„Doina” as an Art: the mystery of the Timbre [Vasile Iovu]

If the ethos is the face of a community’s sensibility, and music is one of the richest and most expressive characteristics of Romanian sensibility, as noted by George Enescu, then one of the artists that most clearly and thrillingly conveyed that sensibility during the last decades of the previous century was undoubtedly Vasile Iovu.

 His land is one where cultures live in a splendid diffusion of values, and he is the first professional pan flute maşter between the rivers Prut and Nistru to establish an image of this instrument beyond the strict borders of local traditions. Two achievements in the Bassarabian musical art bear Vasile Iovu’s name: through the force of his talent, he succeeds in sublimating the sounds of folk music and impart them universal acceptance; at the same time, while discovering and adapting for the pan flute a classical repertoire, Vasile Iovu conferred, alongside the famous pan Autist Gheorghe Zamfir, a new and universal dimension to the pan Aute, previously considered to be a folk instrument.

A difference considered generally valid, and known paradigms that are part of a difference - this a perfectly compensatory relationship, validated at home and in countries where the Bassarabian artist was applauded. Ultimately, here and everywhere, what does the public expect from the performing artist? Witchcraft? Magic? The creation of a secret potion that generates emotions no one can control? Vasile Iovu looks to find within sound the color, or more exactly, the palette of colors that can shine a light on the exact resonance of discretion and tenderness. He also focuses on the gravity and depth of sound, and this is the way he sings the Romanian Doinaş and Ballads, and Balada by Ciprian Porumbescu. But he does so not without showing a real art of vibration, the fascinating gesture of the left arm that molds the shape and volume of sound, in order to make the perfect lines of the instrumental belcanto a distinctive trademark of his style, such as in Ave Maria by Caccini, Schubert and Bach-Gounaud, or Gluck’s Melody, or Andante from Mozart’s Concerto no. 21, Franck’s Panis Angelicus. This is where the savor and beauty of sound are concentratei!, a schooled breathing technique, and, above aii, his lyrical vocation so pronounced, his artistic soul penetrating the mystery of the timbre that fuels the fascination with this instrument. This is the source of witchcraft, magic and wonder, absorbing all areas of sensibility, including the small or extensive appoggiaturas found in music of all genres, be they the thrilling melismata in Descîntec, or the baroque and elegant embellishments in Corelli’s Sonata no. 8, op. 3, or the grace of the restless bells in Mozart’s Fantasy in D minor. An art which will open widely the doors for an apparently rudimentary instrument, to the extent of being considered elevated and noble in the Bach’s Cantata Jesu, Joy of Mans Desiring, and, at the same time, authentic and spectacular in the native Ciocîrlia, which will fly freely within and without us. Accompanied by a folk orchestra, or a symphonic orchestra (such as in Tudor Chiriacs Suita Pe un picior de plai), or by the chamber ensemble that bears his name, or seconded by Anna Strezeva’s organ, the range of Vasile Iovu’s pan flute spans the most diverse eras, styles and music genres, enriching the listeners’ auditorv imagination and sensibility with sonorous ideas and interpretive illustrations. Under the pressure of globalization, a maşter pan flutist should feel best as himself in order to be original and unmistakable. However this is only because originality springs from one’s gift of identifying oneself with the uniqueness of Pan’s flute, the source of sounds that, according to legend, only the chosen ones have access to, those anointed to decipher the mystery of Pan God’s Iove for the beautiful nymph Syrinx, who takes the appearance and soul of a pan flute.

The artist who brought to life in the Bassarabian space the notion of „pan flute professional”, befbre this became an accepted expression, was a pan flute neophyte who withdrew at age 21 from flute classes taught in specialty schools, first at the Special Music School „E. Coca” (today the Music High school “Ciprian Porumbescu”), and later the „G. Musicescu” Conservatory in Chişinău. Taught by professors Efim Tcaci and Filip Evtodienco, these were good flute schools that cultivated his techniques, shaped his tastes and modelled his posture, and equipped him to respond to the challenge that changed his destiny. The well-known folklorist, the maşter of folk violin and the founder of the National Radio-Television “Folclor” Orchestra, Dumitru Blajinu, offered him an unusual role in the debut performance of this new orchestra: to play the pan flute. And thus began everything: both the brilliant career of the pan flutist Vasile Iovu, as well as the biography of the instrument with a double name, “flute - Pan’s flute”, which meant, beyond the success enjoyed at home and abroad, the establishment of a professional pan flute school that would go on to surpass the limits of a local artistic phenomenon.

