From Thursday 5 November until Sunday 8 November, Konserthuset Stockholm will celebrate their centenary by dedicating their International Composer Festival to Betsy Jolas. Closing the festival, on Sunday 8 November, Konserthuset Stockholm will present the World premiere of Betsy Jolas’ Paris : A Poem.
For the Composer Festival, Betsy Jolas has chosen to place her own music in dialogue with that of others – like a conversation with history and with composers she has, in some cases, known as colleagues. The carefully curated and finely balanced programmes therefore also include music by Maurice Ravel and Albert Roussel, Dmitri Shostakovich, Tōru Takemitsu and Witold Lutosławski – and, of course, Olivier Messiaen.
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. Olivier Messiaen was an important source of inspiration for Betsy Jolas, and the two held each other in great esteem. At the same time, their points of departure were fundamentally different. For Jolas, the human being and language are central, while Messiaen sought the eternal and the cosmic.
The contrasts between them are brought into focus in this concert through Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, music deeply rooted in the spiritual dimension of human existence, and a newly composed work by Jolas for actor, piano and string trio – Paris: A Poem. This is also the title of the modernist poem from 1919 that Jolas has chosen, by the English writer Hope Mirrlees. The text is a kind of psychogeographical mapping of, and journey through, Paris in the aftermath of the First World War.
For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit Konserthuset Stockholm’s website
