Imagine Zabaleta on the harp, Gazzelloni on the flute and Segovia on the guitar. Flip through the meagre repertory that circulated until a few years ago for these instruments, and you get the picture: you have just uncovered one of the secrets of the turbulent but enchanting art of the French harp virtuoso Xavier de Maistre. He takes the (relative) outsiders of the concert harp palette as a challenge, and has made free with transcriptions, some by himself – even compositions originally written for the piano or large orchestra!
Faithful to his battle cry: “The harp is like an orchestra for me!” de Maistre’s program takes off with Handel’s Concerto in B major, op. 4, No. 6 HWV 294, composed for organ and orchestra and published in 1738, when the harp was starting to show off its infinite possibilities, graciously in syntony with the gallant style.
This was largely due to the numerous harp makers, their targets not only professional players, but amateurs too. You would see this in Paris and London, but also in Venice, where Giovanni Battista Pescetti worked. His Sonata in C minor, originally for harpsichord, was transcribed for the harp by the legendary virtuoso Carlos Salzedo.
From the guitar – or mandoline – to the harp is a short step, as we can see from the highly popular Recuerdos de l’Alhambra (1896) by Francisco Tarrega. They convey the exotic fragrance of Andalusia, like on late-19th century postcards. Then too, the Grande Fantaisie “La Mandoline”, by the British composer Elias Parish Alvars, re-echoes popular and operatic motifs typical of the Romantic taste.
We can enjoy the same slightly frivolous grace of the harp’s crystalline sonority in a transcription of a piano Impromptu by Gabriel Fauré, and in two Divertissements – à la Française and à l’Espagnole – by André Caplet, a close friend of Debussy; both were written in 1924, a year before he died, and the composer himself drafted a transcription for piano.
But de Maistre’s challenge gives him the bravura to close his recital with a daring transcription of Smetana’s Moldava. This well-known orchestral piece, composed between 1874 and 1879, is part of the cycle Ma Vlast (My Fatherland), a picturesque sequence of tone poems: a hymn in music to the great Bohemian river that flows down to Prague from its source. In just ten minutes this piece has put the composer firmly among the grandees of music.

Luigi Di Fronzo