The 2nd Ceren Necipoğlu Istanbul International Harp Festival was held from 14th to 19th January 2025 with the participation of three internationally-acclaimed lady harpists: Sioned Williams, a former principal harpist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra who is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music; Florence Sitruk, a harpist and professor of harp from Heidelberg who currently teaches at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana; and Imogen Barford, head of the harp department at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Like the previous festival in 2000, this event was organised to commemorate the late Ceren Necipoğlu (pictured above), a Turkish harpist and educator who died in a plane crash while on the way back from a harp festival in Rio de Janeiro in 2009. This year’s festival – whose stated aim was to ‘continue the educational mission of Ceren Necipoğlu, to share and develop harp artistry and learning, to help all participants discover new horizons, and to stimulate the development of harp culture in Turkey’ – included several concerts as well as a number of masterclasses and competitions for young harpists.
I attended three of these events, and will describe them in reverse order, ending with the immensely satisfying and highly atmospheric harp recital by Sioned Williams at the British Consulate-General in Galatasaray on January 14.
The prize-giving for the harp competitions took place in the Theatre Hall at the Atatürk Cultural Centre (Atatürk Kültür Merkezi) on January 19. This was the first time I had attended an event at this venue, a more intimate version of the Türk Telekom Opera Hall. Located to the left of the main entrance to the AKM, it is accessed via a passageway which, in the bitter January weather, had become a tunnel for the biting wind to whistle through. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the hall itself, an attractive space that struck me as being an ideal location for chamber concerts and recitals. During the initial talks, Mr Remzi Buharalı, Artistic Director of the AKM, remarked that a creative artist lives on after their death – something that is especially true in the case of Fatma Ceren Necipoğlu (1973-2009), a harpist and educator from the Istanbul suburb of Pendik who learned her art at the Istanbul Municipal and Istanbul University Conservatories, the Louisiana State University School of Music and the Jacobs Music School in Bloomington, Indiana. At the time of her untimely death she was teaching the harp and the piano at Anadolu University, Eskişehir.
At the prize-giving Sioned Williams, who had chaired the competition jury, proved herself to be a very competent presenter whose words were invariably well judged. She began by thanking various individuals and organisations for their contributions to the festival, telling Turkish jury member Gözde Ece Yavaş Öztürk, “We are all in awe of your work”, and acknowledging the sponsorship of, among others, the British Council. During the awards ceremony that followed, it was announced that the main prize in the harp competition had been won by Teodora Cotuna Rizea, a young harpist from Spain. Jury member Imogen Barford then told us that Ms Rizea would be invited to give a recital at the Barbican Centre in London (home of the Guildhall School of Music) during the summer.
Seven harps had been set up on the stage, and I wondered whether at some point all of them were going to be played simultaneously, but alas this was not to be. After a prize-giving for the chamber music festival that had recently taken place (the first prize went to a duo from Poland), the ‘Arpanatolia’ ensemble took to the stage, dressed in rather fetching embroidered tunics. Their recital featured a number of traditional Turkish instruments, including the kaval, an end-blown shepherd’s flute, and the sipsi, a goatherd’s pipe that produced an arresting nasal sound, accompaniment being provided by a remarkably skilled male harpist and a drummer.
While I admired the musicians’ professionalism, I have to say that their take on the harmonisation of Turkish traditional folk tunes was rather too Westernised for my taste. Indeed, their whole performance was so folklorique, even touristique, that I longed for a little more authenticity. As someone who has written arrangements of Turkish melodies himself in a style that is definitely not authentic, this is of course rank hypocrisy on my part. It remains true, however, that in my view Arpanatolia’s treatment of traditional Turkish tunes made too many concessions to Western expectations, and somewhat unsubtle ones at that. In their defence I will concede that the non-Turkish members of the audience probably found their performance both enjoyable and educational. It certainly did the job of showcasing Turkish folk music – something for which Ceren Necipoğlu herself had great enthusiasm – very effectively.
