[ PORTRAIT ] BETSY JOLAS

To celebrate the Festival’s seventy-fifth anniversary, it was hoped that Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra would create a new work, commissioned for the occasion. The name of the French-American composer Betsy Jolas was immediately obvious.

I accepted, of course, saying to myself that in 2023, at the age of ninety-seven, this would really be my very last work: a collection, no doubt, of beautiful musical memories from a lifetime." – which she therefore titled Ces belles années…

The links between the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Betsy Jolas are long-standing and steady. She attended the first edition in 1948 in the audience. Thereafter, her work has been regularly programmed. In 2012, she supervised the Académie’s workshop ‘Opéra en Création’, which then focused on young audiences, and the same year, the Chamber Music Residency presented a wide range of her works. This summer, the same residency will present her wind quintet O Wall (1976), inspired by a passage from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Mediterranean Youth Orchestra will perform A Little Summer Suite (2016), a seven-movement musical stroll dedicated to its creators: the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and... Sir Simon Rattle.