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Interesting. Youtube doesn’t have her recordings and I didn’t manage to find any samples in internet.
Have you heard Andrew Lawrence-King?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAkzov_udvUHe is fantastic virtuoso, very expressive and stylish player and his approach to Early Music is deeply scientifical. The Best.
Simon Capp is back in business and his medieval harps are fine, authentic and fairly cheap. I’m not so keen on his baroque triples – the sound is pretty dump and narrow, – but he deals fine with the earlier ones.
My best recomendation is Rainer Thurau – http://www.thurau-harps.com
He has couple of cheap models for beginners (Valaamse, Van Eyck), but the quality and sound are better than most of professional instruments of other makers have. I own “Viaggio” small triple harp by Thurau, we are buying the second triple (Zampieri) and planning to buy the Gothic harp from him soon.Some examples to show that Thurau is the best:
The world foremost early harpist Andrew Lawrence-King recently changed to his Zampieri. Hannelore De Vaere has lots of his instruments. Arianna Savall as well. Also, there is a HUGE list of honored clients in, probably, all the countries, where the early music is any popular.And if you are just very short in money – buy the Harpsicle in natural finish or “Royal Blue” (actually, due to museum studies, – The Most Autentic color for medieval instruments, like other Heraldry colors, with no levers, order the natural gut historical harp strings from Bernd Kuerschner and study happily. The whole story will cost you ~500$, I recon.
If you mean Spanish Baroque one – Arianna Savall was selling one of hers, I don’t know if she sold it or not. Instrument is good. Made by Thurau. But she is in Europe.
I recently restored 3 single-action harps. The oldest one was dated something like 1764 or so, not sure about the last one digit. The harp is absolutely playable and has superb tone.
Not sure about if somebody owns rather much older original instruments from earlier periods. Rainer Thurau told something about restoring the instrument of 1740s, I’m not sure of the exact year and if he had older ones.
Queen Mary harp was not long ago strung with gut strings to make some recording (originally it was with wire strings). In ESMUC in Barcelona there are quite a few Spanish baroque harps of ~17th century in storages, some of them are in fairly well condition, possible to be restored to playable.
The problem of really early harps is that those which were really playied a lot and not kept mostly as a decoration is that the instruments-to-travel-with were very lightweight, and hardly survived as a result. So, what we see are mostly like Barberini and Bologna harps – amazingly decorated, huge and heavy like a mortal sin.
Each harp needs service every souple years. The wood “sits down”, stratches, plates move and can get out of tune, etc. If the instrument wasn’t serviced for 15 years, no wonder it got disbalanced. The pedal felting gets old too and trushes.
Usually, I noticed, some service technitians try to tell
Normally the cross-string harp works pretty good, from the point of Spanish Baroque harp. One row is the diatonics (left), the other is semitones (right), and they are crossing pretty high up. Spanish harp was usually played standing, mostly because of that – you should pluck the strings near crossing for semitones to be accessible. This type of chromatic non-pedal harp allows fast dumping, very necessar in phrasing of Spanish music.
That Muma harp looks really… weird, to say honestly, whilst the Spanish prototype is pretty elegant
The picture is from http://www.thurau-harps.com
Andrew Lawrence-King with “Tragicomedia” for Biber.
Can’t remember exactly the other with different ensembles. Several nominations for solo or various ensembles recordings.Dear Amanda,
I suggest wearing the ring on your finger, and not on your right wrist, right shoulder, waist, belly button, thigh and breasts. That should prevent any contact between your ring and the wooden surface of the harp.
Congratulations, btw
I make harps. Woodworking.
Sometimes have occasional work-gigs as a simultaneous interpriter (Russian-English).The normal link – http://www.thurau-harps.com
They located in Wiesbaden, Germany (near Frankfurt). The price for Fianna is about 5000 euro, I can’t remember clearly, but in average.
It is a small company with a very long and proud history. They have no dealers in USA, as far as I know. But in the “Testimonials” page you can find quite a few responces from the world top harpists. Somebody are even USA ones.Pedal harps… and why not to get an Italian baroque triple? The technic is different from pedal harps, but the triple is absolutely chromatic and has lots of possibilities. I play one, the first touch made me giving up the lever and pedal harps forever.
Amazing instrument…Carol, thank you for your kind reply.
If you really want the best lever harp in the world – look here: http://www.thurau-harps.com/harps/folk_harps.htm on Fianna (listed downwards). I played it. I’ve never ever seen or heard anything better. The price-range is relative to Heartland and Thormallen.
Wait-list might be slightly longer, but trust me, it worth this. I own one harp made by Rainer Thurau (and regularly have one other in use), after long search among all existing harpmakers.Thurau uses Delacour levers (really good) and timber of at least 15 years of seasoning. Quality of woodwork is outstanding (I’m a harpmaker myself and woodwork is quite a relative topic for me). Quality of sound – amazing. The harp is extremly lightweight (5.5-6 kg). Actually, I hardly can imagine anything better.
Many people – many thoughts.
And all figures out in comparisons. Actually if to put together pedal harps of Camac, Horngacher and Thurau, the result will be obvious, the same like the diference between factory-made lever harp and [good] hand-made lever harp. So, the “second class” here is not an abusement, but a fact.What Camacs do really have as a great point – their levers. They are really good, fast and correct, and probably the best of existing examples.
I don’t like Camacs. Lowest 3 basses usually don’t sound even on Aziliz. Only levers are lovely. Camac Corrigan is really bad. Aziliz – well, you should be lucky: I saw 5, and only 2 had nice sound.
Thormallen – yes. They are cool and worth their cost.
Heartland (DragonHeart harp) – YES. They are really sweet.
Pilgrim – I tried out just 2 of them and it’s difficult to make statistics on less than 3.My advise from mentioned is a DragonHeart. You’ll be really happy with it.
