10/10
Joost Willemze, harp.
7 Mountain Records, 2026
In shaping his identity as a musician, Dutch harpist Joost Willemze describes himself as a storyteller. He traces this idea back to ancient Greece and the tradition of the rhapsodos, a professional reciter of epic poetry. The term, which also lends its name to his new album Rhapsodos, literally means “song stitcher.” These performers were not the authors but rather interpreters, animating stories through voice and often with the accompaniment of a lyre, an ancestor of the harp.
That spirit of narrative runs through this thoughtfully curated and flawlessly performed recording. Each work contributes to a larger arc of drama and meaning, shaped in part by Willemze’s background in Greek and Latin. He opens with a piece central to his career, Marcel Grandjany’s Rhapsodie, which serves as an inviting gateway into the harp’s expressive range. Willemze meets its demands with warmth, fluidity, and emotional nuance. This gives way to the stark contrast of Anne-Maartje Lemereis’s Me-de-a, where he gradually intensifies the music’s trajectory from innocence to ferocity.
The album also features two new works written for Willemze. In Carlos Micháns’s Trois Moments d’Orphée, the musical language is fragmented and shadowed. Willemze inhabits its shifting states of rage, grief, and resignation with conviction. Themes of loss deepen further in Event Horizon (The Point of No Return) by Ramin Amin and Soheil Shayesteh. With the addition of electronics, the work conjures a haunting underworld, amplifying the myth of Orpheus’s doomed descent in search of Eurydice.
Willemze then steps away from overt storytelling in Caroline Lizotte’s Suite Galactique, focusing instead on texture, space, and pure sound. His command of extended techniques creates a sense of suspended weightlessness, which contrasts sharply with the rhythmic brilliance of Guillaume Connesson’s Toccata, where his precision and virtuosity come to the fore.
That same versatility carries into Pearl Chertok’s jazz-inflected Around the Clock Suite, where the harp shifts effortlessly between melody, accompaniment, and percussive drive. The album closes with a gem from Grandjany, The Colorado Trail, a setting of a cowboy tune that returns Willemze to the rhapsodic storytelling style in which he is at his best. •
