This release is the first comprehensive recording of organ works by Betsy Jolas - one of the most idiosyncratic and fascinating voices in 20th and 21st century music. The French-American composer, a pupil of Olivier Messiaen, combines tonal delicacy with conceptual rigour and a deep love of the organ in a unique way.

At the centre of the production is the large-scale organ concerto Musique d’hiver, a work of visionary radicalism: without bar lines, without a common pulse, but full of inner tension and precisely controlled freedom. This ‘winter music’ flows like a stream through space and time between orchestral impulses and delicate organ sounds – premiered in 1971 and still a reference work for experimental musical thinking today.

The solo works Musique de jour and Leçons du petit jour, light-flooded meditations on the beginnings of the day, birdsong and the slow awakening of the world, can also be heard. Both pieces revolve around the note ‘g’ – a quiet centre from which Jolas creates lines, sounds and utopias with a delicate hand. The recording is complemented by the Trois Études campanaires, sounding bell studies that take on a new dimension on the organ of St Antonius Düsseldorf-Oberkassel with its extraordinary percussion stops.

The interpreter is the multi-award-winning organist Angela Metzger, who brings Jolas’s world of sound to life with great sensitivity and technical precision. She recorded Musique d’hiver with the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Titus Engel.

The Franco-American composer Betsy Jolas was born in Paris in 1926. She began her education in the United States, before returning to France to study with Darius Milhaud, Simone Plé-Caussade and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. From 1971 to 1974, she taught on behalf of Messiaen at this institution, where she was appointed professor of analysis in 1975 and of composition in 1978. She also taught at several American universities, including Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley.

This programme is an invitation to listen, to be amazed – and to pause in the first light of day.