Knowledge and Imagination Lavinia Meijer plays recent music for harp - and impresses PAUL SARCICH '... an exceptional player ...'

The Dutch-Korean harpist Lavinia Meijer has a particular interest in contemporary music and has confined this disc to works from the last forty years, offering an intriguing contrast of compositional styles in the process. Beginning with Britten's Suite Op 83 (written in 1969 for Osian Ellis); a piece which Britten himself seems to have been uncharacteristically modest about, calling it 'rather eighteenth century'; Meijer lays down the gauntlet right from the beginning of the Overture (which has a very definite twentieth century sound), bringing out the drama with a great variety of touch and atmosphere. The Toccata gives a portent of her ability to layer sounds and the spirit in her playing.Nodding towards the eighteenth is the short Fugue, as clever as one would expect from Britten, but the final Hymn (five variations on St Denio) seems to put the brakes on the whole piece due to its reflective opening and overall slow pace. Meijer gives it plenty of espressivo and rubato, but somehow it does not seem to belong with the other movements...

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

TORU TAKEMITSU

HARP