Muziek Centrum Nederland

Willem Jeths

Willem Jeths (1959) has made a name for himself as a composer of timbre. His oeuvre, with as core a series of concertos for a wide range of instruments, from clarinet and piano to flugelhorn and bandoneon, is like a search for new sounds realised by ingenious orchestrations and, at times, unorthodox playing techniques. But it does not end with this fascination for timbre. Equally characteristic is Jeths’ ambition to create a highly personal world of sound by means of a seemingly familiar musical language, using stylistic means and gestures from earlier musical periods and building on the psychology and expectations of those times.

‘Death, both in a literal and figurative sense, has become an increasingly important theme in my music,’ says Jeths. In his opera Hôtel de Pékin  (2008), for a start, it was the empress who not only saved herself through her Liebestod, but also made room for the Chinese Empire to be reborn in a new form. He also used Mahler’s famous ‘death chord’ in his compositions a number of times, for example in a new work for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra that will be premiered at the end of 2010. Jeths says that in nearly all his works there is a moment, usually towards the end, when the musical material is transformed and lifted to a higher plan.

Such a moment of transformation also occurs in Jeths’ Second Violin Concerto, which will premiered in the ZaterdagMatinee on 22 May 2010. The concerto has been titled Diptych Portrait, but is not a double portrait in the way the term is commonly used in painting: it is a double portrait of two aspects or two time phases of one single ‘person’. Unlike his first violin concerto Glenz (1996), in which the soloist interweaves with the orchestra and his surrounding ‘paranymphs’, Jeths has constructed Diptych portrait entirely around the solo violin that operates a lot more independently. The solo part is the portrayed ‘person’ who by ‘living’, by transforming into sound, is able to elevate himself to a higher plan and to evolve out of this duality. The orchestra that is fitted out with a lot of percussion instruments places this development in a colourful perspective.

Joep Stapel

Concerts

Saturday 22 May 2010: Violin Concerto no. 2 (Diptych Portrait). The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw.

ZaterdagMatinee, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, 2.15 p.m.

 

 

3 characteristic statements by Willem:
  • Although I was brought up with serialism, and nowadays a restorative tendency appears to determine contemporary composing to a great extent, my approach develops independent of any fashion or protocol. I always choose those elements that serve my highly individual idiom from every tradition. My approach may seem eclectic, but I give the chosen material an entirely personal twist. I feel like a pioneer in my experiments with sound which I apply to that nineteenth-century vehicle, the symphony orchestra. I make the musicians tear silk and paper, break glass and bang on blocks of wood.
  • I aim for a refined sound and timbre. I like unusual combinations, glissandi, contrasts, which I use intuitively. Thus I expand my means of expression.

  • I have discovered that I am really an opera composer. The way of working where I am just one part of a larger whole of text, image, direction and music. The hammering and sawing in the workshops. The smell of the theatre. Everybody contributing to a Gesamtkunstwerk. This is all set in motion by what I create and write at my kitchen table.

 

 

Willem Jeths [photo: Gerrit Schreurs]
photo: Gerrit Schreurs
concise personal portrait

Willem Jeths’ interests:
Italy. Southern Europe, the Mediterranean. The way people there work in the kitchen. The freedom and transparency of the music. Because the classical antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance have made this country the birthplace of our culture.

Willem Jeths’ heroes and inspiration:
Musically I feel a connection with Alban Berg, Gustav Mahler, György Ligeti and Sofia Gubaidulina. Writers who have influenced me are Thomas Mann with Der Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus, the poet Paul Celan with his concise poems in which death and dance go hand in hand. I also feel attracted to the symbolist Georg Trakl and the decadence of Les chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont.

 

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