Biography

The title "Reflections" has a double meaning in English: both thought and reflection. This score is an echo, a reflection of thoughts I had after the performance of my opera Bérénice, in autumn 2018, at the Palais Garnier in Paris. It was a period which was quite difficult for me, since it was marked by the death of Éric Daubresse, a producer of computer music at Ircam. He was also a colleague, a composer, a very discreet man, of great rigour with a very strong sense of ethics. This concerto is dedicated to him.

This concerto comprises three separate movements - which is quite rare for me - corresponding to the classic pattern of quick-slow-quick, with a first movement which is itself quick, then slow, then again quick, then slow once more. Once the orchestral introduction has passed, the piano takes up the central note, "F sharp," and sets out the chords of this movement: interlocking fifths, which the orchestra will enlarge. At the end of this movement, bells ring out, referring directly to a moment which struck me during a Catholic Mass in the memory of another deceased person.

It is a way of preparing for the central movement. This is a moment of stability, of contemplation, conceived as a canon, in which the fifth interval plays an important role. The last movement, more rhythmic, more bouncy is made up of parallel diminished fifths. Here the subterranean flow, which has innervated the concerto from the beginning, can be heard more clearly.

The central movement is very simple technically, but the other two are challenging. Bertrand Chamayou has a magnificent technical facility, which I wanted to use. I like the idea of writing for someone who will perform a work, then taking it back.

This concerto is the fourth by Michael Jarrell for violin, after, ... Prisme / Incidences ... in 1998, dedicated to the violinist Hae-Sun Kang then Paysages avec Figures Absentes - Nachlese IV, in 2010 performed by Isabelle Faust and Des Nuages et des Brouillards in 2016 intended for Ilya Gringolts. This opus dedicated to Renaud Capuçon was commissioned by Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the National Orchestra of the Pays de la Loire and the Gürzenich in Cologne. Its world premiere was performed on 30 August 2019, by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pascal Rophé.

"For me, composing a concerto is writing for a specific artist I am learning to understand. The piece becomes a kind of portrait. I, therefore, automatically treated the violin differently in each of the four concertos.

Four movements feed this one.

The first is very virtuoso and dynamic. The orchestra begins the second movement and sets up, with particular modes of playing, a regular movement of semiquavers, the soloist playing only pizzicato. The third has a slow character and ends in a slow melody in E. As for the last movement, it returns to the virtuosity of the first movement to end in a final climax. "

Michael Jarrell

This concerto is the fourth by Michael Jarrell for violin, after, ... Prisme / Incidences ... in 1998, dedicated to the violinist Hae-Sun Kang then Paysages avec Figures Absentes - Nachlese IV, in 2010 performed by Isabelle Faust and Des Nuages et des Brouillards in 2016 intended for Ilya Gringolts. This opus dedicated to Renaud Capuçon was commissioned by Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the National Orchestra of the Pays de la Loire and the Gürzenich in Cologne. It's world premiere was performed on 30 August 2019, by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pascal Rophé.

"For me, composing a concerto is writing for a specific artist I am learning to understand. The piece becomes a kind of portrait. I, therefore, automatically treated the violin differently in each of the four concertos.

Four movements feed this one.

The first is very virtuoso and dynamic. The orchestra begins the second movement and sets up, with particular modes of playing, a regular movement of semiquavers, the soloist playing only pizzicato. The third has a slow character and ends in a slow melody in E. As for the last movement, it returns to the virtuosity of the first movement to end in a final climax. "

Michael Jarrell

The viola concerto entitled Emergences-résurgences is a direct reference to the pictorial art of Henri Michaux.

Curves, colours, chiaroscuro and heavy lines, I tried to include a pictorial dimension in drafting this piece and in its performance. Nevertheless, I do not think it makes it a contemplative work. The music, which is above all a temporal art, here uses all the dynamic possibilities, the energy of the soloist’s part being a strong presence, from the beginning.

Being particularly sensitive to continuity of listening, I have tried to work the musical phrases like, it seems to me, a writer works with language, paying attention to the great sweep and to little inflections.

The use of pivotal notes, fixed points which attract or repel characteristic figures, is present from the very start of the piece.

The figures stretch out in all directions, are refracted or narrow down, in a kind of shimmering, and the sequences are sometimes based on echoes, resonances, bifurcations or brusque oppositions.

The processes unfold always within a given framework and there are links between the different moments of the work. Certain figurations are dislocated, sometimes used in fragmentary form. In a way, I tried to write music to separate the depth of the past from the abyss of the future.

The piece is dedicated to Tabea Zimmermann.

Michael Jarrell (septembre 2016)

W O R L D   P R E M I E R E
February  3rd  2012  -  Salt  Lake  City  (Etats-Unis),  Abravanel  Hall  –  Jean-Guihen
Queyras, cello - Utah Symphony – dir. Thierry Fischer.
Order: Utah Symphony, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Orchestre National de Lyon (with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia).


