Nothing to be concerned about. Just a few notes in a quintet.
But when harpist Grace Roepke begins Albert Roussel’s Serenade, Op. 20 with a series of eerie eighth notes, listeners might get a case of the creeps.
“You hear that right away at the beginning, and it’s really cool how it’s almost spooky.” says Roepke. “So, I guess it’s kind of perfect we’re doing it at this time of year. The piece opens in a minor key, maybe a minor harmonic key of some kind, and those moving eighth notes almost sound like something is bubbling, brewing.”
But whatever Igor might be cooking down in the cellar, the audience in the Library will be perfectly safe for the November 3rd NouLou Chamber Players concert at Oxmoor Farm. Nobody’s going to end up in a boiling pot of pain.
“It’s just the opening,” says Roepke, reassuringly. “Then everybody comes in and it’s not that way anymore. The piece goes off in all directions.”
Roepke’s harp plays differing roles in the Roussel, beginning with those moving eighth notes that set the tempo for the quintet — in which she teams with Kathy Karr, flute; Dillon Welch, violin; Laura De St. Croix, viola; Cecilia Huerta-Lauf, cello.
“A lot of the time in chamber music settings like this, there’ll be a piano playing with a string quartet, and in this piece the harp essentially takes on that role -- where I’m the glue holding all the individual parts together. At times I’m playing with people in the quintet. Or maybe I have moving eighth notes that provide a rhythmic stability to help everyone lock in, going from one section to another.”
But then …
“But then I have virtuosic solos where I get to shine by myself,” she says. “In the second movement, there’s a harp solo, and I have to wait forever to come in. Everyone else is playing, and then … it’s just me.”
Roepke’s fingers travel across the full range of her instrument’s strings.
“I start in the very top register of the harp and cascade all the way down to the bass of the instrument,” she says. “The composer shows off the meaty middle register of the harp, and the booming bass — then the really shiny twinkly top notes of the harp.”
Roepke is in her third season as the principal harp of the Louisville Orchestra. She’s from the Twin Cities area, with pioneer ancestors in Northern Minnesota. “My grandmother played the harp,” she notes. “And I guess the harp has shaped a lot of the women in my family’s life over the last few generations.”
The teacher plays the pupil’s music
Also on the program is a Philippe Gaubert trio, performed by Karr, Huerta-Lauf and Chris Brody, piano. And a new work by Louisville native Valerie Coleman.
Brody’s piano leads the trio into the Gaubert piece in the same fashion as Roepke’s harp leads into the Roussel quintet. Only instead of eerie eighth notes, the Gaubert beginning is French Impressionist dreamy — befitting the title Trois Aquarelles (Three Watercolors).
Coleman’s composition is called Maombi Asante, with flute at the fore. Coleman has enjoyed an impressive performance and teaching career, and now holds a faculty position in composition at Julliard. She grew up in Louisville, attended Male High and played in the Louisville Youth Orchestra. She’s a former student of Louisville Orchestra principal flute Kathy Karr, who takes the flute part in a trio with violin and cello.
Karr remembers Coleman was always well prepared for her flute lesson.
“But when arrived she’d want to show me these compositions she’d written,” says Karr. “She’d say, ‘Look, I want to show this symphony, this piece of music I wrote.’ And I’d say ‘That’s nice, but let’s play the flute.’ Not realizing, of course, that she would grow up to be Valerie Coleman, and famous as a composer.”
Coleman was back in Louisville last year for a Louisville Orchestra performance of a piece the orchestra commissioned.
“Valerie always loved coming to the Louisville Orchestra concerts, so I feel that was an honor for her and for us,” says Karr. “I was so proud when she was introduced, and she came out and explained her composition and we got to play it.”
Karr says the Coleman piece the NouLou will perform Monday night, Maombi Asante, is very rhythmic. “It’s got a lot of fun rhythm challenges, and is very tuneful, as well,” Karr says. “It’s a difficult piece but I think the audience is going to love it.”