Willem Jeths (b. 1959)
Mors aeterna (2015)
Violin Concerto No. 2 'Diptych Portrait' (2009)
The Tell-Tale Heart (2017)
Tasmin Little (violin), Juliane Banse (soprano)
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra/James Gaffigan, Reinbert de Leeuw, Jaap van Zweden
rec. live, 2010-2018, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, The Netherlands
CHALLENGE CLASSICS CC72908 [63]
These recordings are from Netherlands Radio’s Saturday Matinee series. They were made live and the very occasional cough betrays an audience presence in the auditorium. Such events are a small price to pay for such concentrated music-making.
Dutch composer Willem Jeths studied with Tristan Keuris and Hans Kox, having attended the Sweelinck Conservatorium at Amsterdam and also the Utrecht Conservatorium. Jeths’ worklist is active and lengthy. There are songs and operas, the latter of which include Hôtel de Pékin (2007). Other recent scores listed include a Flügelhorn Concerto (2002), First Symphony (2012) and Recorder Concerto (2014). The last two can be heard on an earlier Challenge disc (review). Conductus for orchestra and a Requiem date from 2014. The latter is for two soloists, mixed choir and orchestra and has also been recorded by Challenge Classics (CC72874).
He says of his own music that it “… is about extremes: strict purity versus distortion, loud against soft.” It’s richly allusive and although sources claim an “atonal idiom” it is clear that he moves in ways that stay connected with most listeners, without a doctrinaire adherence to methods.
The single-movement Violin Concerto, in a Berg-like style, is stern, meditative and impassioned. Here the solo artist who also gave the premiere is the now-retired Tasmin Little. Her mastery seems undeniable. The melodramatic operatic scena The Tell-Tale Heart (2017) runs to about half an hour and here includes applause at the end. It is here sung by Juliane Banse in a tour de force of a performance. Jeths was to extend it into a short opera to partner Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. The scena is oppressive and is given a performance that smokes, cloys and flames even it does find some seriously threatened poetry in the last five minutes. Its storyline is derived from an archetypical short story by Edgar Allan Poe as adapted by Carel Alphenaar. It recounts the murder of an old man by the narrator who dismembers and hides the corpse. The heart beats on despite the murder and, heard by the murderer in his hyperactive guilty conscience, results in the narrator confessing to the police. The beating of the heart can unmistakably be heard in the music and a general creepiness lays siege to, intensifies the music and underpins its convulsions.
Death is again the backdrop to the ten-minute work that opens the disc, Mors aeterna. Its contemplative mood sounds a little like a riff around the subdued depressive pages of the start of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, but at other times it contrives to sound like a darkly mercurial concerto for orchestra.
Dominy Clements has warmly reviewed the Challenge CD of the First Symphony and Recorder Concerto. Jeths’ music also impressed the late Peter Grahame Woolf some years back and his Cello Concerto has been noted by Patrick Waller and Renate Dehmer as part of the Cello Concerto Project.
The composer must surely be well pleased with the outcome of this project and with the recordings/performances which are extremely well written up in the English-only booklet.
Rob Barnett
