Notte: Solo Harp Nocturnal Works of the 20th Century
Same composer
Da Vinci Classics
Physical Release: 16 October 2026
Digital Release: 30 October 2026
Coming soon · Available on the physical release date
Sofia Marzetti is one of the most distinguished harpists of her generation on the international music scene. Her artistic path combines a solid solo and orchestral career, developed in major European theatres and institutions, with an early and significant academic activity.
Born in 1989, she graduated in harp with honours and special mention from the “L. D’Annunzio” Conservatory in Pescara, under the guidance of E. Boscherini. She subsequently obtained, with highest marks, second-level academic degrees in harp and chamber music from the “A. Boito” Conservatory in Parma, in the classes of E. Degli Esposti and P. Maurizzi. At the same conservatory she was awarded the prestigious scholarship granted by the Zonta International Club, reserved each year for outstanding female students. She later received a two-year advanced diploma from the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, where she studied with S. Bertuccioli, and completed a second-level Master’s degree in solo and orchestral performance, again with highest marks, at the “G. Verdi” Conservatory in Milan under the guidance of M. E. Bovio and C. Passerini.
As a soloist, she has established herself through appearances in important theatres, concert halls and festivals, and through numerous first prizes in international competitions. These include First Prize at the 10th International Harp Competition “Marcel Tournier”; the 2014 Premio Nazionale delle Arti, in the edition devoted to “The Romantic Harp”, whose jury was chaired by E. Ceysson, with international debuts at the Italian Cultural Institutes in Paris and Strasbourg; First Prize at the “Grand Prize Virtuoso International Music Competition” in both the Salzburg and Rome editions, together with the special Best Italian Musician award in Rome; Absolute First Prize at the 10th and 15th editions of the “Paolo Barrasso” International Competition in Caramanico Terme; Absolute First Prize at the 3rd “Giovani interpreti” International Competition organised by the Accademia Musicale Pescarese; First Prize at the “Giovani promesse” International Competition in Bracigliano, Salerno; and many others. She was also awarded an honourable mention at the 5th edition of the prestigious International Harp Contest “Suoni d’arpa”.
Her orchestral career began with youth orchestras such as the Orchestra Nazionale dei Conservatori Italiani, with which she performed as principal harpist on tour at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, the Teatro Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste, the Teatr Polski in Warsaw, the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest and the Academy of Music in Kraków.
In 2021 she won the audition for principal harpist at the Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste. With the Trieste opera foundation she has taken part in major productions broadcast by RAI, including the world premiere of Nicola Piovani’s Amorosa Presenza and Lucia di Lammermoor conducted by Daniel Oren. At the express invitation of the Trieste institution, she also appeared as soloist in Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols for harp and women’s choir. She regularly collaborates with leading opera and symphonic institutions, including the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari and the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, working alongside renowned conductors such as Daniel Oren, Donato Renzetti, Vitali Alekseenok, Francesco Ivan Ciampa, Christopher Franklin, Massimo Zanetti, Nicola Piovani, Renato Palumbo, Gianna Fratta, Norbert Baxa, Nikolas Nägele, Yuki Yamasaki, Lü Jia and others.
As a soloist with orchestra, she has performed harp concertos by G. F. Handel, W. A. Mozart and C. Debussy. In particular, she performed Handel’s Concerto in B-flat major with the Orchestra Internazionale di Roma after winning the “Solisti con orchestra” competition, a project supported by SIAE, and Debussy’s Danse sacrée et profane with the orchestra of the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, following success in a public audition.
Alongside her concert activity, she has distinguished herself in chamber music, collaborating with internationally renowned artists, and has successfully pursued an academic career. After teaching harp at the Italian State Conservatories of Music in Vibo Valentia, Potenza, at the Viggiano branch, in the historic “city of the harp”, and Foggia, she won the national competition for a permanent professorship, ranking first. Since 2021 she has held a tenured position as Professor of Harp at the “L. D’Annunzio” Conservatory in Pescara, becoming one of the youngest Italian musicians to hold such a post. Her standing in the field has also led to regular invitations as a jury member at prestigious international music competitions, including the “Città di Paola” International Competition and the “Città di Filadelfia – Paolo Serrao Prize” International Music Competition.
