Petr Eben: Music for Harp

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Historical records tell us that after the premiere of Mozart`s Don Giovanni Prague's street harpers used to play the famous minuet from the opera in pubs and at street corners. When Eben decided to write a composition for the harp, he had in mind exactly this unique resonance between composer and the common folk. Songs to ho with Lute, similarly as the „Six Love Songes“, this cycle takes inspiration from mediaeval and Renaissance love poetry in the original languages. Their atmosphere brings to mind the idea of a mediaeval trouvere with his lute singing under his chosen one's bay window. In this CD, though, the guitar or lute accompaniment is substituted by the harp which gives the songs a rounder sound. The recorder, which has become increasingly popular in the past few decades, is undoubtedly one of the best musical instruments for even very young children to play and to come into intimate first contact with the art of music. Eben wrote for his three sons, a cycle of short pieces for the recorder. The German harpist Katharina Handstedt has arranged this cycle for the recorder and harp. In the present CD the Duettini are rendered using the soprano and alto recorders but also the piccolo and the transverse flutes. Six Love Songs is cycle written in 1951 on mediaeval lyrics in the original languages aims at expressing the universal nature of love which is timeless and unbounded by land or language. The different languages offer scope for contrast and for bringing out some of the typical mentality of each of the nations. „Ordo modalis“ contains a number of stylized dances familiar from old Baroque suites. Present-day musical language tends to confront the harpist with considerable difficulties as the perpetual chromatic changes, a feature typical of the music of today, require frequent pedal retuning. Eben's approach to this technical problem was to make each movement rest on a different seven-tone mode which the performer can prepare beforehand without having to touch the pedals throughout the movement, which lends the harp an ampler sound. The cycle Greek Dictionary was originally intended as a musical accompaniment to an evening of Homer’s Iliad. The recitation was interspersed by choruses written each on one or, at most, two words. The cycle is to be a real, albeit unconventional, dictionary designed to translate unknown words into the language of music rather than into one's mother tongue.