Harp Extravaganza!

The will host a harp extravaganza, For the Love of Harp, on Sunday. 

Acclaimed professional harpists Celia Chan Valerio and Meredith Clark (who has Livermore ties) will perform and will be joined by the winners of the Yvonne La Mothe Schwager competition held earlier this spring.  

The performance will begin at 3 p.m. For information on the tickets, including prices, click here.

"For the Love of Harp" will feature Chan Valerio in a lecture-performance based on her doctoral research on Felix and Jules Godefroid. The brothers were pioneers as players and composers for the harp during the nineteenth century. On Felix Godefroid’s tours, people, so moved by his playing, rioted for admission into the concert halls.

Chan Valerio will perform a medley of the Godefroids’ most memorable works, written at a time when harpists were still creating the sound of the new double-action pedal harp. The medley will include Jules’ pioneering Boléro and Felix’s set of Le Rêve, La Mélancolie and La Danse des Sylphes.  

Chan Valerio will be joined by Clark, a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland Institute of Music.  Her grandparents, Arnold and Marion Clark, were well-known musicians in Livermore and founding members of the Livermore-Amador Symphony. Clark will perform the West Coast première of the brilliant Rhapsodie by Vierne, composed in 1911 as an exam piece for the Paris Conservatory.

Joining the two professional harpists will be the winners of the Yvonne La Mothe Schwager competition, organized by the Bay Area Chapter of the American Harp Society and held earlier this spring. They will perform music by Tournier, Grandjany, Salzedo, Pierné and others.

La Mothe Schwager was a Berkeley harpist who devoted herself to organizing composition contests and developing commissions on behalf of the Northern California Harpist’s Association in the 1950s and ‘60s.