Liliana Parisi (b. 1998) is a pianist active in the contemporary repertoire. She graduated with highest marks from the “F. Torrefranca” Conservatory in Vibo Valentia, and subsequently completed her specialist Master’s degree in Piano at the Milan Conservatory with honours and special mention. She is currently a doctoral candidate there, holding a scholarship in “Music, Performing Arts and STEM”.
She performs regularly as a soloist and ensemble musician in Italy and abroad, collaborating with internationally renowned composers such as Tristan Murail, Michael Jarrell and Ivan Fedele.
Her artistic research focuses on pianistic gesture in contemporary music, a subject she has developed in interdisciplinary contexts and presented at international conferences in venues including Tallinn, Helsinki, Salamanca, Saint-Étienne and Milan.
Alongside her musical activity, she holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Magna Græcia University in Catanzaro.
Bedřich Smetana: (b Litomyšl, 2 March 1824; d Prague, 12 May 1884). Czech composer, conductor and critic. The first Czech nationalist composer and the most important of the new generation of Czech opera composers writing from the 1860s. His eight operas established a canon of Czech operas to serve as models for Czech nationalist opera and have remained in the Czech repertory ever since. Such was the force of his musical personality that his musical style became synonymous with Czech nationalist style, his name a rallying point for the polemics which were to continue in Czech musical life into the next century.
Camille Saint-Säens: (b Paris, 9 Oct 1835; d Algiers, 16 Dec 1921). French composer, pianist, organist and writer. Like Mozart, to whom he was often compared, he was a brilliant craftsman, versatile and prolific, who contributed to every genre of French music. He was one of the leaders of the French musical renaissance of the 1870s.
Salzédo [Salzedo; Salcedo], Carlos (Léon)
(b Arcachon, 6 April 1885; d Waterville, ME, 17 Aug 1961). American harpist and composer of French birth. He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 16, an unprecedented winner of the premier prix in two instruments. In 1909 he moved to New York, where he was engaged as the first harpist of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under Toscanini for four years. In 1913 he founded the Trio de Lutèce and in 1917 the Salzédo Harp Ensemble; he also played in and helped to found and promote other ensembles worldwide. A champion of contemporary music, he assisted Varèse in organizing the International Composers’ Guild (1921) and was active in ISCM, the New Music Society of California (under the direction of Cowell), the Pan American Association of Composers and Pro-Musica. He established the harp department at the Curtis Institute of Music (1924), founded the Salzédo Harp Colony in Camden, Maine (1931), and taught at the Juilliard School. Other activities included serving as editor of the Eolian Review (later Eolus) and president of the American Harp Society. In 1931 Lyon & Healy (Chicago) began to produce the first Salzédo Model Harps.
Giovanni Caramiello
He was born in Naples on January 14, 1838. He studied the harp with Filippo Scotti (1790–1865) at the Naples Conservatory. In 1886, he succeeded his fellow student Felice Lebano (1837–1919) as a teacher at the conservatory, holding the position until 1915. His brother Sebastiano (1828–1903) was also a harpist.
The programme of this disc considers the harp through concrete practices of writing, transcription and variation. The itinerary begins in the Naples of Giovanni Caramiello, where popular and theatrical melodies nourished a repertory intended for the salon, the school and the concert platform; it continues into the France of Camille Saint-Saëns, passes through the timbral modernity of Carlos Salzedo, the solo reinvention of Smetana entrusted to Hanuš Trneček, and the late-Romantic cantability of Reinhold Glière. The sequence constructs a history of the harp as mediation between vocal sources, concert forms,…
The programme of this disc considers the harp through concrete practices of writing, transcription and variation. The itinerary begins in the Naples of Giovanni Caramiello, where popular and theatrical melodies nourished a repertory intended for the salon, the school and the concert platform; it continues into the France of Camille Saint-Saëns, passes through the timbral modernity of Carlos Salzedo, the solo reinvention of Smetana entrusted to Hanuš Trneček, and the late-Romantic cantability of Reinhold Glière. The sequence constructs a history of the harp as mediation between vocal sources, concert forms, national identities and technical laboratory.
