Review by Kenny Mathieson
Hannah Phillips
Town House, Inverness, 2 September 2009
Hannah Phillips (© David Charles)
THERE WERE no shortage of local connections in this recital by harpist Hannah Phillips, beginning with the musician herself, who although born in Northampton, was brought up in Beauly, and began playing clarsach after hearing a performance in Inverness as a seven-year-old.
The centrepiece of the recital was a new work by Glasgow composer Edward McGuire, The Poet’s Return, inspired by a visit Robert Burns paid to Inverness and environs in September of 1787. The piece was commissioned for Hannah Phillips by Inverness Arts Forum with funding from the Highland Culture Programme, and also marked the end of Inverness Arts Forum in its present form (the lunchtime recitals, however, continue unabated).
Phillips added the classical pedal harp to her original clarsach before attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (she graduated with First Class honours this summer), and wanted to commission a piece that featured both instruments.
McGuire, who is a performer as well as a composer, albeit on the rather more portable flute, was an ideal choice for the task. As an esteemed composer of contemporary music and a long-term member of The Whistlebinkies, he has a foot firmly placed in both the classical and traditional music camps, and a thorough grasp of both.
His writing for both pedal harp and clarsach revealed an equally thorough grip on the nature and potential of the instruments, and made for a captivating piece. Cast in four movements, with the two outer sections on clarsach and the inner movements on pedal harp, it evoked four contrasting moods which the composer described in his spoken introduction to the piece.
Crudely summarised, the first evoked lively anticipation of the poet’s journey with his friend William Nicol, the second was a more troubled and sombre refection on his dilemma over staying in Scotland or getting involved in the slave trade in the Caribbean, the third reflected friendship and their perambulation around the area, and the fourth his reflections in retrospect back home in Ayrshire.
The composer weaved a series of familiar tunes by Burns into the fabric of the music, all eminently recognisable if occasionally fleeting, and made full use of the contrasting qualities of the two instruments in his explorations of their sound world. Phillips had learned the piece – and everything else she played – and seemed to have it both fully absorbed in her mind and well under her fingers in a captivating and highly accomplished performance.
She opened the recital with an equally compelling account of William Mathias’s colourful and carefully characterised Santa Fe Suite and Bernard Andrès’s Elegie pour un mort berger (Elegy for a dead shepherd), two 20th century works which explored a wide-range of the pedal harp’s sonorities and technical resources in a pleasing and tuneful musical context.
The harpist’s own arrangements of four Airs for Clarsach included the poignant ‘Lament for Rory’s Sister’ and a set of three tunes that opened with more local connections in Donald Riddell’s ‘Morag Haig Thomas’, and added a ‘St Kilda Song and Dance’ and ‘Skye Dance’ (in, she claimed, new arrangements since she played them here last year).
For information on forthcoming recitals, contact James Munro on 01463 710363 or
© Kenny Mathieson, 2009
