Harpist
Lavinia Meijer is the recipient of numerous awards and much international acclaim. Her varied interests include crossover music and contemporary music as well as traditional harp repertory.
Meijer was born in 1983 in South Korea, but raised in the Netherlands by adoptive parents. She has toured all over the globe with many leading orchestras including the
Residentie Orkest, the
Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. She released several albums on the Channel Classics label, including her interpretations of work by
Handel,
Bach, and
Scarlatti on the 2004 release 1685. In 2007, she was awarded a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship, often a stepping stone to a top international career. In 2009, she received one of the most prestigious awards in The Netherlands: the Dutch Music Prize. She released the album Metamorphosis/The Hours in 2012, which featured works by
Philip Glass. This also earned
Meijer gold record status for classical music from The Dutch Association of Producers and Importers of Video & Audio Media.
Meijer has experimented with the traditional concert setting, sometimes performing solo concerts in candle-lit rooms.
Since signing with Sony Classical and releasing an album of
music by European crossover composer Ludovico Einaudi in 2014,
Meijer has emerged as one of the world's best-known harpists. As usual with
Einaudi, that album was a commercial success, but had a mixed critical reception. On her next album,
Voyage,
Meijer mixed classical standards with music from the soundtrack to the film
Amélie, by composer
Yann Tiersen. Her 2015 live album In Concert showcased her interest in both contemporary composition and vernacular genres.
Meijer returned to
Glass in 2017 with
The Glass Effect, featuring not only music by
Glass but also compositions by younger composers, some of them (such as rock musician
Bryce Dessner) from outside the classical sphere. Those composers included
Meijer herself, who arranged music from
Glass' Koyaanisqatsi for harp.
Meijer released (with Maud Geffray) a third
Glass album, Still Life: A Tribute to Philip Glass, in 2019. The following year she appeared on the album Peaceful Choir: The New Sound of Choral Music.