Jan Pas

Jan Pas was born in 1962 in Zele, Belgium, and began cello lessons at the age of 7. His first television performance was as an 11-year-old, playing “Le Cygne” by Saint-Saens. He continued studies at the Conservatory in Ghent (A. Messens), Brussels (E. Carlier) and later in Detmold (I.Gudel). In 1981, as the winner of Belgian Radio and Television’s ‘Tenuto’ competition, he made a recording for television playing the Lalo cello concerto. In 1981 he was the youngest cello soloist at the Opera du Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels.

As a member of the European Youth Orchestra he played und the direction of Claudio Abbado and Herbert von Karajan. In 1985 he was appointed to the opera in Mannheim. From 1988 on he works at the Staatsoper Stuttgart, and since 1995 he is invited to play at the Bayreuth Festival. He has recorded several CDs of chamber music, as well as the cello concerto by F. Gulda. He plays an instrument from 1760 made by Tomasso Balestrieri.

CLIMATE CHANGES

In 1870, the reactionary musical life of the Second Empire was on rocky foundations. The defeat suffered by France in the Franco-Prussian War had shaken up the entire country. Musically this annus horribilis saw a genuine cultural renaissance, in which a new generation of composers propagated with conviction an ‘Ars Gallica’, united under the banner of the Société Nationale de Musique Française. Headed by Camille Saint-Saëns, the Société expressed its desire for a musical culture that did not function for the entertainment or amusement of the listener, but for his edification. Part of this strategy was a renewed interest in choir, orchestral and chamber music, which had been neglected for some time. French music culture, long dominated by opera and operetta, chamber music had been relegated to a marginal position. The Société’s platform for ‘serious’ music now offered composers such as Franck or Fauré the opportunity to present their first chamber music pieces.
Their music drew quite a lot of interest. The young Claude Debussy, for one, was so impressed by Franck’s string quartet that he wrote one himself three years later. Despite all his enthusiasm, it would be more than twenty years before he wrote another chamber piece. Near the end of his life, he wrote three masterful sonatas for several different ensembles. The printer Jacques Durand is to thank for this sudden output of ingenuity, as it was he who managed to inspire Debussy – who had withdrawn after the outbreak of the First World War – to write music again.
Debussy’s original intention had been to write six sonatas, with a nod to the 18th century pre-Classical sonatas, which were often written for diverse combinations of instruments to be played at home. Debussy’s fascination with and knowledge of music history should come as no surprise. As personal and modern as his music sounds, this French-impressionist-despite himself in no way disguised his respect for the musical past. Although his orchestral music consistently avoids traditional forms like 'symphony' or 'concerto', his piano music contains multiple echoes from musical tradition. The Suite bergamasque makes reference to the baroque keyboard suite à la Bach, and with Pour le piano he pays homage to French harpsichordists like Rameau and Couperin.
Debussy’s chamber music sonatas were also veiled homages to music history. These little gems are wonderfully inventive compositions in which Debussy shows himself to be a gifted stylist and a subtle designer of instrumental dialogues. The Cello sonata, originally with the programmatic title Pierrot fâché avec la lune (‘Pierrot angry with the moon’) was composed in just a few weeks during the summer of 1915, and is the first part of his ‘sonata cycle’. Debussy’s 18th-century thrust is clear from the first note: an aristocratic unmeasured prologue (imitating the majestic severity of a baroque overture) gradually turns to delicate reverie, before landing in more tumultuous regions. This hybridity between archaic and modern sounds is also audible in the Sérénade, in which he takes aim at the tradition of nocturnes played under the balcony on plucked instruments. A rhythmically rigorous finale (in which the ensemble briefly ducks into Spain) concludes the sonata.

