De la nuit…

De la nuit… is a solo harp album that explores the space “in between things,” where harpist Zachary Hatcher says music lives for him. He began on violin at two and moved to the harp at four, and the harp has become an extension of his hands. The programme opens with Hatcher’s own three-movement Sonata for solo harp (2024), a “love letter to his instrument” designed to show the instrument’s full sound palette and its technical possibilities beyond cliché. It moves from Burlesque through Waltz to a long, searching Prayer. Two meditative miniatures by Per Nørgård, Consolation: As a Roselike Flower and Swan Descending, were written for harpist Tine Rehling, and Hatcher plays them as a way of sharing a piece of his Danish home.

Hindemith’s Harp Sonata (1939) is cleanly neoclassical and brutalist in construction, with darker undertones of its time. Henriette Renié’s Pièce Symphonique (1907), from the woman Hatcher calls the “grandmother of the harp,” traces a path through profound loss, and ends in her own words: the thought of future hopes “does not destroy pain, but transforms it.” The title work is Hatcher’s own transcription of Ravel’s Ondine, the first movement of Gaspard de la nuit, a score he found at a library sale in Maine at age fourteen and spent thirteen years studying. Recorded at Garnisons Kirke in Copenhagen, the album offers a vivid case for the harp as a solo instrument.

Zachary Hatcher, harp