Music review: Edinburgh International Harp Festival George Watson’s College

Jim Gilchrist enjoys an explosion of spices and some masterly performances at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival

Edinburgh International Harp Festival, George Watson’s College ****

A coincidental explosion of spices infused Edinburgh International Harp Festival’s Saturday afternoon concert. Firstly, a palpably delighted, 25-year-old Anna Eggersberger was introduced as the 2022 recipient of the festival’s Iain Macleòid Young Composer Award, the Irish-based Bavarian player giving a deft performance of her winning Suite of Spices.

Heading the bill was another German player, Eva Curth, playing both clarsach or lever harp and the larger pedal harp to feature music by the contemporary French composer Bernard Andrès. She opened with Andrès’s Ribambelle suite of ten lever harp solos which, despite their brevity and simplicity, were bursting with character and charm.

Eva Curth –a performance with character and charm

Switching to the fuller-toned pedal harp, lo and behold, here was Andrès’s Epices suite, a different spice informing each piece with fragrance or pungency and, indeed, reinforcing Curth’s suggestion that his music is “a gift to the harp world”.

Saturday’s evening concert opened with Irish harpist and composer Michael Rooney ranging through repertoire that meant much to him over the years. Far from a maudlin trip down memory lane, however, this proved to be a superb showcase for his masterly ease and musicality. Old chestnuts like O’Carolan’s Si Bheag Si Mhór and Jockey to the Fair were revivified potently, while extracts from his suite commemorating Irish patriot and suffragette Constance Markievicz ranged between prison cell despair and defiantly syncopated string cascades.

The Swedish duo Dråm, with droll self-deprecation, suggested we were in for some gloomy musical Scandi-noir but in fact proved highly entertaining, combining the sonorities of Erik Ask-Upmark’s harp with the grainy voice of Anna Rynefors’s nyckelharpa in a selection of polskas, an intriguingly Irish-sounding Norse wedding march and even resorted to reed sound, Rynefors playing a revived Swedish bagpipe for some ancient cattle-herding tunes.