Kees van Baaren - Recueillement

Kees van Baaren (1906-1970)
Recueillement : pour chant et piano (1947)
text by Charles Baudelaire
Wendela Bronsgeest, soprano
Thom Bollen, piano.
Kees van Baaren was a Dutch composer and teacher. The son of a music dealer, he first learned music from his father’s stock of scores and recordings, before studying the piano with Rudolph Breithaupt and composition with Friedrich Koch at the Berlin Hochschule (1924-1929). Also working as a jazz and cabaret pianist (under the name Billy Barney), and encouraged by his fellow student Boris Blacher, he developed simultaneous enthusiasms for Gershwin and Webern. He returned to the Netherlands in summer 1929, shortly after meeting Pijper in Berlin; some months later he began composition studies with the latter, at the same time destroying all his compositions from before 1930. The study sessions grew progressively less formal, and Pijper remained a friend and mentor until his death in 1947. After several years in Enschede, mostly working with amateur ensembles, van Baaren became director of the Amsterdam Musieklyceum in 1948. In 1953 he was appointed director of the Utrecht Conservatory and in 1958 director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He, like Pijper, became the mentor of younger composers and performers (including Louis Andriessen, Bruins, Reinbert de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg, Porcelijn, Schat, van Vlijmen and Wisse), who led the Dutch avant garde from the 1970s onwards.
Following public performances of his Piano Concertino (1934) and Trio for winds (1936), which shows Pijper’s influence, van Baaren completed nothing more until 1947. His first major work, a striking cantata setting of Eliot’s The Hollow Men, was written in 1948. While essentially tonal, the harmony grows out of a recurring six-note figure, employed as a series. For a time he wrote simultaneously in an accessible tonal style, largely for students and amateurs (as in the hearty Partita for band, 1953), and in progressively more ambitious applications of serialism. The Settetto (1952), while still reliant on Pijper’s germ-cell principle, was his first wholly 12-note work; he became the first major Dutch serialist. Van Baaren’s approach was rarely orthodox. Some compositions employ several unrelated rows; others involve exchange of notes within a row. The Muzikaal zelfportret, Variazioni per orchestra, Sovraposizioni I and II and the Piano Concerto, and parts of the Musica per campane, Musica per orchestra and Musica per organo, rely on a special formation around a tritone axis, resulting in either an all-interval row or, depending on octave placement, one in which the second half is a strict intervallic retrograde of the first (see ex.1). In portions of the Musica per campane and Musica per organo, rows of more than one octave appear: 72, 47 and 51 pitches respectively, matching the keys of the instrument.
Van Baaren’s close attention to structure is seen in the five Variazioni per orchestra, based respectively on isometric pitch series, vertical groupings of notes, intervals, what the composer calls ‘variable metres’ (actually metres arranged according to interlocking numerical progressions) and groupings of durations. The ‘variable metres’ are a recurrent feature in the later works and lead to increasingly pointillistic textures. A special case is the sonic collage in the finale of the Musica per orchestra, quoting his own music, Latin dance rhythms and eight other composers from Bach to Pijper.
Van Baaren and his music were respected in the Netherlands and he received many prizes. The melodic imagination, sensitivity to instrumental colour and rhythmic vitality in his work overcame the customary resistance of audiences to atonality and won him a dedicated group of supporters at home and abroad. He was awarded the important Sweelinck Prize for his life’s work as a composer in January 1970, nine months before his death.