By Debussy’s death in 1918, France’s musical landscape had changed entirely. The First World War had blown a new wind through European music history. Europe was dealing with the aftermath of a devastating high-tech war on land, sea and in the air, that had destroyed four empires and nine million people. The accompanying moral indignation and disbelief could not permit a repetition of 19th-century romantic optimism in the art field. Irony, gallows humour and cynicism were more appropriate, as were detachment, objectivity or pragmatism.
The figurehead of this response was Igor Stravinsky, whose mocking neoclassical mannerisms pointed the way to the future, if an insecure one. But Stravinsky was not the only one with a self-assured anti-Romantic style. Within the Paris music scene, many promising composers shared the ironic detachment of their Russian colleague. Six of them (Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey) even formed a group, with the prosaic name ‘Les six’. These very different personalities, although only a collective on paper, still shared the same stylistic idiom for a time. Like Stravinsky’s, their oddball but never-pretentious music consciously distanced itself from the standard Romantic parameters and so joined the struggle with an objectionable past.
When Francis Poulenc finished his Cello sonata in 1948 – after the world had yet again erupted in war – he had already developed his personal signature. The Cello sonata, first sketched in 1940, is in other words largely an extension of his hybrid aesthetic from the Interbellum period. Yet the tone of this often-condemned composition is a great deal more expressive than Poulenc’s earlier chamber music. Remarkably, Poulenc seems to be exchanging neo-classical craftsmanship for a flight into (once so maligned) expressiveness. Sentimental escapism, if you will, diluted with – could it be any more ironic? – a streak of German high Romanticism. The Brahmsian cello in the opening movement, the melancholy Cavatina and the Finale bound up between severe angular passages are all movements that leave a strikingly despondent impression. Only the impromptu babblings of the Ballabile are reminiscent of the carefree, nonchalant aesthetic of Poulenc’s earlier work.

Even more explicit than the sadness hanging over Poulenc’s abstract Cello sonata is the tenor of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time). Comparing the two works, it is difficult to believe that they were begun at about the same time (1940), or that Poulenc’s work is the most recent of the two – it was not completed until 1948, at the urging of cellist Pierre Fournier. Unlike Poulenc, Messiaen was still finding his own voice at the start of the Second World War. The work environment in which Messiaen was writing the Quatuor, his first masterpiece, was somewhat unusual: he was a prisoner of war in the camp at Görlitz in Silesia. The piece’s somewhat bizarre scoring (violin, cello, clarinet and piano) was dictated by the available musicians among his fellow prisoners. In contrast with the neoclassically schooled Poulenc, the religious Messiaen was not seeking a traditional formal pattern for his ‘quartet’ but was exploring a form he had already used in his organ music: the composition as a sequence of meditations. In the case of his Quatuor, Messiaen connected his war experiences to the vision of St. John, who describes an angel announcing the end of time in the Apocalypse. Consequently, time standing still is not a musical characteristic of this composition by chance. Repetitive figures, limited transposing scales, long lines and long note values give the listener a physical impression of this eschatological lack of motion. The extremely drawn-out cello singing the ‘word of God’ in the fifth movement of the quartet, Louange à l’étérnité de Jésus, is perhaps the clearest example.

Cherchez la femme. While Debussy’s cello sonata was created in the wake of the First, and the cello compositions of Poulenc and Messiaen can be seen as reactions to the Second World War, the Six climats by Belgian composer Jacqueline Fontyn provide an unencumbered moment of rest in our – up to now – French tale. This six-part cycle was begun in 1972, when Fontyn, having taught counterpoint at the conservatory in her native Antwerp, was appointed to teach at the conservatory in Brussels. Fontyn’s great feel for French impressionism brings our circle round. Within her compositional career (with the pursuit of sonic beauty as its focus), these short pieces for cello and piano are at the turning point between her pseudo-serial compositional techniques from the 1960s and the more relaxed and poetic signature characterising her music after the 1970s. Poetic is, accordingly, the code word of this pedagogic composition, written for talented cello students interested in contemporary music. The fact that Six climats transcends its educational aims is clear from the title: more than pure etudes, these six pieces conjure up ‘poetic’ changes of climate.

Tom Janssens
Vertaling: A. Hodgkinson