Composer Willem Jeths already had two piano concertos to his name: his First Piano Concerto from 1994 and his Second, Fas/Nefas, from 1997. Over the past year he worked on a third. Scorching Passions is the title of the new piece, dedicated to soloist Ellen Corver. During the closing concert of the 76th edition of Dag in de Branding, Corver premieres the work with the Residentie Orkest conducted by Antony Hermus. Also on the program: Stravinsky’s revolutionary Le sacre du printemps from 1913 — music so unprecedented at the time that its premiere erupted into the most infamous riot in music history.

Stravinsky – Le sacre du printemps

Paris, the evening of Thursday 29 May 1913. In a sold‑out Théâtre des Champs‑Élysées on Avenue Montaigne, the audience awaits a new work by Igor Stravinsky, the composer who had already made a splash with The Firebird and Petrushka. Expectations are high — not least because Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, had stoked the flames with a pointed press release promising “a new sensation that will undoubtedly lead to heated discussions.”

He wasn’t exaggerating.

When the lights dim and a bassoon begins to play in a piercingly high falsetto register, the tension is palpable. During the first minutes things remain relatively calm, though the increasing dissonance provokes murmurs and whistles. But at the start of the second part, all hell breaks loose. Strings and brass blast out an ear‑splitting dissonant chord from the pit, obsessively repeated with jagged, off‑kilter accents. Shouting erupts from the boxes. Supporters and detractors even come to blows.

In his acclaimed history of twentieth‑century music, The Rest is Noise, New York music critic Alex Ross describes how even Diaghilev was taken aback when he first heard the notorious passage during rehearsals. “Does this go on for long?”, he reportedly asked. Stravinsky’s reply: “To the end, my dear, to the end.”

The premiere of Le sacre du printemps would go down as the greatest scandal in classical music history. Music would never be the same. The unprecedented newness of Le sacre lies above all in the way Stravinsky (like Bartók in Hungary and Janáček in the Czech lands) fused two seemingly opposite sound worlds: modernism and folk music.

Stravinsky drew on a wide range of folkloric sources — from Lithuanian wedding songs and folk‑dance arrangements by his teacher Rimsky‑Korsakov to his own memories of Russian songs from childhood. The brilliance lies in how he breaks the material into tiny motifs and reassembles them into a cubist‑like montage of polytonal harmonies and shifting rhythms. In doing so, Stravinsky arrived at a new kind of music — “of the street and yet refined, cleverly savage, style and muscle combined,” as Ross puts it.

Jeths – Third Piano Concerto Scorching Passions

“It actually began with a chance encounter,” says Willem Jeths. It is mid‑March. Over the phone, the composer explains how, nearly thirty years after his Second Piano Concerto, Fas/Nefas (1997), a third finally came into being. “I ran into Ellen two years ago in Italy, where we both spend a lot of time. When she asked whether I might write a piano concerto for her, I didn’t have to think long.”

His immediate yes had everything to do with a shared musical history of some forty years. When Jeths gained international recognition in the late 1980s with Novelette for violin and piano (selected for the ISCM World Music Days in Oslo), Corver performed the piece frequently with violinist Peter Brunt. Later, Jeths wrote his piano trio Chiasmos (2000) especially for their Osiris Trio. “I’ve always thought Ellen was a fantastic pianist,” Jeths says. “She can do everything. She’s rhythmically precise, but she can also shape color beautifully, phrase, and spin long melodic lines. She’s really the ideal pianist to write a concerto for.”

Despite her impeccable soloist qualities, composing the new concerto proved quite a challenge. Jeths worked on the piece for about a year and a half, often wondering what he still wanted to add to the two piano concertos he had already written.

In the end, his Third Piano Concerto became a response to his Second, he says. Whereas Fas/Nefas reveled in modernist sound experiments and timbral explorations (the soloist plays inside the piano and strikes the strings with sticks), Scorching Passions embraces a more traditional pianism. Jeths: “Simply the black‑and‑white of the keys. There’s quite a bit of tradition shimmering through the solo part. Long lines in the voice‑leading, surprisingly much counterpoint. ‘Goodness, this sounds like Bach,’ Ellen said when we recently went through the score together.”

Thematically, Jeths’s Third is also loosely connected to his operas. As in Hôtel de Pékin (2008), about the last empress of China, and Ritratto (2020), about the eccentric Italian marchesa Luisa Casati, Scorching Passions centers on a female figure — or more precisely, a series of interwoven female archetypes. Around them, Jeths constructed a contrasting triptych about love (hence the “scorching passions” of the title).

From an early stage, Jeths knew he wanted to work with Alecto, one of the three Furies from Greek mythology: “That image of an implacable, merciless woman stayed with me. It also resonated strongly with Turandot — another vengeance‑driven ice queen who initially rejects love.” Jeths was astonished to discover that the main motif of Puccini’s Turandot is almost identical in sound to the diminished‑seventh chord he had already chosen as the foundation of his concerto in the sketch phase. The first movement therefore contains fragments of the Turandot motif. Meanwhile, the soloist gradually breaks free from the orchestra’s grip: first coaxing, then increasingly defiant, finally liberating herself with percussive cluster chords.

As the concerto progresses, Jeths’s female figure transforms. In the second movement she appears as a dazzling femme fatale who demands adoration. In the final movement she becomes the embodiment of true love, culminating in an ecstatic union reminiscent of Tristan und Isolde, where love and death are inseparably intertwined. Attentive listeners will hear echoes of the famous Tristan chord.