premiered in 2014), in addition to George Frideric Handel’s Harp Concerto in B-flat major, HWV 294, with an original cadenza by Suen-Campbell.
“It was really nice actually to have the balance and diversity of recording a Baroque concerto with two new Canadian works in the album,” Suen-Campbell says. “The two new works are contrasting in style as well: Campbell’s concerto is neoclassical and romantic in style while Chan’s is more contemporary-sounding in terms of tonality.”
James W. Campbell, Suen-Campbell’s husband, wrote the Concerto for Harp as an engagement present. “He was planning to write a piano concerto one day and I asked him why not write a harp concerto instead,” Suen-Campbell says. “I was also involved with the compositional process.”
“For Prof. Chan’s concerto, I really enjoyed listening to one of his works for cello and was moved by it, [and] I invited him to write [a harp concerto] for me,” Suen-Campbell says. “He wrote the harp concerto to honor his mother who was suffering from dementia; it is a memory for her amazing life. In the concerto, he also inserted a passage for singing because his father loved to sing.”
The album is available digitally and as a physical CD (available by emailing ChristopherBevis.Campbell@gmail.com or by attending the album launch party on July 15 in Toronto).
Suen-Campbell’s debut solo album Longing, released in Hong Kong in 2010, was reviewed as “a well-balanced program focusing on calmness and warmth, beautifully played” by the Canadian classical music magazine Whole Note. She also recorded Alice Ho’s “Beyond the Erupting Skies Silver Angels Sing Among the Gold Stars” on the Centrediscs label.
An advocate of contemporary music, Suen-Campbell has commissioned five harp concertos, three solo works for the harp, and two solo works for harp and electronics to date. Suen-Campbell is also a Harp Column Music artist whose arrangements have been reviewed in Harp Column.
Suen-Campbell has performed as a soloist with Sinfonia Toronto, Toronto Concert Orchestra and Hong Kong City Chamber Orchestra. She has also performed at different music festivals such as the Toronto Summer Music Festival, American Harp Society Summer Institute, and Hong Kong Arts Festival. Suen-Campbell is currently principal harpist of the Toronto Concert Orchestra and North Bay Symphony, and was previously principal harpist of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong.
Suen-Campbell is currently a harp examiner at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and is on faculty at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. She also taught harp at Carleton University, Northwestern University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the first harpist from China to acquire a Doctor of Music degree in harp performance, studying with Elizabeth Cifani, former principal harp of Lyric Opera of Chicago, at Northwestern University. Learn more on her website.
