There is a paradox at the heart of the harp, an instrument that sounds ancient and inevitable but demands a kind of ferocious technical precision that audiences almost never see — the fingers working the pedals in a silent choreography while the hands do their visible business above. Lavinia Meijer, the Dutch harpist whose 2004 solo recording has now found its way to Sony’s digital catalog after nearly two decades in quieter circulation, understands this paradox completely. You hear it in the way she plays.
The program is, on its face, a gamble. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is among the most keyboard-specific bodies of music ever written — conceived in an era when “keyboard” meant harpsichord or clavichord, later appropriated triumphantly by the piano, and only occasionally visited by other instruments. The harp has its advocates for this repertoire, but they are few and they had better be persuasive. Meijer is persuasive. She opens with the prelude and fugue in C major from Book I, which is either the most obvious possible choice or the most inspired one, and in her hands it becomes the latter. The arpeggiated broken-chord writing of the prelude lies so naturally under her fingers that you wonder, briefly, whether Bach might have had the instrument somewhere in the back of his mind. The fugue is another matter — fugue almost always is — and here Meijer’s voicing is careful, her sense of contrapuntal hierarchy clear without being labored. The F-sharp major pair from Book I may be the finest thing on the disc: there is a luminosity to Meijer’s tone in the upper register that the relatively remote key seems to summon, something cool and particular, like light through old glass.
She performs the preludes and fugues as pairs, which is the only honest approach. Cherry-picking a prelude and leaving its fugue behind is like printing half a sonnet.
The Scarlatti is more complicated. These nine sonatas are soaked in the Spanish guitar idiom — Scarlatti spent the most productive decades of his life at the Iberian courts, and the guitar’s strumming, its rasgueado attack, its drone-bass figures, run through his keyboard writing like a ground current. The harp, with its own Iberian associations, should be a natural translator. And technically, Meijer plays them superbly, her ornaments clean, her rhythmic pulse steady. But something goes slightly wrong in aggregate. Four of the nine are marked Allegro, yet the disc’s emotional temperature barely varies across the set. Everything arrives at the same pretty, burnished remove. The dynamic range — already constrained by the instrument — narrows further, and by the fifth or sixth sonata the effect is of a single continuous texture, sweetly competent and ultimately unstirring.
Then there is the Handel Theme and Variations, offered here with appropriate scholarly hedging — the attribution to Handel is uncertain, and Meijer apparently does not pretend otherwise. Marisa Robles recorded the same piece for Decca years ago, in a version with a slightly brighter, thinner tone. Meijer’s harp sounds warmer and fuller in the Maria Minor Church in Utrecht, where this was recorded, and the acoustic suits her: spacious but not cavernous, with just enough natural resonance to give the instrument body without smearing its articulation.
What the release does, above all, is induce a very specific and not unpleasant mental state — the kind of focused inattention that certain music produces, where you are not quite listening and not quite not listening, where thought runs along in parallel to the sound rather than in response to it. This is not necessarily criticism. The Goldberg Variations, after all, were allegedly composed to ease an insomniac count through his sleepless hours, and there is something fitting about music from that same baroque world being deployed once again for similar ends. But it does suggest the disc’s natural habitat: late evening, low light, a mind that wants company without demands.
The Sony remaster sounds distinguished — clean, present, no digital roughness. Whether the album converts harp skeptics is another matter. It confirmed my admiration for the Bach and left me cooler about the Scarlatti than I wanted to be. Worth owning for the former; the latter you will enjoy more if you do not listen to all nine sonatas in sequence.
