1} Felix Godefroid - Etude de Concert en Mi bémol mineur Op. 193
2} Henri Büsser - Pièce de Concert Op. 32
3} Marcel Grandjany - Dand la forêt du charme et de l'enchantement. Conte de fée, Op. 11
4} Albert Roussel - Impromptu Op. 21
5} Marcel Grandjany - Rhapsodie Op. 10
6} Marcel Tournier - Berceuse Op. 41
7} Camille Saint-Saëns - Fantaisie Op. 95
8} Jacques Ibert - Scherzetto
9} Henriette Renié - Deuxième Ballade

I've said this before but it bears repeating. Anyone can run their fingers up and down the strings of a harp and produce beautiful sounds. It's the nature of the instrument itself. You hear a few arpeggios on a harp and it immediately evokes a springtime brook, Christmas, angels ... and all sorts of nice imagery. Unfortunately, too many harpists leave it at that and let the harp do all the work for them without any concern about the music they are playing. Not so with Caroline Léonardelli. What she brings or adds to the music at hand, to any piece she plays, is close to magical. For example, the Etude de Concert by Felix Godefroid is a flurry of notes within which is concealed a beautiful melody that Caroline shapes and accents just enough to focus our inner ear on, all the while giving each and every other notes around it just as much care and attention. After all, composers don't write down all those notes to paper just to kill time you know. To them, each note is as valuable as the next, and it's nice when a musician like Caroline gives each one the respect it deserves. She doesn't just play the music. She sees beyond the notes and recreates what the composer had in mind. I've noticed something along those lines in her previous recordings, (reviewed here) and (here), on which she collaborates with organists. She gets the wit of the Jacques Ibert and the expressive discipline of the Camille Saint-Saëns. One can tell that an enormous level of work has gone into mastering these pieces, but only a few seconds in and that impression gets lost within the flurry of notes.

Jean-Yves Duperron - June 2014