Lavinia

Korean-born Dutch harpist Lavinia Meijer states as her goal "to make the harp better known as a solo instrument, with all its possibilities which are often still unknown to the wider audience." With this release she accomplishes her goal, not so much technically as musically. The harp does not do so much here that the attentive listener to the big early film scores won't have heard before. But Meijer's album falls nicely into the group of releases that are reconstructing the virtuoso solo repertoire of a century ago, rediscovering gems that were swept aside by self-serving modernist imperatives. The music on the disc is plenty spectacular technically. The opening Variations sur un thèm dans le style ancien plunge into tight, high figures with the first variation and deepen from there. But what's really intriguing about them is their distinctive take on the little neo-Renaissance current that flowed through the music of the early twentieth century. The two Divertissements of André Caplet are even more unexpected, especially the one marked "à l'Espagnole" (track 5).

During his lifetime, from his Neapolitan years to his Spanish sojourn, Domenico Scarlatti cultivated the “cantata” genre, composing at least about sixty works – those of uncertain attribution and his Serenades excluded. Other cantatas are likely to emerge once the uncatalogued funds are systematically scanned. Since in those years the cantata was a genre on the wane, this high number is revealing of Scarlatti’s uninterrupted link with the baroque tradition, an age in which the cantata had reached its climax as an extremely refined genre, the place for daring experimentation, and exquisite writing, the appropriate gym for high craftsmanship, as expected by the elitist audience for which it was intended. The manuscripts date from 1699 to 1724.