Femme le soir presents Betsy Jolas at her most intimate and exploratory, drawing from a distinctive late style characterized by transparency and emotional directness. Anssi Karttunen and Nicolas Hodges offer readings attuned to micro-details: the grain of a cello’s whispered harmonics, a piano’s half-lit resonance, delicate intertwinings whose phrasing sidesteps routine for discovery at every turn. Jolas’s writing is anchored in nocturnal imagery. Here, the music often hovers - resting on understated figures that seem to murmur fragments of half-remembered stories or dreams. Karttunen’s expressive range finds equal footing in reticent lyricism and tense subtext, while Hodges’s command extends the piano’s voice from textural filigree to outbursts that quickly subside. Rather than simply tracing lines, the duo carves spaces for breath and semantic ambiguity. The dialogue between instruments is at once conversational and sculptural; moments of stillness are not empty, but charged with anticipation. Each page of this album suggests inseparable links between listening and remembering, between gesture and riddle. Jolas’s music on Femme le soir does not seek to impress; it invites - with patience and remarkable restraint - anyone willing to approach the threshold where meaning, sound, and shadow are made provisional, luminous, and alive.