N O T E S
Composition works like an arborescent structure. At each ramification you choose a path, which depends on the whole dynamic of the whole piece. Doing this, you leave quite a lot of ideas and fragments behind. Nachlese is a german term already used by Goethe for the idea of "reading again", referring to, commenting something... The
 
idea of this cycle (Nachlese) is to come back to some musical ideas which I liked and found interesting, but were inappropriate in a different context and to develop them in new directions. When choosing a title I like it to refer to different techniques used in the piece, but also very directly to what is heard at some moments. For instance, in the first movement the orchestra "emerges" from the very fast and nervous line played by the soloist and then, later, the "climax" of this movement "emerges" from the fast line then played by the orchestra. This piece is dedicated to Jean-Guihen Queyras and Thierry Fischer.
Michael Jarrell, December 2011

 

Born in 1958 in Geneva, Michael Jarrell started playing the piano in early childhood before doing his musical studies at the Geneva Conservatory. He followed various courses in the USA (Tanglewood, 1979) and studied composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik im Freiburd Bresgau with Klaus Huber. Between 1986 and 1988 he lived in Paris to take a course in computer at IRCAM, which commissioned him a piece for flute Midi, oboe, instrumental ensemble and electronics, Congruences.

In 1988-89 he was a resident at the Villa Medicis in Rome and in 1989-90 at the Swiss Institute of Rome. Between 1991 and 1993 he is residing composer with the Orchestre de Lyon, and since October 1993, he lives in Vienna as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik.

The works of Michael Jarrell all say in their own way, that writing is not created out of nothing. Like the drawings and portraits of Giacometti that he admires, Jarrell claims the need to "work unceasingly the same idea", in cycles of parts, as in the series of Assonances initiated in 1983, form a vast 'book of sketches".

Often his titles reflect the relationship between his works. Somes Leaves, for solo cello and Somes Leaves II for viola alone are in a way the sheets extracted from "From the leaves of Shadow", concerto for viola and orchestra in 1991. Prism, for solo violin, is a "mise à nu" of the solo part of ... prism / incidences..., concerto for violin and orchestra in 1998. Similarly, Offrandes, for solo harp, exposes openly the delicate instrument that dialogues with a string orchestra in Conversations (1988).

This manner of extraction, this way of digging into the material of a writing from the past formulates to the letter in Aus Bebung "extract from Bebung", a piece in 1995 for clarinet, cello and ensemble.

The instrumental writing of Jarrell has the magic of working the color that he shapes and reshapes in small steps, creating an art of "small transition" (in the words of 'Adorno to Alban Berg). On a harmonic canvas often stopped, he shimmers colors like alternating tones on an unchanged design.

If Jarrell loves solemn music, complex, dense textures and slowness, he does not,however, give up the flashes and outbursts. It is a music often driven by the theater ...d'ombres lointaines... (1990), a powerful vocal style, alternating happy singing and speaking. Dérives (1985), chamber opera and especially Kassandra, monodrama on the text of Christa Wolf, created in Théâtre du Châtelet in 1994 by Marthe Keller and performed again in 1999 at the Theatre des Amandiers demonstrating the vitality of this score, dominated by the dark and haunting colors of the interrogation.

NOTICE

Galilée, an opera in 12 scenes from La vie de Galilée by Bertolt Brecht, was created January 25, 2006 at the Grand Theatre de Geneve by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, les Choeurs du Grand Theatre, Claudio Otelli (Galilée), Peter Bording (Andrea Sarti), Hanna Schaer (Mrs. Sarti) Ulfried Haselsteiner (Ludovico), Elzbieta Szmytka (Virginia), Peter Kennel (Inquisitor)... under the direction of Pascal Rophé. Realization of the computer music at IRCAM: Gilbert Nouno. Staging: Nicolas Brieger.

Galilée is the first large-scale opera by Michael Jarrell. "I deliberately entered the "machineopéra" " the composer said, agreeing to write for opera singers who have a specific repetoire,to assign them a character and make them sing with their classical techniques. "I agreed to write an opera, therefore to try a few things within a given straitjacket. Perhaps I will be accused of writing an opera too "classic", because its drama follows the chronology and that I make the characters sing. "The composer took his own booklet from La vie de Galilée by Brecht, condensing some of the action and focusing on the character of Galilée, historical figure who Brecht made into a character full of contradictions.

Unlike the structure of the piece, well defined into 15 scenes, framed by songs frontispieces, Michael Jarrell made the opera as a steady stream of 12 scenes, seeking to capture the subtle nuances and changes of the various characters portrayed by Brecht. His writing is not subject to a single principle of composition, but it tries to find the nuance and evolution in each situation making it suitable both theatrical and musical, in its form and in its own expression.

In this way the orchestra develops textures, sometimes transparent, sometimes with the effect of mass, the use of the voice is extremely diverse, from hard speaking to the most lyrical song, and some overlays (or replicas of scenes) try to give an aspect sometimes chaotic and packed with reality, always drawing an intense musicality.

The choir is mostly in "voice-off", the composer did not want to give it a dramatic importance; and brings a sort of musical commentary of the action and almost replaces the poems Brecht placed as the frontispiece of each scene without partitioning the piece. Instrumental interludes, very short and always linked to the scenes before and after, indicateing the geographical change or the passage of time.

"It remains that the most important part takes place in the orchestra, that Jarrell treats with a refinement, sensitivity and power that are truly admirable." (Harry Halbreich)

Time : about 1:40