‘Sivan Magen, a harpist of astonishing range’

‘Mr. Magen impressed with his chameleonlike ability to match color to emotion.’

‘Sivan Magen gives the harp a tonal spectrum that one rarely hears’

‘Some of the best harp playing I have ever heard came from the fingertips of Sivan Magen… Magen created fleshy sound on the strings, a sudden sharp glissando surprised, opening up sunlight, resonant bass notes countered, and a most wondrous sense of warmly earthy and divinely exquisite gorgeousness abounded.’

'Here came through Sivan Magen with his magical virtuosity, which produces from the harp a multitude of sounds like the human voice..."

“In their first concert on 2014 in the Music Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra featured distinguished harpist Sivan Magen. He stole the show with Debussy’s Danses Sacree et Profane for Harp and Strings in the second half of the concert programme. It seems odd to start the review with the third piece played, but the beauty of it brought goose-bumps to this reviewer. Magen enchamted the audience, playing as though the piece was his own Fantasia…The SCO has certainly set the bar high with the first of their enviable solo guests visiting Aberdeen this year”

'Magen seems destined to be the Zabaleta de nos jours, with a paintbox of colours allied to fabulous dexterity and nuanced phrasing.'

“Virtuoso Israeli harpist Sivan Magen conjures an astonishing range of colour and dynamic”

“Captivating recital…Magen uses every means at his disposal to create a compelling emotional narrative that draws the ear irresistibly on. In the wrong hands CPE Bach’s Fantasy H277 can easily disintegrate into series of rhetorical gestures, but Magen takes us into a rarified dreamworld of magical colors and dynamic shadings that creates the strange impression of the notes floating free of musical gravity. The same is true of his micro-sensitive accounts of four pieces from Brahms opp. 116 and 117, so poetically soothing as to make the piano originals appear almost unwieldy in comparison…”

“Choice for the Curious: ‘I like Sivan's playing a lot on this…There is lots of interesting new music here.’”

“Disc of the Day: ‘Magen magics the listener into the Gothic horror story with dream swirls, violent tugs, inveigling melodies and an appreciation for Renie's feverish imagination.’”

'Harpist Sivan Magen is a dazzlingly virtuosic musician and in this recital disc has set out to show the flexibility of his instrument.'

“The harpist Sivan Magen is a magician. He accompanies Phan in folksong settings, Canticle V (based on a hermetic and disquieting T. S. Eliot poem), and Britten’s last song cycle, A Birthday Hansel. Whether weaving a faux-naïve spell in “Dafydd Y Garreg Wen” (the song of an aged bard) or sending forth an ever-more-venomous cloud of sound in “She’s Like the Swallow,” Magen’s playing is prodigious in color and imagination, the ideal accompaniment for Phan’s sensitive singing”

“The Collaboration with harpist Sivan Magen likewise leads to very exceptional results. Singer and instrumentalist both drive the rhetoric of these songs to a hilt, one with virtually unlimited artistic means, the other with a fantasy of sound…” Still Falls the Rain – Supersonic Award

“…Sivan Magen accompanies gorgeously on the harp…”
Still Falls the Rain – Favorite International Albums of 2012

Still Falls the Rain – Best recordings of 2012