Classical and Modern Music
Format: CD
Code: 113383
EAN: 3838898113383
Top pianist and harpsichordist, pedagogue and music critic Janko Šetinc was born on 27 April 1932 in Maribor. After finishing grammar school in Maribor, he graduated from the Ljubljana Music Academy under Professor Marjan Lipovšek in 1961. He finished his postgraduate studies at the Ljubljana Music Academy in 1969. Janko Šetinc then went on to do an advanced course of piano playing in London under pianist K. Taylor and of the harpsichord in Prague
under harpsichordist Z. Ružičkova. During three and a half decades of giving concerts pianist and harpsichordist Janko Šetinc made over one hundred appearances. In 1965 he made his debut in Ljubljana with the Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra. He played Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.
Janko Šetinc performed as a soloist and chamber musician both at home and abroad. His piano and harpsichord playing was distinguished by a rich technique and suggestive expressional vigour. As a chamber musician he played in all formations, from duo to nonet, and particularly in permanent ensembles, such as the renowned Collegium Musicum Maribor, which he founded in 1968 when he was also planning the Festival of Baroque Music. He also played in the Trio Cavaliere and in the Slovene Piano
Quartet. The list of top representatives from the Slovene and international music scene with whom he collaborated is very impressive: Irena Grafenauer, Igor Ozim, Primož Novšak, Miha Pogačnik, Tonko Ninić, Miloš Mlejnik, Valter Dešpalj, Branimir Slokar, Marjana Lipovšek, Ondina Otta, Marie Claude Chappuis, Clara Dent, Dag Jensen, Vladimir Mendelssohn ... As a soloist he performed with the orchestras of the Slovene and Maribor Philharmonic, RTV Ljubljana, with soloists from Zagreb, the Zagreb
Philharmonic Chamber Studio, the Dubrovnik city orchestra, the Slovenian Chamber Orchestra... He has performed in all music centres of Slovenia, former Yugoslavia and in many European cultural centres, such as London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Helsinki, Graz, Bratislava ... He has collaborated in numerous national and international music festivals.
He was at the outset of everything conceived in Maribor that was of artistic high quality. He was the initiator, founding and artistic director of the Festival of Baroque Music. For more than two decades the festival, which he already planned in 1967, was hosted in the Festival Hall of Maribor Castle. From the concept of the Baroque Festival in 1993, grew Šetinc’s idea for his next festival, Musical September, which he organised in collaboration with the Concert Office at Narodni dom Maribor.
Right from the start the festival moved into many until then unknown venues, churches, castles, and mansions across the region. It attracted top musicians from around the world, but sadly after just six years this important chapter of his life closed, due to external factors. The culmination occurred just as the festival had grown. The festival Musical September fulfilled Professor Šetinc’s life goal of creating a superior chamber event, such as those he encountered as a pianist and
harpsichordist in Europe.
Too much of what he did has been forgotten. Šetinc gave dozens of concerts during which through playing and commentaries he presented the lives and work of important composers to young people. At numerous concerts, adapted to the age of the young listeners, Šetinc with an orchestra, as a soloist and in various chamber ensembles displayed the properties and capacity of wind and string instruments, all human voices, individually and together thus cyclically rounding off the concerts.
Consequently, over a period of four consecutive years not one programme was repeated. Until that time such intensive work for Jeunesses Musicales (Musical youth) had not been seen in Slovenia.
For four decades he was a teacher at the Music and Ballet Secondary School in Maribor, as well as at the Teachers’ Training Faculty in Maribor and also in Velenje. He was the enthusiastic tutor of many who today are esteemed artists, pianists, conductors... He marked them with his inexorable value orientation in the arts.
He has received numerous awards and prizes, such as the student Prešeren Award for artistic achievement, award of the then Assembly of the Municipal of Maribor for his artistic work, the Order of the Silver Wreath, Slovenian Jeunesses Musicales award, Jeunesses Musicales Maribor award and the Glazer Award 1992, the city of Maribor’s highest award for artists and culturalists for lifetime achievements, the Julija Betetta award, the Dr. Romana Klasinc award, the Conservatory for Music and
Ballet Maribor award.
Although Horace’s saying is valid for Janko Šetinc’s life style - Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis (Blessed is he who is far from daily business), it would be a sin if it was not convincingly and unwaveringly ‘’involved ‘’also in the media scene.
His yearlong music critic opus ranks amongthe top in Slovenia.
With his signature everything written about music acquires unwavering persuasive relevance and beauty.
Melita Forstnerič Hajnšek
Translation: Heather Pirjevec
FAURÉ, DEBUSSY, RAVEL
Three giants of European music, Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), Claude Debussy (1862- 1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937), worked during the significant transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In history they are recorded in gold letters, as they returned world value to French orchestral music.