Giovanni Caramiello belongs to the Neapolitan school of the harp, with roots in the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella and in the pedagogy of Filippo Scotti. His activity as composer, teacher and transcriber is situated within an environment in which lyric theatre, the domestic romanza and street song formed a single circuit of listening. Naples offered the musician a reserve of recognisable themes, together with a grammar of inflections, suspensions, cadences and modal colours transferable to the instrument. Caramiello knew the virtuoso tradition of the nineteenth-century harp, made up of rapid arpeggios, broken chords, harmonics and leaps between registers. In his fantasias the theme is presented, ornamented, shifted in light, entrusted to the right hand as a vocal line or dispersed in arabesques that preserve its profile.
Rimembranza di Napoli. Fantasia su motivi popolari op. 6 immediately raises the question of memory. Remembrance indicates an affective relationship with the city, entrusted to popular materials treated according to the logic of the fantasia. Caramiello adopts a language that alternates between song in relief and ornamental refraction, allowing the link between popular melody and domestic virtuosity to emerge. The piece belongs to a tradition in which Neapolitan song was editorial, theatrical and social material. The harp acts here as an instrument of cultivated transposition, capable of maintaining the melodic line in its cantability and of transforming its contour into a study in resonance.
The Fantasia brillante sulla romanza della Fornarina del M° Michele Ruta shifts attention from the popular repertory to the romanza. Michele Ruta, likewise connected with San Pietro a Majella, was a composer, critic and figure involved in the Italian musical debate. In his time, the chamber romanza constituted a privileged form of affective communication, suspended between theatrical taste and domestic practice. Caramiello derives from it a fantasia in which the adjective brilliant concerns the instrumental transformation of song. The melody preserves its identity, while the harp broadens its breath through connecting passages, flourishes, rapid modulations and accompanying figures. The absent voice thus remains at the centre of the instrumental scene.
With the Fantasia sull’opera Aida di Verdi op. 11 the strong relationship between harp repertoire and opera comes into relief. Aida offered the transcriber material of powerful melodic and dramatic clarity, as well as an orchestral imagination founded upon ceremonial colours, contrasts between public monumentality and lyrical intimacy, harmonic tensions and incisive rhythmic profiles. Caramiello approaches this universe through synthesis. The Verdian themes are removed from the scenic mass and led into a writing that preserves their recognisable energy, transforming the orchestral gesture into harp figuration. Fanfares, solemn calls, amorous song and tragic accent are translated into registers, chords, arpeggios and modulations. The presence of an alternative finale in the modern tradition of the piece confirms the living nature of this repertory, born between edition, adaptation and performance practice.
Le Serenate del Vesuvio. 6 melodie popolari trascritte e variate in forma di studi op. 12 constitutes the most organic nucleus of the section devoted to Caramiello. The title unites three decisive dimensions. The serenade refers to urban and nocturnal vocality; Vesuvius places that vocality within a symbolic geography; the study form introduces a technical principle. Chelle che tu me dice, Le stelle della sera, Fiore de Primavera, Giulia gentil, Bella Cate and La canzone della pulce are melodies transcribed and varied with attention to their didactic function. Caramiello organises each piece around a problem of touch, articulation, balance between melody and accompaniment, distribution of registers or figurative fluency. The presence of Teodoro Cottrau, C. Rossi, G. Martelli and Michele Ruta signals a network of authors and mediators of Neapolitan song, in which composition, arrangement and editorial dissemination took part in the same cultural process.
