In 2014 Betsy Jolas met Sir Simon Rattle at a dinner in London. The encounter was auspicious. It led to a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, A Little Summer Suite, and marked the beginning of what has been dubbed Jolas’ ‘Indian Summer’, a period of striking productivity and overdue celebrity.
Now 96, Jolas insists that tonight’s world premiere Ces belles années… will be her last symphonic work. But though its title (Those good years) suggests a general harking back, perhaps in the manner of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, the inspiration is more specific. Co-commissioned with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, which turns 75 this month, the piece is an anniversary celebration, and its titular ‘good years’ refer to Jolas’ own memories of attending.
In fact, Jolas was at the first ever Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1948, where she saw Austrian conductor Hans Rosbaud lead Mozart’s Così fan tutte. She would return many times to hear other Mozart operas and, from 1966, her own works too. Ces belles années… alludes to those ‘wonderful summers filled with music’ in blurred musical quotations, while a ‘Happy Birthday’-shaped refrain, announced in strings and winds within the first minute, gives the piece its rondo-esque form. The jubilant mood reaches its climax in a short epilogue. Here, a solo soprano acts as ‘a kind of messenger angel’. She invites the orchestra to rejoice – ‘Let’s celebrate these beautiful days, all these beautiful years’ – which it soon does, echoing her phrasing and enthusiasm before at last dissolving into laughter.
Vocal music has always been important to Jolas. Surprising, then, that Ces belles années… is the first piece she has written for solo voice in a truly symphonic context. The setting of familiar exclamations, rather than a specific text, is also unusual. Still, many hallmarks of her compositional style remain. The large orchestral force – with its healthy percussion section – is used with great economy, and each line is written to be enjoyable for the player (‘I compose as though for a chamber ensemble’). Jolas’ wit and love of vocal expression can also be found in the raft of extended techniques given to both the orchestral players and solo soprano, from glissandos, claps and excited whispers to the tutti stomp in the final bar.
Jolas feels very strongly that Sir Simon Rattle brings out the best in her music, and Ces belles années… was written on his request, with him very much in mind. Having helped launch the Jolas ‘Indian Summer’, his role at the close of this symphonic chapter offers a satisfying symmetry.
Betsy Jolas
Set in the Parisian Années folles (crazy years) of 1920s France, Betsy Jolas’ childhood was coloured by the artistic circle that formed around Transition, the magazine her American parents founded. Visitors included Ernest Hemingway and André Masson; James Joyce ‘was like a grandfather to me’. But it was music that Jolas chose to pursue. After a stint living in New York, where performances with the Dessoff Choirs instilled a lifelong passion for Renaissance repertoire, she returned to France and, with the encouragement of organist André Marchal, enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire. Her teachers there included Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen; she would ultimately succeed the latter as Professor of Analysis (in 1975) and then Composition (in 1978).
Jolas began honing her compositional voice in the period following World War II, embracing the ascendant avant-garde. An encounter with Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in the 1950s struck her ‘like a lightning bolt’ and, despite Milhaud’s scepticism, she followed contemporaries such as Boulez and Stockhausen with interest. Certain aspects of their style – an enthusiasm for new and unusual timbres, meticulously wrought textures and forms – made a mark on her own. And her breakthrough work, Quatuor II for soprano and string trio (1964), was commissioned and premiered by the concert society Boulez established: Le Domaine Musical.
But Jolas’ trajectory was serial-adjacent, rather than that of an unquestioning disciple: her innate lyricism and love of vocal music guarded her from the era’s extremes (‘I just borrowed whatever I needed but no more!’). Textural complexity in D’un opéra de voyage (1967) or Sonate à 12 (1970) never obscures musicality, and though her approach to rhythm and metre is fluid (see in particular 1966’s J. D. E.) the result isn’t fragmentary, but flowing.
Neither did Jolas reject the past. ‘My roots are in the entire history of music,’ she said in 2016. Works such as Musique de jour (1976) and Letters from Bachville (2019) pay homage to Bach and Monteverdi. While working on her opera Schliemann (1983–93), Jolas took time to study her favourite works in the genre, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Berg’s Wozzeck, absorbing their models into her own unique means of expression.
Read the full programme note and profile on the London Symphony Orchestra website