REVIEWS

Harpist attracts attention in all kinds of ways

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When Lori Pappajohn pulls her luggage through the airports of Western Canada this Christmas season, people will notice and stare.

They always do.

Her suitcases just don’t conform to the usual standards. The custom-designed boxes are huge and oddly-shaped. Airport officials in Mexico once asked (jokingly) if she kept a husband inside. She smiled.

Actually, her boxes hold harps. The husband answer makes a better punchline, it’s true, but it takes longer to get through the airport.

Serving as the object of stares in airports is just one of the occupational hazards Pappajohn faces as a professional harpist. Add bags of thick, velvet costumes and you can see another hazard: no light travel. She gave that up when she opted to abandon playing her flute in order to perform on harp. Now, there is no ducking on the plane with a carry-on and scooting out after landing. No. Have harps. Must go to the special West Jet wicket for the fragile items.

All this heavy travel through the airport is quite a different picture from the light and airy music that flows from the mix of fingers and strings as she performs with the six-member Winter Harp group this Christmas season. The transcendent cadences created from ancient instruments flutter into an audience’s ears and then their hearts. Pappajohn says the music strikes a different chord for every person, somehow related to each person’s individual memories of Christmas. She’s received countless emails thanking her for their music. The messages often also include the words “changed my life” somewhere in the body of the text. What happens? I ask. She doesn’t know.

“We open doors for people and they walk through the door. What they do when they go through is their own business,” Pappajohn tells me in a recent interview.

She guesses, though. She thinks the appeal of harp music, particularly Christmas music, in a chaotic, noisy world of headsets and mp3's, stems from the ancient design of harps. They are old. They have a slower sound. They take people back. No past life regression. No repressed memories. Just somehow. Slowing. Us.

Down.

Having said that, let’s qualify. That heavenly sound of harp that’s running through your thoughts now, that’s only one variety of harp. If you’re like I was (pre-interview), you may have no idea that there are abundant types of harps. And abundant styles of music that can be played on harp. Pappajohn is known for her Celtic harp performances. But she has 14 harps. She’s versatile. Sure, she plays those angelic melodies you associate immediately with harps. But she can also play flamenco music, the kind that gives you visions of swirling skirts and stomping shoes. She can play ancient tunes reminiscent of tiny Chinese villages where hearts are broken by decrees from faraway emperors. She can play forcefully and with vigor, like a muscle-bound, testosterone-filled, libido-driven, leather-chap-wearing Chilean harpist with sweat dripping from his hard, tanned, unconcealed chest, blood pounding through his body from both the passion of the music and lust barely contained by his jeans. (Settle down, gentle LR readers.) Yeah, she can play like those guys do. So, that angel picture that you have in your head next to “harp?” Move it over to make space for the South American guy too. One thing, however, is common to all the styles: all the music sounds beautiful, and does so right from the beginning of a harpist’s career.

“Easy to learn, difficult to perfect,” says Pappajohn, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and who also teaches harp to both adults and kids in the Greater Vancouver area. Students of the harp, she tells me, can sound great right from the first lesson. Think trumpet students can do the same?

But it’s the years of perfecting that audiences experience during the Winter Harp concerts. Well, no doubt they love the clothes as much as I did. But let me get to that later. The Winter Harp tour covers Western Canada from Victoria to Winnipeg. The six-member ensemble plays in about a dozen venues which often sell out months in advance. In addition to Pappajohn’s Celtic harp and vocals, Lauri Lyster plays percussion, Janelle Nadeau plays classical harp, Joaquin Ayala covers medieval instruments and Mark Ferris plays violin. The combination of instruments, voices, subject matter and the theatrical elements create an intimacy that people love.

Checklist for Winter Harp Concerts:

• beautiful music
• fun parts in the show
• interesting instruments, some medieval designs
• elaborate crushed velvet costumes
• enormous candelabras

So a regular Christmas tour plus eight CD’s means Winter Harp and Pappajohn get steady business. That’s quite a different story from her start more than a decade ago when she got her first gig playing harp before she had even learned how...

Pappajohn had performed on flute countless times with a harp-playing friend. The friend suddenly left for England in the fall semester after all sorts of work-seeking publicity for the duo had been sent out to prospective clients. Pappajohn started to receive calls from major stores looking for a harpist for Christmas. She was about to turn them down, but then decided no, the money was too good. She accepted the gigs and then took on the challenge of learning the harp. She had three months to accomplish her task. She did it.

During that first performance, she played five hours straight. At one point, a man watching her asked if her fingers ever hurt. As she opened her palm to gesture, she noticed that the tip of the skin of one finger was dangling away from the rest of her finger, blood spattering all over the harp strings. “Did you go to the hospital?” I wince. “Nah,” she tells me, “The show must go on.”

Naturally, her fingers have toughened up a lot since then. In the past few years, she’s had some incredible moments including playing at the reinstatement of the Olympics in Delphi in Greece, traveling throughout North and South America and Europe, working as an artist-in-residence for a White Rock elementary school. She’s also done smaller gigs: playing for a private aquarium functions dressed in mermaid gear, performing background music in restaurants, once performing while a couple broke up at a table nearby. Now there’s a memory!

Throughout it all, she has been extremely fortunate when it comes to clothes. I wipe the saliva from my face as I write this: you should see this woman’s closet.

OK, I’m not even really a clothes horse. I did my time in Jones New York business suits and I now like a nice-fitting, earth-coloured pair of cotton pants. I have simple needs, clothingwise. But looking at Pappajohn’s closet was like breaking out the little girl dress-up box in Woman Size. I desperately wanted to try things on. I craved to wear the crushed velvet, princessy, shoulder-revealing garments that Pappajohn climbs into on a regular basis. (I didn’t ask. Good grief. I have some self-control!) Still, the colours, the fabrics, the medieval designs. Ooooh, so fun. You can see a sample of some of these outfits in her Avalon video.

But those lovely dresses? They’re heavy. And as she drags them through the airports this Christmas season, with her gigantic boxes of harps, she’ll feel tired. Oh well, the life of a harpist. A little heavy lifting, a lotta light, lustrous music. It all balances out.

If you get a chance to see Winter Harp this Christmas season, check them out. See the schedule at www.winterharp.com. Some tickets are still available.