Top trio set to entertain

A Scottish trio will perform a late Easter concert at Alnwick Playhouse.

Alnwick Music Society is hosting the Waverley Harp Trio on Tuesday, March 29.

The group is an interesting combination of harp, flute and viola, which some may not have heard played together before.

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The trio hail from north of the Border and are led by harpist Helen MacLeod, who freelances with leading Scottish orchestras, as well as teaching at St Mary’s School of Music in Edinburgh.

She is joined by flautist Lis Dooner, who for 25 years was the principal flautist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and is a tutor of Baroque Flute at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

The third member of the group is Steve Tees, a professor at Trinity College of Music and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and a freelance player in some of the UK’s leading orchestras.

The programme begins with Arnold Bax’s Elegiac Trio, followed by Jacques Ibert’s Deux Interludes taken from the incidental music to Lilar’s play La Burlador.

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The Door to the Sun, by Peter Maxwell Davies, is based on a set of poems by George Mackay Brown. Movement by Edward McGuire was written specifically for harp, flute and viola.

Following the interval, there will be two of James Oswald’s 96 compositions, Airs for the Seasons. Each is named for a flower or shrub and the trio has chosen to play The Narcissus and The Crocus. Andre Caplet’s Divertissement a la L’Espagnole follows, and has been called the most perfectly executed writing in the harp’s repertoire.

The performance ends with Debussy’s Syrinx and Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, written in the final years of his life.