Canada’s best-known harpist, Judy Loman, and soprano Monica Whicher teamed up last year to record Lullabies and Carols for Christmas, ideally suited to shutting out the crescendo of December mayhem.

As part of her ongoing work to evangelize for her instrument, Loman arranged the bulk of the music on the album herself.

Loman’s accompaniments are atmospheric, but never anodyne. Whicher is a pleasure to listen to.

I would compare listening to the disc to having a late, warm fire, when the logs have been reduced to big, glowing embers, and little flames pop up now and then to lick the remaining bits of wood here and there.

You can check it out, complete with audio samples, here.

They’ve worked together on other music, as well, which they’ve toured to places like Prince Edward Island’s Indian River Festival this past summer.

Instead of thinking about Christmas shopping, you can catch them both in a faculty recital at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s warm-and-intimate Mazzoleni Hall this afternoon (Dec. 4) at 2 p.m. Details here.

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Looking for a nice example of Loman at work, I ran across this intriguing short video by visual artist Kaiya McCormick. The accompaniment is the slow movement of Loman’s Sonatine pour harpe:

John Terauds

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John Terauds

John Terauds, Editor-Emeritus of Ludwig van Toronto, is currently a Divinity student at the University of Toronto and a church music director. He joined the Toronto Star in 1988, was the classical music critic from 2005 to 2012, and continues as a freelance critic for the paper. He is the co-author of Roy Thomson Hall: A Portrait, a book written with Toronto Star Colleague, William Littler.

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