Salvi harps in Perth

Made in Piasco

Salvi build their harps in Piasco, in the north-west of Italy. They are among the instruments you will hear in most orchestras, and for a lot of players a Salvi is the harp they work towards for years before they buy one.

Which is the reason this page exists. An instrument at that level is usually bought from a photograph, a specification sheet and somebody else’s recording. We would rather you sat down with it.

The range, plainly

Daphne is the pedal line, and the numbers are the string count. The 47 is the full concert instrument; the 40 is the same idea in a smaller body, which suits a room that cannot take a concert harp and a player who does not need the bottom octave yet.

M2 is the lever harp most first-time buyers end up on, and Aurora sits at the concert end. Between them there is a lot of ground, and the honest answer to which one you want usually comes from playing two of them in the same afternoon.

What we do before it reaches you

A harp arrives in a crate and it needs work before it is worth playing. Ours are strung up and regulated on our own bench in Osborne Park before anyone takes one away.

When it drifts, and it will, because that is what a wooden instrument under two tonnes of string tension does, the bench that set it up is the one that sees it next.