“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.
