“I am, at 96, practically the last of my generation,” writes Betsy Jolas. “Since most of my great colleagues have, alas, left this world ... I am today constantly called upon to ‘testify’ on the now historical music movements many of them represent.” Following trends, she says, has helped her evaluate the situation today: “Most people’s attention to music has shrunk drastically to barely 10 seconds. This observation has been echoed in much of my music.”
Hence bTunes, Jolas’s new piano concerto, which Nicolas Hodges introduced with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Karina Canellakis. The similarity of its title to the name of a well-known digital music service is not at all coincidental, for the punchy 15-minute piece is essentially a series of brief musical vignettes, using material reworked from Jolas’s previous piano miniatures and songs, to which the orchestra (classically sized, with a harp and extra percussion) adds some continuity and commentary.
It’s a distinctly tongue-in-cheek affair, launched by the orchestra’s leader, who cues a sprinkle of cymbals and a buzz of strings before the soloist and conductor rush on to the platform to launch immediately into the work, and ending with a gigantic orchestral crescendo and a throwaway piano phrase. In between, the music swings between pointillism (a reminder that Jolas was a contemporary of Boulez and Stockhausen in Paris) and swirling post-romantic gestures with the occasional tinge of jazz; nothing is developed, nothing overstays its welcome, in what is a witty, delightful diversion that won’t tax anyone’s concentration.
Beethoven and Mahler featured in the concert too. Canellakis had shown how vividly the BBCSO, and its strings especially, respond to her conducting by opening with a fizzing account of Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus Overture, while her superbly managed performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, every detail sharply etched and demanding the widest possible range of dynamics, confirmed her command of large-scale musical architecture; everything, whether expressive or vulgar, seemed to be exactly in the right place.
Available on BBC Sounds until 10 October. The BBC Proms continue until 10 September.
