Organist Laurens de Man, baritone Ben Kazez and violinist Eva Saladin present a special concert centred on the music of Constantijn Huygens. This Dutch poet, diplomat, scholar, architect and composer, and father of the physicist Christiaan Huygens, who became known in the musical world as the inventor of the Dutch 31-tone tuning, composed what appears to have been an enormous musical oeuvre. Very little of this, however, has survived. Fortunately, the intriguing collection Pathodia sacra et profana, containing 39 pieces for voice and basso continuo, has endured through the centuries and thus forms an excellent point of departure for this concert. In the intimate acoustics of the Kleine Zaal at the Muziekgebouw, and with the expressive meantone tuning of the Fokker organ, his music is particularly well suited to its surroundings. Alongside music by Constantijn Huygens, works by contemporaries will be heard, as well as the only surviving work by his son Christiaan, namely the Courante in E minor from 1661, in an arrangement by Laurens de Man. The programme also includes more modern works, among them Lamentations from 2014 by the French composer Charles van Hemelryck and Vues des Anges from 1959 by Hans Kox for baritone and violin, both composed in 31-tone tuning.
The collection Pathodia sacra et profana appeared in 1647 and contains sacred psalms in Latin and secular airs and arias in French and Italian. Instead of the composer’s name, the score bears the cryptic word ‘occupati’, usually translated as ‘by a busy man’. With this, Huygens indicates that he is not a professional musician, but fulfils a ‘function for the public good’, and that it would be inappropriate for a gentleman of his standing to publish a collection under his own name. The word ‘pathodia’ is a contraction of ‘pathos’ and ‘odè’ (passion and song) and is described by the musicologist Rudolf Rasch as a ‘Huygenian neologism’. Rasch, who has written extensively about the music of Constantijn Huygens, is also the biographer of Adriaan Fokker, the initiator and designer of the Fokker organ, who in turn had this 31-tone organ built on the basis of ideas by Christiaan Huygens, the son of Constantijn.
The various sections from Pathodia sacra et profana are linked by Laurens de Man, on the basis of atmosphere and sonority, to the other works on the programme, such as the capriccios by the German composer and organist Johann Jakob Froberger, who was in contact with Constantijn Huygens and with whom he shared mutual musical admiration. Connections are also made with a canzona by the Italian composer and organist Girolamo Frescobaldi, who was Froberger’s teacher, and with movements from the Dutch anthology ’t Uitnemend Kabinet from 1649. In this way, a varied concert emerges.
Laurens de Man, resident second organist of the Fokker organ, is a versatile musician with an affinity for historical tunings and contemporary repertoire. As the winner of the Dutch Music Prize, he regularly performs seventeenth-century music with baritone Ben Kazez, an expressive singer who has already appeared on many international stages since obtaining his master’s degree at the Guildhall School in London in 2018 and becoming a Britten Pears Young Artist. He and Laurens regularly collaborate with the Spanish violinist and violist Paula Pérez Romero, who studied in The Hague and specialised in historical performance practice in Basel. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and also plays the viola with the Geneva Camerata. Together, alongside a tribute to Constantijn Huygens, they bring to light the richness of early Dutch music through Pathodia sacra et profana.