Harp Concerto 'Winter'

Harp Concerto (“Winter”) is a small-scale concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra divided into three separate movements. Its meaningful, lyrical tone is infused with moments of quiet introspection and luxurious sensuality. Orchestrated with careful touches of great detail and sophistication, it is an expansive, compelling mix of imaginative writing for the instrument and frequently employs many of its special effects for dramatic and theatrical drama.

It is a purely musical abstraction of the loosely, unspecified ‘Winter’ subtitle, as its recurring motifs of delicately, downward-moving, cascades of rippling music are reminiscent of snowfall. It is tonal, cinematic in its orientation, and uses vast stretches of complex textures to create otherworldly high-flying acrobatic gestures – supernatural to its core. It is ricocheting music that flits between daunting and yearning tonalities that push and pull toward each other and use fleeting and ever-moving sweeps of grandeur and tumbling, disjointed tumbling melodic strains to fragment the symmetrically of the score and push it to its extreme lushness in highly engaging entertainment that is satisfyingly beautiful and yields the ability to make the listener feel the emotion and emotionally charged phrases.

Broadly speaking, it is mostly constant, as dissonance is more of a musical tool for dramatic gestures than a compositional tool. Contrapuntally intricate, it shimmers with delightful glistening effervescence and reflects a fundamental softening of tone as the score develops. It is orchestrated brilliantly – both musically and psychologically, reflecting polyphonic images full of moods and character that reveal more about the character of the season than in the few dazzlingly pyrotechnics of the Harp cadenza material.

It soars magnificently: high lyricism, elegant writing, and beauty in its colorful orchestration and throbbing rhythmic interest. The palette of formal devices includes interludes, heart-stopping soloistic passagework, and a variety of sumptuous harmony – it wanders in the open, airy score and pulls at the ear and the heartstrings.