concert review: 700 Years of Pop

February 2003

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Harp Music at the Peterskirche

OF BARDS AND BEATLES

By Martha Harich

Bielefeld. What is pop music? In any case it is not just a 20th century phenomenon – this was made audible in an impressive manner in a concert with Astrid Nielsch on Sunday. The musician from Berlin played popular music from seven centuries on medieval and baroque harps – music from the baroque period and songs from musicals, Spanish dances from the 17th century and medieval music. A programme that suited the location, the medieval Peterskirch, extremely well.

What is regarded as classical music today, was popular music in its own time – this is especially true for the harp. Melodies that the birds sang from the rooftops, found their way into printed sheet music for this instrument. Other parts of her programm were Astrid Nielsch’s own arrangements: Music taken from film scores, for example, which she weaved into medleys together with baroque dance pieces and improvised interludes. It was surprizing, how similar a song from “Anatevka” and motives from the early baroque collection “Luz y Norte” turn out to be!

Ideal acoustics in the Peterskirche

With respect to harmonic language, however, the baroque pieces were the more surprizing. But who knows? Maybe the things we regard today as particularly artistic, were just the common musical formulations of their own day.

Once more the wonderful, sustaining acoustics of the Peterskirche proved ideal for a soft solo instrument. Besides the baroque harp with its warm sound, in amongst the stylistic medleys Astrid Nielsch played melodies from the 12th and 14th century on a medieval harp. This instrument is less than a meter in heigh and has a softer, but at the same time almost metallic sound. Listening to a French lovesong from the times of Richard the Lionheart, or an English melody the imitates the voices of birds, one fancies oneself in a different world. Especially in a church building, whose origins reach back to the 8th century, the music of the Middle Ages unfolds its own very special tension and incredible charm.

Of course this requires a musician like Astrid Nielsch, who is able to sing out each part individually, up into the (almost) inaudible, in complex polyphony like, for instance, a Chaconne by Handel. The specialist on historical harps, and graduated musicologist, also showed a light touch in her moderation. Competent, but without a scholarly attitude, shetook her public on a stroll through a few centuries of music history, and evidently enjoyed both the music making and her discoveries. For instance that of the Irish bard Turlough O’Carolan, who wrote a sort of highly complex folk music in the late baroque period, strangely untouched by musical developments on the European continent.

The audience in the sold-out Peterskirche listened to all that with increasing enthusiasm and had a special surprise in the end, when the artist pulled out a forgotten song by the Beatles (from their Hamburg period) as an encore: “Cry for a shadow”. Perhaps the song will become a hit posthumously, in its harp version!

last updated: 20 March, 2006