Four days earlier, on January 15, I had made another trip to the AKM, this time to attend a concert in the Multi-Purpose Hall (Çok Amaçlı Salon), another venue within the complex that I had never before set foot in. Located to the left of the Theatre Hall, it proved to be a rather unsatisfactory space, especially in winter weather. Having queued outside in the balmy breezes of the wind tunnel for rather a long time, we audience members were finally let in, only to find there were not enough seats to accommodate everyone. My praise and thanks must go, therefore, to the young man who conjured up 20 extra chairs from somewhere, even specifically inviting me to sit on one of them. I only saw the first half of this concert, in which Gözde Ece Yavaş Öztürk, a former pupil of Ceren Necipoğlu, and the jury member who was complimented by Sioned Williams at the prize-giving, played some pieces that I could hardly hear, as I was too far from the stage. The people around me seemed more interested in their telephones than in the music, and many of them were so absorbed in the onders of Whatsapp that they did not even bother to applaud the performer after each item. I therefore did not stay for the second half, in which Florence Sitruk, another of the jury members, was due to present a programme marking the 80th anniversary of the violent death of Noor Inayat Khan, a harpist who doubled as a spy in World War II and paid the ultimate price for doing so. For those interested in the story of this Muslim Indian aristocrat (her father was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century ruler of Mysore who was a pioneer of rocket artillery), her education in child psychology at the Sorbonne, her compositions for the harp and the piano as a pupil of the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatory and her fascinating family background in Sufism, here is her Wikipedia entry.
For me, the most rewarding event of the 2nd Ceren Necipoğlu Harp Festival was the recital given by Sioned Williams at the British Consulate-General in Galatasaray on January 14. As might be expected of a venue in a 19th-century consulate building – which was actually the British Embassy before the relocation of the capital to Ankara in 1923 – the hall in which the music took place was a highly formal one, complete with ultra-high ceilings and chandeliers.
Scene-setting interlude: here is a video in which the redoubtable Ms Williams describes her struggle with debilitating illness and the various passions that energise and motivate her.
Ms Williams began her performance by telling the audience very firmly that she was Welsh, not English, and continued by giving an account of the time-honoured Welsh harp tradition. She spoke of the itinerant harpists who once roamed the countryside, visiting the Eisteddfod (a Welsh cultural festival featuring competitions in music and poetry) not so much to win prizes as to impress potential patrons. She spoke of the blind John Parry (c.1710-1782), a Welsh harpist who moved in high circles in London and inspired Thomas Gray to write his poem The Bard, doing much to encourage people to visit Wales. She also touched on the career of Edward Jones (1752-1824), remembered not just for his skill as a harpist but also for his activities as a collector of Welsh folk tunes and his three-volume Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards. Ms Williams then moved on to describe the technical features of the Welsh harp, which has three rows of strings.
Then the music began. First, she played the Andante and Gavotte movements from John Parry’s Sonata in D major, followed by the Moderato and Pastorale sections of Edward Jones’s Sonata No 4 in F major. Here is a recording of the pleasingly tinkly Parry sonata in which the harpist is Jacqueline Pollauf.
Two of the works that followed were modern compositions that demonstrated the harp’s ability to create novel and musically interesting sounds. These were, firstly, two movements from a suite entitled The Drowning of Capel Celyn, by Michael Stimpson (1948-), and secondly, Lachrymae, by Osian Ellis (1928-2021), a piece written when the composer was 92 years old. Ms Williams informed us that her grandfather had walked to Westminster to protest against the plan to flood the village of Capel Celyn in order to provide water for Liverpool, but in vain – in 1965 the project had gone ahead, and Stimpson’s atonal music reflected the misery that was felt at the destruction of one of the few remaining communities in which only Welsh was spoken. Lachrymae (‘Tears’), by Osian Ellis, a former principal harpist with the London Symphony Orchestra, whom Ms Williams described as having ‘captured the essence of Welshness’, was perhaps even more adventurous from the stylistic point of view, making good use of the instrument’s ability to produce sweeping arpeggios that in this instance were anything but mainstream, and thus highly titillating to the musical taste buds. (The parallel chords also sounded good, but were, I have to say, a direct crib from Debussy.) As Lachrymae was in progress the sound of the call to prayer came from a nearby mosque, and I took the fact that the muezzin’s voice lingered exactly on the dominant of the scale the piece was in as a sign of approbation from somewhere up above.
The recital ended with some traditional Welsh gypsy music – Hiraeth (‘Longing’) by Grace Williams (1906-1977), and two movements from Returning to Arcadia by Andrew Baker (1954-). Here is Hiraeth, a piece that powerfully recreates the emotion of longing for home, performed by none other than Ceren Necipoğlu. Note that the side menu in YouTube will provide you with further examples of her playing.
From my point of view, what left the most lasting impression from this concert was the other-wordly atmosphere that Sioned Williams’s playing generated. It is not easy to imagine oneself looking down from a misty hillside in Wales while sitting in a High Victorian salon in Istanbul, but this recital provided the necessary transportation, and for that I am grateful. Thanks must go, then, to the British Consulate-General for their hospitality, to the British Council, to all the other sponsors, and to whatever forces (perhaps Brân the Blessed and his magic cauldron?) were responsible for bringing us, the members of the audience for this memorable event, so close to the veil.
