November 10, 2009: My first harp recital

Today's Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral was probably "something completely different" for almost everyone in the audience, a harp recital by Anna Maria Mendieta consisting of two solo works and an arrangement of the "Concierto di Aranjuez" by its composer, Joaquín Rodrigo, in response to a request from harpist Nicanor Zabaleta to rework the guitar solo into a harp solo.  Accompaniment for this concerto was provided by pianist Jieun Lee.  For the record, during my graduate student days, the only living harpist I could name was Zabaleta (Harpo Marx having died in 1964).  This was not the first time I had heard a solo harpist, but all previous occasions had been social affairs for which the musician had been hired to provide a discreetly quiet and atmospheric background.

Mendieta's program was relatively short.  This may have been necessitated by the need to take time to tune the instrument prior to playing it, which is clearly far more time-consuming than tuning any other instrument in the string family.  Mendieta told the joke that every harpist spends half the time tuning the instrument and the other half playing out of tune.  Fortunately, for her own performance she was wrong about both the amount of time she needed and the accuracy of her pitch.

Mendieta's first solo work was by Raoul Laparra, a French composer, who was so taken with Spanish music that, according to Richard Langham Smith's article for Grove Music Online, his study of the topic "remains his most important contribution to musicology."  Of his composition Smith wrote that "Laparra writes vivid Spanish pastiche," which was certainly the case for Mendieta's selection, the "Tientos" movement from his Rhythmes Español.  This suite was originally written for a chromatic harp, in which the "white keys" and "black keys" are strung on separate crossing planes:

This instrument attracted some attention in the late nineteenth century but is now little more than a museum piece.  Mendieta performed on the standard double-action pedal harp.

Mendieta also introduced the work by explaining that "tientos" meant "temptations."  This may be accurate in the dictionary but probably misses Laparra's intent.  Here is the introduction to the Wikipedia entry for the word in its singular form:

Tiento is a musical genre and flamenco palo originating in Spain in the mid-15th century. It is formally analogous to the fantasia (fantasy), found in England, Germany, and the Low Countries, and also the ricercare, first found in Italy. The word derives from the Spanish verb tentar (meaning either to touch, to tempt or to attempt), and was originally applied to music for various instruments. By the end of the 16th century the tiento was exclusively a keyboard form, especially of organ music. It continued to be the predominant form in the Spanish organ tradition through the time of Cabanilles, and developed many variants. Additionally, many 20th century composers have written works entitled "tiento."

This certainly does justice to Laparra's composition, which is very much a synthesis of twentieth-century rhetoric with his scholarship of Spanish music, which, in all likelihood, included extensive study of the vihuela repertoire of the mid-sixteenth century (a repertoire which, as a graduate student, I came to know well through my Musical Heritage Society membership).

The composer of Mendieta's second solo was more familiar, Astor Piazzolla;  but the selection was not one of his many tangos.  Rather, it was a lyric work that was apparently first conceived for oboe and piano, entitled "Tanti Anni Prima" and later published under the title "Ave Maria."  The music on the Sheet Music Plus preview page appears to allow for a transcription for solo harp, but Mendieta did not say whether or not the transcription was her own.  The work is probably a product of his final years, when he turned his attention from his own tango-based genre of jazz to chamber music;  and Mendieta's performance provided a refreshing opportunity to hear this different side of his repertoire.

The Rodrigo arrangement was quite effective, perhaps because he was able to work closely with Zabaleta on the project.  Mendieta's remarks cited a traditional theory that the folk idioms in the second movement of this concerto were intended to heal Spain after the division over the Civil War;  but the current Wikipedia entry for this concerto discredits this theory (citing a BBC Radio 4 documentary broadcast last month), suggesting, instead, that the movement reflects both happy memories of the Rodrigo's honeymoon and his subsequent devastation at the miscarriage of their first pregnancy.  No piano accompaniment could match the transparency of Rodrigo's orchestration for his concerto, but Lee still provided excellent support for the clarity of Mendieta's solo work.

On the whole Mendieta offered a stimulating view of the current harp repertoire and a taste for further exploration of that repertoire.