There is always music in me — Jacqueline Fontyn’s sentence stands over this volume. The grande dame of Belgian composers never submitted to a dogma and wanted to keep her work as free as possible of doctrines. She never worked by the rules of serialism: it was all too intellectual for me, she sums up. In conversation she talks about the shape of her days, about the creative process — I remain the boss — and about nature, which has always inspired her.
The four concertos span more than three decades. Rêverie & Turbulence for violin and orchestra of 1975 sets a Tranquillo against a Vivo. Colinda for cello and orchestra was written in 1991, the double concerto Es ist ein Ozean… for flute, harpsichord and strings in 2000, with Praeludium, Passacaglia and Réjouissance. Capricorne for two percussionists and chamber orchestra occupied the composer from 2003 to 2009.
The recordings were made in 2010 and 2011 in the Athanasiuskirche in Hanover with the Göttinger Symphonieorchester under Christoph-Mathias Mueller. With the orchestra one can achieve everything, Fontyn says in the conversation that Mirjam Wiesemann recorded on 10 August 2010 at her house in Limelette.
The third SACD belongs to the violinist and pianist Kolja Lessing, who plays the violin concerto; Mirjam Wiesemann talked with him on 20 January 2012 at his house in Würzburg. The edition was made with the kind support of Belfius Bank and the Ministère de la Communauté française.
Jacqueline Fontyn was born in Antwerp in 1930. Shortly after her fifth birthday she began daily piano lessons with the Russian teacher Ignace Bolotine, who encouraged her to develop her improvisations; at fifteen she decided to become a composer. She studied music theory, instrumentation and composition with Marcel Quinet in Brussels and continued her training in Paris with Max Deutsch, an ardent pupil of Arnold Schoenberg; in 1956 she attended Hans Swarowsky’s conducting class in Vienna. From 1963 to 1970 she was professor of music theory at the Antwerp Conservatory, and from 1970 to 1990 she taught composition at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels. Her catalogue comprises more than 120 works.
How close her music stays to lived experience is shown by Colinda. As Fontyn was about to begin work, she learned of the death of her 29-year-old Romanian friend Petre Papurica: on the evening of 24 December 1989, during the revolution in Bucharest, he was struck by a fatal bullet at his first-floor window. She dedicated the concerto to him in homage to his moral courage and his spirituality and chose as her basic material a colinda, a Romanian Christmas carol from the collection made by Béla Bartok.