French Harpist Coline-Marie Orliac, adds her first solo album “Harpistically Yours, Chopin” to her ever- growing discography featuring her own arrangements of Chopin’s solo piano works and songs, performed alongside singer Olga Pasichnyk Prior recordings include “OBVIOUS”, a digital recording together with Achilles Liarmakopoulos featuring duets for trombone and harp and a Naxos recording of Chiayu
Hsu’s Huan – the piece with which Ms Orliac won the Mario Falcao prize at the USA International Harp Competition in 2007. This CD won Gramophone Music Awards in 2015 “The most purely beautiful is Huan, played with exquisite grace by Coline-Marie Orliac.”
An active and in-demand soloist and chamber musician, Ms Orliac has performed at Festivals in both Europe, and the US including the Newport Music Festival, the Festival d’Aix-en Provence, the Spivakov Festival and the 10th World Harp Congress in Amsterdam amongst others. She has also twice been invited to the Curtis Summerfest as a faculty member. In 2021 Ms Orliac will perform and give masterclasses at the SALVI Harpissima Festival as their guest of honour and as part of duo Avantgarde together with fellow harpist Augusta Giraldi at the Festiv’Alba in Italy.
“Harpistically Yours, Curtis” a special project commissioned by the Curtis Institute featuring video recordings of works written for Ms Orliac, was recently filmed in April 2021 with a masterclass at the Institute given the following month. Ms Orliac is a committed advocate of new music having appeared as a guest artist with numerous contemporary groups including Klangforum Ensemble, PHACE and Airborne Extended at festivals including Transart Italy, Warsaw Autumn and Wien Modern amongst others. She works regularly with living composers as well as making her own arrangements of works to help broaden and expand the harp repertoire.
Since joining the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra at the personal invitation of Claudio Abaddo, Ms Orliac regularly performs as guest harpist with orchestras including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, ORF Radio Symphony, La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra under conductors such as Neeme Järvi, Simon Rattle, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Christoph Eschenbach.
In 2011, Maxim Vengerov invited Ms Orliac to join him in a performance of Ravel’s Tzigane with the Sinfonia Varsovia at the Festival de Musique de Menton. She also performed on a cruise with the Queen Elisabeth Chapel that same year: The Queen Elisabeth Musical Voyage – Turkey and Greece.
A prize-winner at numerous international competitions (USA International Harp Competition, Concours International de Harpe de la Cité des Arts de Paris and Vera Dulova Harp Competition, Moscow) Ms Orliac studied in Marseille, Paris and Nice where she earned diplomas in both Harp and Piano
Performance. Invited by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, she continued her harp studies in the US attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Ms Orliac is also in demand as a teacher and is regularly invited to give masterclasses most recently at the University of Tampa, USA and Panorama Festival Aarhaus, DK amongst others.
She collaborated with maestro and cembalist Martin Gester and sang Vespetta in Pimpinone (G. P. Telemann), with several performances in Germany and France.
Constantly seeking ways to present her music-making in new and exciting ways, Ms Orliac is a passionate fashionista regularly collaborating with haute couture designers including Galia Lava, Erika Suess, Christian Louboutin and Solaine Piccoli.
Coline-Marie Orliac plays on Lyon & Healy Concert Grand harp.
“One doesn’t think of the harp as a passion-accommodating instrument, but as played by Coline-Marie Orliac, it is.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
