On Track: Collection not quite a musical trifecta

By WILLIAM DART

As the harpist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Carolyn Mills is a more familiar figure on the concert stage than many Aucklanders might realise. Youngsters may also know her from her indefatigable touring around schools, introducing thousands of children to her instrument.

Mirage, Mills' new Atoll CD, presents her centre stage and solo, with an airbrushed portrait on its cover that has something of the come-hither femme fatale to it. You might try to resist, but you just have to sample this collection of music that's a little off the beaten repertoire.

While we're not talking major composers here, a figure like Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961) writes music that is grateful to the fingers and falls gracefully on the ear.

Mills transcends the technical challenges of two of his Five Poetical Studies and unlocks their poetry. This composer was given to rather folksy homilies and once observed that "to play like an angel you have to work like a devil". While I have no idea of Mills' practice regime, these performances are positively seraphic.

Ironically, Marcel Grandjany's Children's Hour Suite, composed 30 years later in 1950, remains mostly earthbound and an invidious comparison with Debussy's piano work of the same name is unavoidable.

When the composer is at his best in Playing in the Garden, Mills throws open the casement window and reveals vistas of evanescent enchantment, perfectly captured in the floating washes of Wayne Laird's production.

Predictably Mills includes a batch of arrangements of folk-songs rather than pieces from the classical repertoire. Most of them do embarrassingly little for me, especially Dewey Owens' lame traipses through three Irish traditional numbers.

This is missed-opportunity time: there is no shortage of originals from the great 18th-century Irish harpist Carolan that could have livened this programme.

As it happens, the most successful of all the arrangements is Mills' take on the American spiritual Give Me Jesus, especially in its first minute when the tune is delicately illuminated in single notes, like fireflies catching alight in an all-surrounding misty resonance. This album is a marvellous showcase for the Whangarei harp-maker Kim Webby whose instruments are as interesting sculpturally as they are sonically.

Mills' harp has a column that is carved in the shape of a nikau palm, with its base decorated with carved ferns and koru inlay. Webby is one of our country's treasures, internationally celebrated, a master craftsman who limits his output to one harp a year and has a waiting list of eight clients.

One request: Mills has played New Zealand music often and recorded Gareth Farr's From Forgotten Forests some years ago.

Might I suggest an album devoted to New Zealand music played on a Webby harp? Mills, Webby and Kiwi music - now, that's a musical trifecta if ever there was.

* Carolyn Mills, Mirage (Atoll ACD 602)