The Ancient Roman Lyre

Back in the days that I ran a music department at Borders, I had a customer come in with a special request: he wanted to know if I had any CDs that featured harp music. “I love the harp more than King David,” he said. How I wish we had carried Michael Levy's albums back then. I could have sold him every single one. I would have added those albums to my own collection, as well. Up until recently I've only owned a few harp albums, including Harps of the Ancient Temples and Debussy's Harp, performed by Yolanda Kondonassis. Now I've been able to download Michael Levy's album, The Ancient Roman Lyre, and it's a wonderful addition. No language speaks more clearly to people than music, and the ancient lyre is music in its purest form. Listening to The Ancient Roman Lyre is as close to time travel as I'll ever get – I can imagine the Roman baths, or gardens, or courtyards where diners have finished their meal and are enjoying wine and contemplation. The fidelity of the recording is beautiful and the performance is a salve for the soul. Lovers of the harp and the lyre, (and possibly even the lute), rejoice. You can download this album or buy it on CD (or both). Sample it and judge for yourselves . . .

Ancient Roman music may have sunk without a trace in the depths of history - at least in its written form - but in THE ANCIENT ROMAN LYRE Michael Levy has evoked its "anima", its aspiring soul, better than any other treatment I've yet heard even by academic ensembles. Every aspect of lyre playing technique Michael has learned is employed, yet in the spirit of the Golden Mean, never any one of them too much. More disciplined tonally in its melodic formulations than most of Michael's previous work, THE ANCIENT ROMAN LYRE features the *kinnor or late-model Hebrew lyre built by Marini Made Harps, the "secret sauce" of the style of just intonation implied by Suzanne Haik-Vantoura's resitution of biblical chant, the use of various ancient Greco-Roman diatonic modes, and the excellence of timbre granted by modern string materials evoking ancient equivalents. The result of Michael's focused efforts is music worthy of cinematography, of historical documentary.