Composer Festival with Betsy Jolas – Opening

The French-American composer Betsy Jolas grew up in a circle where names such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse and Ernest Hemingway were family friends. She herself studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen, whom she later succeeded as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. In her music, Betsy Jolas combines modernist sharpness with a sensitive, deeply human voice. Her imaginative music carries traces of Impressionism, but can also be incisive or fragmentary, and radiate an almost improvisatory freedom.

Her own comment on the symphonic poem Tales of a Summer Sea, which opens this year’s international Composer Festival, is as simple as it is evocative: the music is inspired by the memory of a summer sea, sometimes calm, sometimes stormy. Within the orchestra’s rich palette of colours, the moods shift between quiet reflection and dramatic surging waves.

Histoires vraies – True Stories – is a concertante suite composed so that trumpet virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger and pianist Roger Muraro could perform together, as they do here. With sounding fragments reminiscent of orchestral tuning, tapping and applause, Jolas has created a series of concentrated, poetic episodes in which trumpet and piano sometimes emerge as soloists, sometimes merge into the orchestral texture.

To set her own music in relief, the French-American Jolas has chosen two works by French composers depicting famous couples from classical mythology, both of which also became ballets. In Albert Roussel’s Second Suite from Bacchus et Ariane, the god Bacchus encounters Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, and their love culminates in an ecstatic bacchanal. We hear this in music that conjures a sensuous atmosphere with refined harmonies and driving rhythms.

Maurice Ravel’s ballet music to the classical love story of Daphnis and Chloé is equally vivid in its imagery. He created two concert suites from the ballet, of which Suite No. 2 is the most popular. It is sumptuous and richly coloured music in which we hear the sun rise and cast a magical light over the landscape.

The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra is led by Chief Conductor Ryan Bancroft. The soloists are trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger and pianist Roger Muraro.

Read more about chief conductor Ryan Bancroft