Bernadette Harvey
Bernadette Harvey plays contemporary piano music with lean, fearless clarity. Her programmes move between French brilliance, Australian premiere works and large-scale sonatas she has commissioned from living composers.
On Alternating Currents she sets Kevin Puts, Ross Edwards, Grażyna Bacewicz, Carl Vine and Henri Dutilleux side by side: music that asks for technical range and quick shifts of colour, from meditative resonance and quiet nobility to percussive drive and toccata fire. Mantras and Night Flowers pairs Edwards miniatures and his Piano Sonata, written for her and supervised in the studio, with Vine’s Sonata No. 1 and the twelve Anne Landa Preludes. Reviewers mark pure, lean articulation, interlocking rhythms kept clear, and playing that can turn from contemplative to exhilarating without over-pedalling. Through the Sonata Project she commissions large-scale solo works to enlarge the recital repertoire, especially sonatas by women composers. The first instalment brings substantial new pieces by Aristea Mellos, Melody Eötvös and Jane Stanley beside Edwards’s Sea Star Fantasy, a recital-length survey of recent Australian piano writing.
Bernadette Harvey is featured on the following titles
The Sonata Project
Bernadette Harvey performs four large-scale solo piano works: Aristea Mellos’s three-movement Sonata, Melody Eötvös’s two-movement Piano Sonata No. 1, Jane Stanley’s Piano Sonata framed by Prelude and Postlude, and Ross Edwards’s Sea Star Fantasy.
Mantras and Night Flowers
One can be sure that Australian music might be finally coming of age when one record label can contemplate a third recording of a recent piano work – Carl Vine's magnificent Piano Sonata No. 1 is now released for the third time by Tall Poppies.
Alternating Currents
Bernadette Harvey’s debut solo CD on Tall Poppies presents one of Australia’s finest pianists: scarily accurate technique, a fearless ear for nuance, and a gift for making a composer’s intentions clear at first hearing.