The gentle radiance of Betsy Jolas: works for organ and orchestra

AI translation with ChatGPT from French

Shortly before her hundredth birthday, Betsy Jolas continues to glow through a distinctive body of work. The German organist Angela Metzger now dedicates an entire album to her, Works for Organ and Orchestra, on which the organ does not appear as a grandiose instrument but as an intimate lantern that reveals an elusive, subtle musical language.

Trained at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München with Edgar Krapp and Bernhard Haas, Angela Metzger completed her studies with distinction before broadening her musical profile by taking up the oboe at the Landeskonservatorium Innsbruck with Konrad Zeller. A prizewinner at renowned international competitions — from Bad Homburg to Tokyo, via Wiesbaden, Wuppertal and the ARD Competition in Munich — she has been honored with awards such as the Bayernwerk Culture Prize and the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize.

Her career today brings her to major international stages, both in the concert repertoire as a soloist and alongside orchestras like the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Augsburg Philharmonic, and she performs on instruments ranging from historic organs to contemporary new builds.

Angela Metzger has risen to the top of the international organ world — thanks to astonishing technique, modern approaches to presentation and performance, and an insatiable curiosity for repertoire, particularly contemporary music. Her disarming musicality and rhythmic precision were recently praised at Milano Musica 2025; critics described her as “extraordinary: breathtaking in clarity as in articulation, admirably relaxed and with impressive purity of tone.”

In that spirit of discovery she now devotes a whole album to Betsy Jolas’s organ-and-orchestra works. The new release is timely for the composer’s 99th birthday (5 August 2025) — the “doyenne of Franco-American refinement” — whose singular language answers to no school or stylistic label.

Jolas’s music often resists immediate grasp, as Angela Metzger’s recording shows. Her organ scores open up a landscape where time does not march but drifts — like fog spreading over winter fields and drawing together again: Musique d’Hiver, Musique de Jour, Leçons du Petit Jour and the Trois Études Campanaires. Together they make less of a monument than a fleeting apparition, a suspended moment rather than a loud proclamation.

The reward of listening to this album is not catharsis but attention itself. If Feldman is the Rothko of sound, Jolas might be the Bonnard: intimate, elliptical, softly luminous. Rather than seeking dramatic peaks, one is invited to watch the discreet play of light on water. Instead of demanding intensity, one receives subtlety: how a single note bears the weight of the silence around it, or how a fragile line becomes a shared utopia between organ and orchestra.
The music on this recording reveals Jolas’s organ writing in its restraint and refinement. Organist Angela Metzger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Titus Engel are its impeccable advocates.

Wouter de Moor

classicagenda.fr, September 24, 2025