FANTASIA

Magdalena Hoffmann releases her second DG album Fantasia, focusing on the music of the Baroque period. Channeling the period’s contrasting spirit of improvisation and formal rigour, Hoffmann showcases the harp in a collection of fantasias and preludes originally composed for keyboard or lute by Bach, his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, as well as his contemporaries George Frideric Handel and Silvius Leopold Weiss. 

Using the resonance and versatility of her instrument, Hoffmann adds new spatial dimensions to this richly imaginative repertoire. “The harp offers the possibility of great inner tension and a kind of spiritual dynamic which has a liberating effect,” she notes. “And that means each fantasia is like a musical snapshot that sounds different every time you play it – its energy is infinite, and it can never be definitively captured.”