THE young harpist Maria Cleary is based in the Netherlands, where she studied with Edward Witsenburg at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. She is currently continuing her studies with Susanna Mildonian, and, in Bremen, with that leading exponent of early varieties of harp, Andrew Lawrence King.
Her programme at the RDS last night covered works by eight composers, presented in a well contrasted sequence: Dussek, Hindemith, Debussy, Salzedo, Spohr, Godefroid, Isang Yun and, Faure a piece by the young Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, Sampled Curves, was dropped because of difficulties with the electronic equipment it calls for.
Maria Cleary's playing shows intelligent musicianship, particularly in her small scale shaping of line. She captured well the lightweight charm of, Dussek's Sonata in C minor, and was more at home in the slow fall of the closing movement of Hindemith's Sonata than in the busier patterns of the first two.
Of the two harp showpieces, Godefroid's concert study sounded far more comfortable than Carlos Salzedo's Variations sur un theme dans le style ancien, which were not always clean in detail and were played in a truncated form that omitted the very feature (a Barcarolle in 5/8 time) highlighted in the programme note.
The most unusual inclusion was Isang Yun's In Balance. Korean born, Berlin resident Yun, who died last year at the age of 78, achieved a certain notoriety by being imprisoned ink his native country in 1967 (Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Boulez and Klemperer were among the individuals who petitioned for his release), and his music, which aimed to create a territory of its own between East and West, was even featured in the programmes of the RTESO in the 1970s. His short, carefully coloured, flickering In Balance, written in 1987, was here played with restraint and delicacy.
