If you want to experience lovely atmospheric music that might remind you of the sea, drifting clouds and rolling hillsides, then you should consider the Vancouver Symphony’s concert this weekend.
The orchestra has lined up an all-French program featuring works of Gabriel Piern?, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Gracing the stage will be guest harpist Valerie Muzzolini Gordon and the women of the Vancouver USA Singers. They will appear in separate pieces, all of which will be conducted by music director Salvador Brotons.
Playing French music is second nature to Muzzolini Gordon, who is a native of Nice, where her mother played in the Nice Symphony. As a 4-year-old, Muzzolini Gordon got to touch the harp strings of the orchestra’s principal harpist and it left an indelible impression. So at the age of 7, she eagerly signed up for harp lessons at the local conservatory’s after-school program.
“I started playing a Celtic harp, which is smaller than a concert harp,” recalled Muzzolini Gordon. “It has levers instead of pedals. In order to change the pitch of the string, you have to push the lever up and down. I was on that for a year or two, and then my teacher moved me to a pedal harp that was smaller and has fewer strings than a standard concert harp.”
A few years later, Muzzolini Gordon moved up to the concert harp, which has 47 strings and uses seven pedals to change notes to sharps and flats.
“The concert harp has one set of strings for both hands,” explained Muzzolini Gordon. “The left hand usually plays the bass notes and the right had has the treble notes — just like a piano. The high notes use the shorter strings and the lower notes are the longer ones. A concert harp has about six and a half octaves to cover. It’s a big range.”
Even though her first teacher was tough, she kept practicing even when she did sports.
“My teacher didn’t want me to play volleyball, but I did,” Muzzolini Gordon said. “I played basketball. Knock on wood, I never had any accidents. I played on my high school basketball team. I never told my teacher until many years later. She rolled her eyes.”
Muzzolini Gordon moved to the United States to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she played with chamber ensembles and with orchestras. She did graduate work at Yale University and won the Principal Harp position at the Seattle Symphony when she was just 23. Later she became Principal Harpist with the Seattle Opera Orchestra, and last year she joined the music faculty at the University of Washington.
Muzzolini Gordon will play Pierné’s “Concert Piece for Harp and Orchestra” and Debussy’s “Sacred and Profane Dances.” The two pieces were written just a couple of years apart but are different in style.
“Pierné’s piece is romantic French,” she explained, “and the Debussy is post-romantic French. The Pierné has a beautiful melody that holds a conversation with the woodwinds and strings. The music is very tricky, with lots of cross fingerings. You’ll see my left hand taking over from the right for example and playing the upper strings.”
Debussy wrote the “Sacred and Profane Dances” for a French harp company that was trying to promote a new kind of harp. That harp style never quite caught on, though, and the piece is usually performed with a pedal harp, such as Muzzolini Gordon’s Lyon & Healy harp.
“The sacred section of the piece has more chords than the profane section,” she remarked. “The profane part turns into a waltz. Keep in mind that profane means secular here. The two sections flow together and the pedaling is intense. Watch the feet!”
Like an impressionist painting, Debussy’s “Nocturnes” is beloved for its subtle shading and orchestral colors. The work has three movements that were inspired by clouds, festivals and sirens. The sirens are not the kind that you hear from police cars and fire trucks but are meant to be like the women’s voices that lured men to the rocky shoals in Greek legends.
In the concert, the women of the Vancouver USA Singers will seek to evoke the ethereal quality of the sirens.
“The women’s voices are divided into eight parts,” explained Jana Hart, VUSA Music Director, “but the melody is passed around. They sing a wordless ah that augments the orchestral sound. It’s gorgeous.”
Because the full choir, totaling about 100 men and women meet regularly on Monday nights, the women have been going to extra Wednesday night rehearsals to learn their parts.
“The Debussy is quite difficult,” added Hart, “Counting is of the essence. Everyone has been working hard. Fortunately, we have an awesome accompanist, Laurie Chinn. She can sight read a complex orchestral scores like this one, and that makes everyone’s task easier.”
The orchestra will also perform the Suite No. 2 from “Daphnis and Chloè,” a ballet that Ravel wrote in 1912. The ballet’s story is based on a pastoral drama by the Greek writer Longus. The Suite No. 2 opens with a glorious depiction of the sun rising over a bucolic landscape and builds a lush palate of sounds that convey the love of the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloè.
