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Music and Beyond review: Harpist Valérie Milot makes celestial music with Les Violons du Roy

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Harpist Valérie Milot, Les Violons du Roy

At Notre-Dame Basilica

Reviewed Saturday night

The harp is one of the largest and most imposing instruments, yet it rarely gets to shine. Instead it lurks at the back of the orchestra, or on the sidelines at weddings and cocktail parties. But Valérie Milot wants to put the harp in the spotlight.

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A few years ago, the young Trois-Rivières woman became the first harpist in a century to win the Prix D’Europe, Quebec’s most prestigious prize for music students. Since then her solo career has skyrocketed in Canada and internationally, fueled by her virtuoso technique, sensitive artistry, and warm personality – not to mention a healthy dose of social media savvy.

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Milot’s 2013 recording of concertos with Quebec City chamber ensemble Les Violons du Roy was hailed as one of the top Canadian classical discs of the year. It also solidified a sympathetic relationship between the harpist and the ensemble. This summer they’re touring the summer festival circuit, including an appearance at Music and Beyond.

Even though Bernard Labadie, Les Violons’ founder, is back in action after a nearly lethal battle with lymphoma, Saturday’s concert was in the capable hands of associate conductor Mathieu Lussier. Lussier is a bassoonist, and he conducts with an ear to rhythmic impulsion and breath. Instrumental excerpts from Rameau’s opera Les Indes galantes were performed with superb attack, crispness, and all the dazzle and pomp of the Sun King’s court.

Elgar’s Sospiri, composed on the eve of the Great War, was washed in muted, mournful, autumnal colours, while his early Serenade for Strings swept along eagerly, luminous with fine detail. However, the strings lacked the rich, well-fed sound Elgar demands.

Milot joined the orchestra for Handel’s well-known Concerto for Harp in B-flat major and the more obscure C Major Concerto by early 19th-century French composer Françéois-Adrien Boieldieu.

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The harp is a paradox: an instrument with a delicate, celestial tone that requires enormous physical strength and stamina to play. To appreciate its subtleties, you practically need to be sitting in the artist’s lap. Vast Notre-Dame Basilica was not the ideal venue to watch Milot’s sinewy fingers dance on the strings, or hear all her ethereal pianissimi and silver-filigreed articulation, barely louder than the rain falling outside. But you couldn’t miss her intense focus and sincere, natural musicality even from the back of the room.

Lussier’s  accompaniment was always tactful, and he did an admirable job of not overpowering the soloist. An encore of Handel’s Lascia, ch’io pianga sealed the audience’s infatuation with the poetic charm of Milot’s playing.

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