Harp Column Blogs: Alexander Rider

The English harpist, writer and composer, John Marson, died on Sunday 4th February in London, after a brief illness.

I only knew John towards the end of his life, but it is nonetheless difficult to confine my respect and affection for this splendid man to words. John was a great musican and a real pro, admired as much for his fine musicianship as for his simple kindness, professional courtesy and vast intellect. And what humour! John had his opinions, but never were they expressed in anyway other than complete dignity an succintness

Above all, John's scholarly commitment to researching all aspects of the harp, and almost total [harp] recall was simply stunning. Reading a book or article of John's is always a joy and a reveleation.

From my very beginnings on the harp, I remember my teacher Frances Kelly speaking about him with such respect and fondness. So, it was with great pleasure that I met John when I began study with Gabriella Dall'Olio in London, in whose home he was a frequent guest. What a thrill to finish the lesson and enjoy dinner with a mine of harpistic information! The date of this publication, that harpist's background...a bit of innocent gossip?

Gabriella, a great friend and neighbour to John, will surely miss him terribly. We, as harpists, often find we must be wary of our colleagues and rivals, but what friendships occur in the absence of this enmity! It is a lesson to us all.

So many of John's colleagues, some of whom having known him for decades (English national opera's Alison Martin for one who gave a fantastic speech) have said many more beautfiul and meaningful things than I ever could, and I leave to those who best remeber him to list his many achievements, to recall John in his prime.

I at least knew John Marson well enough to be inspired by John Marson, his love for the harp and for music.

 I have been away for so long! I hope to post more regularly, if you still want to hear what I have to talk about. When did I last write? May? Ah yes, on the eve of my concerto debut!

With a great deal of preparation, confidence and bravery, a concerto can be amongst the most rewarding arts in solo performance. What a tremendous variety of tonal and rhtyhmic statements a soloist can achieve, with the colours of the orchestra as the backdrop.  Yet as harpists, how often are we afforded the oppurtunity to hear real treasures of this genre, featuring our own instrument? With the exception of the myriad recordings of Mozart, concert programmers and recording companies will have little to do with the harp concertos by Rodrigo, Wagenseil or even Debussy. Yet, are things changing?

Few are doing as much as the record company Naxos to navigate the great ream of negelcted and often unrecorded harp concertos, languishing in the repertoire of the very few. Since 2004, Naxos have released all of the Bax chamber music for harp,with English harpist Alison Nicholls and her ensemble 'Mobius', Alwyn's shining 'Lyra Angelica' with another English star, Suzanne Willison and the Royal Philharmonic orchestra, and more recently, this summer, Reinecke's concerto for harp in E-minor.

Featuring (the frankly splendid) Fabrice Pierre as soloist, his ravishing tone, quality and breadth of sound, dynamic range and the sheer excitement of his sonic presence, mark this amongst the finest harp playing I have ever heard. What is still more exciting is that Pierre is conducting from the harp(!). Having achieved top honours in his studies in conducting as well as in harp, Fabrice Pierre was named by Pierre Boulez as his conducting assistant at the ensemble intercontemporain de Paris, and now from his current base in Lyon, he directs another contemporary group, L'Atelier XXeme siecle. This recording allows us to really see how a harpist is capable of manipulating the music as both as concerto soloist and conductor. Quite right too.

I treasure this recording, as I do all of my Naxos recordings of harp repertory. As a student, Naxos has allowed me to cover much core (and less core) symphonic, opera, and instrumental repertoire, as they retail at between ??4.99 and ??5.99. So, harpists! You can ill afford to miss the oppurtunity to own these secrets of the harp for so small a price.

These exemplary recordings of rarely programmed harp masterpieces, with a roster of real harp artists, will help to prove once and for all that harpists are in possession of  rigourous and ferocious musical intellect and capability. So, thankyou to Naxos. How about Salzedo's concerto for harp and seven winds? Or perhaps the preambule et jeux?  The Spohr concertante for harp and violin, the petite suite concertante for harp, piano and harpsichord by Frank Martin? Or perhaps one of the vast numer of works for harp by composers of the former Soviet republics? After all they were inspired by such great harpists as Vera Dulova and Tatyana Tauer. There is much to explore.

 

I just watched an edition of  BBC's history programme 'timewatch'. This documentary focused on one,  Noor Inyaht Khan. I was so profoundly affected and moved by her story that I decided that I would try to spread awareness about her among harpists.  

Noor Inayat Khan was born in 1914 in St.Petersburg. She was the daughter of a reknowned Sufi mystic and an American society girl-turned- runaway. Shortly after her birth, Noor's family moved to the suburbs of Paris where she was to grow up. Noor (whose name translates as 'light of womanhood')  grew up talented, educated and beautiful and was a writer of children's stories, many of which were published in France. However, her greatest passion was actually the harp, and one of her two  Erard gothic harps can be seen at the family home  in Paris.

After the German invasion of France in 1940, Noor, her parents and brother fled Paris to Bordeaux, managing to get a passage by ship from there to England. Once settled in Oxford, Noor and her brother decided that they both wanted to do something for the War effort. Although Noor's Sufi pacifism forbade her from killing anybody, she decided to train for a purely operational role. Like my own Grandmother, she trained as a wireless operator in the WAF (women's air force).

Fortuitously, an administrative worker spotted 'Perfect French' on her paperwork and forwarded her details to SOE (the special operations executive. At this time, the  SOE was sending many young people of either French descent, or whose skills at the language enabled them to appear so, to work in French counter-resistance. The only person more valuable than a girl with 'perfect French', was a girl with 'perfect French' who was a trained wireless operator. Depite being described during her SOE training as, 'emotional' and 'clumsy', she was 'dropped', in the dead of night, near Angers in the Loire valley, in August 1943. From there she made her way to Paris.

Owing  to the fact that one of her superiors, who met her from the plane was, infact, a double agent, Noor was being watched  (by the Gestapo 'listening service')  the instant she began to transmit. Soon after, the occupying German forces, equipped with the information this agent had given them,  began to descend on the hapless wireless operators, on the 'Paris circuit'. One by one, these valuable agents began ominously to disappear from the airwaves.  During this time, Noor moved frantically and restlessly around Paris, always  one step ahead of her captors. Soon she was the ONLY active wireless operator left in Paris, and she could not evade capture for long. The Gestapo finally caught up with her, in a hiding place not 100 yards from the Gestapo's French HQ. She put up such a tremendous fight that the commanding officer almost had her shot on the spot to avoid the trouble.

The great tragedy of her capture was that she was only caught due to an act betrayal. The sister of a fellow agent had been denied a place on the 'Paris circuit'. Insane with Jealousy for Noor, she went to the French police, and accepted a reward of 10,000 francs for information leading to her capture. 10,000 francs was just one TENTH of the price that the Gestapo would have payed for her. Betrayed, Noor had been sold to the Gestapo.

After being exhaustively interrogated (and presumably tortured) over a period of five weeks, Noor was taken from captivity in Paris to the German prison in Karlsruhe. In September , she was moved from there to the  infamous Dachau concentration camp, where she was  savagely beaten and shot dead on 13 September 1944.  An eyewitness wrote to her family, saying that the last word she was heard to murmer was 'Liberte!'- Freedom. She was just 30 years old.

I apologise for taking this heavy handed tone, and to any historians, I apologise for the brevity of this piece, and for the probable mistakes in dates and specifics. But I wanted to write about a woman who was brave, and who died doing  despite her staunch pacifism, what she held as right. In a way, as a harpist, I really wanted to tell you all about someone who might have a speck of the same blood runing through her veins as I do.

I hope that I have done the Noor who was a harpist, some service in doing so.