Fauré developed an individual, classically formed, controlled and extremely poetic musical expression, imbued with the sensitivity of French sound. When we admire the undeniable artistic greatness of his works, we can only wonder why the world of music beyond France‘s borders did not know his music for a long time. The progressively oriented twentieth century somehow initially overlooked him, but later he was forgotten. One of the major reasons is
undoubtedly that simultaneously excitingly new alluring Impressionism music in short simply flooded his works. Music history has had quite a few snags labelling the composer with some direction or affiliation to this or that ism; it was overlooked that foreign influences did not touch Faure‘s in itself concluded, original and artistic selfassertive music. Some saw in him the forerunner of Impressionism, others due to the strict formal rigor and logical development of his compositions compared
him with Brahms. In his students, among who was also Ravel, he implanted a reliable sense for formal construction, retained espressivo and clear sound, so they called him the great-grandfather of neoclassicism. Some people saw in him a conservative, others the earliest forerunner of new music. Faure‘s artistry is not revolutionary, if under this sign we understand volume, explosiveness and sensationalism. It comes gently, slowly and quietly, as if it were intended for intimate cognoscenti.
Everything happens without noise, kindly, with tranquil breath; therefore it is understandable that he focused mainly on the piano, songs and chamber music. In the Piano Quartet Op. 15 as the dominant value we are influenced by the charm of his melodies with their hymnic width, unmistakable charm and sublime beauty that never fall into banality. Although the music is full of emotional warmth, musical enthusiasm and lavish inspiration, it does not deny delightful balance and that serenitas -
serenity, purity and tranquillity that long ago adorned Mozart‘s music.
Debussy, despite his connection to Chopin, Liszt and Mussorgsky, developed a brand new piano style, in fact new aesthetics - Impressionism, which the next generation drew from starting with Bartok, de Falla, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, young French people, in our country with Škerjanc and others. Anyone who wanted to express reflections in water through tones could not use the traditional academic melodies, had to invent an entirely new piano technique.
Debussy‘s original tonal language gave some of the listeners‘ impressions and feelings that until then they had not even anticipated. These innovations were not the product of self-will or desire for sensation, but they dictated the composer the basic idea of a composition. He did not want music portraying images of reality, but he strove to unite spiritual reality with the sensation of perceived impressions of nature. He argued that in this union there is a mysterious consensus between
nature and the creative imagination. Debussy is a master of sound differentiation, blending and sensitivity, which are expressed without pathos. The rhetoric, speculative and monumental were all foreign to him, as he strove towards freedom without intellectual schemes. He sings about his internal landscape with the naive innocence of a child. The Suite Bergamasque is unweighted and fresh youthful work, written in Italy as a recipient of the Prix de Rome. It belongs within a set of early
conservative works, which already show the writings of a genial creator. In the third movement the gentle mood picture of „Claire de lune“, meaning “moonlight” in French, already has the beginnings of Impressionism. This in the mature brilliantly formed composition „Reflections in the Water“ unfolds in hundreds of coloured shades.
In comparison with Debussy, Ravel in his expressive range is more limited, colder, more reserved and more committed to tradition. With a sense for form and quality, with a tendency for elegant lines, with blatant contempt for everything vulgar and with metronomic emotional coldness he tamed his hidden tendency to romanticism. The essence of these bearings he best described himself when he said that people who talk about the fragility and meanness of
his heart are mistaken, because „We Basques experience things passionately, only we do not show it“. Sonatina is a charming example of compositional mastery, with which his original, modern style with minute precision is encompassed within the classical legitimacy of a sonata. In its transparency and tenderness it is an example of refined filigree art, which has turned its back on the swollen pathos of the outgoing nineteenth century. That artistry has brought European music refreshment and a
return to classical simplicity. Profuse virtuosity in the third movement contrasts effectively with the chamber restraint in the first two.
Fauré, Debussy and Ravel have in common the fact that the piano is their primary expressive medium. Each developed their technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument in their own way, all three to those heights that since then no one has surpassed them. It is not about pianistic skill and virtuoso knowledge, but about the culture of extreme tonal differentiation, specific sound feeling and crystal clarity and precision. The music of all three unites
values, with which we otherwise like to denote French artistry: perfection, balance, refinement, elegance and spirit.
Janko Šetinc
Translation: Heather Pirjevec
TRACKS:
C. Debussy: Suite Bergamasque
1. I. Prélude 4:23 (listen!)
2. II. Menuet 4:21
3. III. Clair de lune 4:58
4. IV. Passepied 4:09
5. C. Debussy: Reflets dans l'eau 5:53
M. Ravel: Sonatine
6. I. Modéré 4:21
7. II. Mouvement de menuet 2:56
8. III. Animé 4:16
Janko Šetinc – piano
G. Fauré: Kvartet št. 1 v c-molu, op. 15
9. I. Allegro molto moderato 10:44
10. II. Scherzo (Allegro vivo) 6:17
11. III. Adagio 10:03
12. IV. Allegro molto 9:24
Slovenski klavirski kvartet
Gorjan Košuta – violin
Črt Šiškovič – viola
Miloš Mlejnik – cello
Janko Šetinc - piano
Recorded:
Kazinska dvorana SNG Maribor, 26.9.1983 (1-4)
Radio Slovenija – Studio 13, 17.4.1979 (5-8)
dvorana Slovenske filharmonije, 26.3. in 4.4.1980 (9-12)
