Lauren Scott’s passion for the lever harp inspires her interpretations of atmospheric works by 20th century composers ranging from John Cage and Peter Maxwell Davies...

Lauren Scott’s passion for the lever harp inspires her interpretations of atmospheric works by 20th century composers ranging from John Cage and Peter Maxwell Davies to Lennon & McCartney, as well as her own ambient compositions. Beyond the Horizon, Lauren’s debut solo album, casts a twilight glow on the unique qualities of the traditional lever harp –also known as the Celtic harp –and the kaleidoscopic colors it produces, sonorities that Lauren enhances with extended techniques including note bending and percussive effects in her own music. The result is a beautiful and distinctive album with broad appeal. Born in Australia, UK-based Lauren performs with many of the country’s leading orchestras, in West End shows, on commercial recordings, and for radio and TV. Active in the international harp community, Lauren avidly fosters the next generation of harp players, and has had her music published and performed world-wide.

REVIEWS:

At last, a harp album that isn't mostly the standard solo harp repertoire played on a plushy pedal harp by someone who doesn't clean the palette. Lauren Scott (b 1970), whose family moved from Australia to England when she was 6, has put together an album of works that sound better on a lever harp, which has more of an early-instrument tonality (what she calls "the open quality of folk origins, an earthier sound") produced by a thinner sounding board and strings with less tension, resulting in less resonance. By replacing gut strings with nylon and fiber ones, she can also create a wider array of colors.

Scott herself is an excellent composer of shorter works. The album opens with her 'Elegy', 'Free Running', and 'Blue Moon Rising', which have lovely fluid folk-like melodies with accompaniment that could be written only by someone with classical training. Just as important, they show off an instrument with a treble, slightly wiry sound and a mellow lutelike quality in the lower range, much like the best fortepianos can have distinctly different colors in their treble, midrange, and bass. In 'Gypsy Dance' she manages to produce solid bass resonance, using it as an alluring pedal point. In 'Beyond the Horizon', a sort of threenote bass passacaglia with treble variations, she takes advantage of her instrument's quicker decay and refuses to fill in the open spaces between the notes. 'Celestial Spirals' also is based on a swirling three-note motif that is the basis for the three-note largo that offers the work's pulse. 'Crepuscule' opens as a slow lament (a reflection on her father's dementia) before becoming more melodically hopeful.

In her lucid liner notes she says that John Cage's In a Landscape (the title of the album) is the piece that initiated this, her first solo album, because it didn't work on the pedal harp. It's a nine-minute meditative piece that slowly evolves around a pentatonic Japanese-like motif. I found it initially engaging, especially with Scott's subtle colors...The work here that has the strongest, most sustained character is Scott's arrangement of Peter Maxwell Davies's 9-minute Farewell to Stromness, written in response to efforts to establish uranium mining on his beloved Orkney Island. It combines two themes, one of persistent grit, the other more mellow, but both with an insistent beat of peaceful protest rather than violent raucousness. What a stunning display of colors Scott creates! She also does very well in her arrangement of Lennon-McCartney's 'Across the Universe' where she works out the tune through an array of ornamentation and tone colors without making it feel "pops".

-- American Record Guide