Composer Festival with Betsy Jolas – Side Roads

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.

The first part of the concert centres on three works for cello and string orchestra that are closely connected. We begin with Lutosławski’s Grave: Metamorphoses, where the atmosphere is initially sombre and weighty, with long lines in the solo cello. Gradually, the energy intensifies and the cello and orchestra develop a compelling interplay before the gravity returns. Toru Takemitsu was a master of atmosphere, and in Scene the cello is set against the shimmering backdrop of the string orchestra.

The cellist Anssi Karttunen suggested to Betsy Jolas that she write a work for cello and strings that could form a triptych together with Grave and Scene. The result was Side Roads. Here, the cello finds its own path through the constantly shifting sonorities of the string orchestra. “It is a deeply personal work that reflects Betsy Jolas’s unique way of moving freely through music history. With complete naturalness, she combines new ideas with references to earlier music, from the Renaissance to our own time,” says Anssi Karttunen, whom we also hear as the soloist.

In Well Met Suite for string orchestra, Jolas has reworked her own stage work Well Met into an independent concert suite. She has described the piece as a wordless depiction of an orchestral rehearsal: instruments tuning, musicians trying out fragments of music, discussing and returning to the rehearsal, before everything culminates in a lively and humorous musical sequence.

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony is an arrangement for string orchestra of his Eighth String Quartet, which is also by far his most frequently performed. Here, the music shifts between deeply sorrowful passages and dramatic outbursts in one of the 20th century’s most personal and compelling works for strings.