The Fantaisie pour harpe op. 95 by Camille Saint-Saëns introduces a different formal order. The work, dedicated to the Vicomtesse de Ségur-Lamoignon and connected with the tradition of pieces composed for the annual Concours of the Conservatoire de Paris, reveals the French conception of technique as clarity of enunciation. Saint-Saëns knew the value of effect but subordinated it to the construction of melody and to the proportion of discourse. Although this Fantaisie does not rank among the finest examples of melodic inventiveness by this great composer, the piece is well written for the instrument and proves agreeable to the ear. The fantasia, a form so pervasive in the passage between the two centuries, alternates lyrical sections and more mobile passages, making formal freedom into a principle of equilibrium. The difficulties of the harp are integrated into the phrasing: broken chords, scales, harmonics, changes of register and cadenzas contribute to the continuity of an elegant thought. The form appears fluid, and the writing preserves that precision of surface which, in Saint-Saëns, coincides with a profound vigilance over the architecture.
Carlos Salzedo brings to the programme a twentieth-century conception of the harp. The Variations sur un thème dans le style ancien op. 30 look towards an archaicising model filtered through a modern sensibility, capable of treating the past as material for invention. The theme presents a measured, almost ceremonial profile, and the variations progressively interrogate its rhythm, register, density and colour. The musical conception of Salzedo revolutionises the harp idiom by emphasising its resonance, according to the principle of a new musicalness infinitely more in harmony with the elementary vibrations of the universe. Here the vocabulary includes chordal clarity, dry articulations, dynamic contrasts and timbral solutions that organise variation as an experience of sound. The ancient style evoked by the title has the value of a mask, beneath which the hand of the composer investigates fully modern possibilities.
With Moldau op. 43 by Bedřich Smetana, in the transcription by Hanuš Trneček, the programme enters the territory of the symphonic poem adapted for solo harp. Vltava, the second movement of Má vlast, describes the course of the Bohemian River from its springs to Prague, passing through landscapes, dance scenes, nocturnal reflections, rapids and historical memories. The passage to the harp requires rigorous selection. Trneček preserves the flow of the piece through continuous figurations, arpeggios and sonic planes that replace orchestral stratification with a manual geography. The transcription enhances a quality already present in the original, since the idea of water, which is well matched to the sonority of the harp, arises from undulating movements and from the superimposition of lines. The celebrated theme of the river assumes a more collected character on the harp, while the descriptive episodes are condensed into essential gestures. The operation belongs to a high tradition of transcription, in which fidelity consists in preserving direction, image and formal tension.
The second movement of the Concerto per arpa op. 74 by Reinhold Glière, Tema con variazioni, leads the listener towards an ample cantability, supported by a late-Romantic harmonic framework. The score was dedicated to Ksenia Erdeli, whose advice proved decisive for the effectiveness of the harp writing. In the central movement, in C-flat major, the theme is stated with unforced simplicity and then subjected to a series of variations that alternate ornamentation, mobility, chordal density and lyrical transparency. Glière favours a firm melodic conception, shaped by regular phrases and by a warm harmonic colour. Variation becomes a process of progressive clothing, in which the theme maintains its identity while passing through different states. In this piece the concertante dimension is concentrated into a formal meditation that unites classical elegance and Russian intensity.
Considered as a whole, the programme traces a historical line founded upon verifiable transformations. Caramiello reworks Neapolitan and operatic materials within fantasias and studies, showing how Italian nineteenth-century culture could entrust to the harp a role of translation between song, theatre and pedagogy. Saint-Saëns brings that tradition within the French discipline of the short concert form. Salzedo renews the technical idiom through a variation in which ancient memory becomes a field of timbral experimentation. Smetana, through Trneček, shows the possibility of concentrating an orchestral poem into a solo writing capable of preserving narrative continuity. Glière entrusts to the varied theme a synthesis between lyricism and instrumental mastery. From the Gulf of Naples to academic Paris, from national Bohemia to twentieth-century Russia, the disc tells the history of a repertory in which the harp absorbs diverse sources and restores them as form, technique and imagination.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026
Available from 16 October 2026.