Vasile Iovu’s choice of the pan flute, made during a dilemma all his own, points to his origins, those of a boy born in a peasant family, in Bărdaru-Hînceşti, the village where he spent his childhood before being selected at age 10 for special music classes, his “secret place” that fed his sensibility and where he discovered the ingenuity and beauty of folk music through his mother’s songs; he called his mother, Maria, “the sapience of the earth”. Similarly, his academic flutist background will later reemerge in the rigor and distinction of an instrument to which he will impart a new repertoire, expression and musical culture.

 

For the moment, though, the “Folclor” Orchestra became his launching pad, an area of artistic gestation, thanks to which, while studying the capabilities of the 23 tubes in Dumitru Blajinus performances, Vasile Iovu soon became greatly appreciated and requested by audiences. This popularity was due in part to the relevance of the instrument and the performer’s charisma, but also due to the fact that this music came to fiii a void in a period of utter stagnation and antinaţional Soviet “Bodiulism” in the ‘70s, when - lo and behold - “the reed’s magic sound” gave voice to a long repressed identity sensibility. Sîrba lui Iovu, Hora în bătăi, La căsuţa părintească, Dragu-mi-i de codru verde, Sîrba din Iablona, these and many other songs recorded for Radio-Television’s music collection or performed in concert together with the “Folclor” Orchestra or other folk music bands, songs for which he signed the orchestral arrangement or the score itself, constituted the repertoire that brought him success, performed with the conviction that folk music is the creation of authors who are not necessarily anonymous. This conviction was fueled by the idea that, if the gold ingots of ethno-folk samples are put in the hands of professional “jewelers”, “they can become superior in quality, coherence and timbre purity”. Vasile Iovu’s name also became known in the USSR when the young pan flutist won in 1974 the first place in the Pop Artists Competition. This success was later repeated four years later in socialist Cuba, in Havana where, according to soviet media, the “Soviet Union’s representative” received the gold medal in the artistic competition from among 18 thousand participants at the World Festival of Youth and Students. The same period marks his first United States tour, where he participated in a “Forum for the Soviet and American Youth” meant to reconcile, after a long freeze, the two large powers of the world, the pan flute being chosen from among the pacifist voices as a special instrument welcomed with curiosity in New York, Washington and Atlanta. At home, the same Doinaş and Ballads or Joc bătrînesc, or Melodie de dor would produce a spectacular healing effect, for which the local poets and writers dedicated to the performer eulogies of sincere admiration. As Grigore Vieru noted in a reverential article at the time, this soul-piercing music, two-thousand years old, has the ability to “teach us how not to die”.

 In order for Vasile Iovu to become “the Iovu phenomenon”, and for the pan flute to become a part of him, this creation could not be completed without his author having an impetus, a paradigm, an idol: Gheorghe Zamfir. The distinguished artist, who lived in Paris at the time, was the first to open up the universe of the pan flute to the Romanian cultural space and beyond. He represented to the Bassarabian artist a school of techniques and expressions, as well as a source of ideas, avidly assumed and integrated into his own personality. The “Zamfir obsession”, meaning the vinyl records, the recordings, identity roots that fueled their beauty and individual personalities. There is a rousing difference between the two, so evident at first sight, between Gheorghe Zamfir s passionate liberty and unleashed artistry, and Vasile Iovu’s inspired and rigorously unfolding passion. This difference confirms once again that, beyond talent and education, to be a performer is a state of being.

Vasile Iovu was loyally engaged as a soloist for over 40 years in the “Folclor” Orchestra (which was initially led by Dumitru Blajinu, then by the conductor Petre Neamţu) and was scandalously suspended for two years during the neo-communist government that wanted to rid itself of “Romanians”, “nationalists” and “rebels”. He also authored over 200 orchestral arrangements for instrumental pieces and folk songs, which are kept in the Radio-Television archive. The uncontested veteran of “Folclor” found that folk music provided the vein, the “mother lode”, according to an interview, which fueled and imprinted continuity to his idea that “folk music represents the nucleus of all genres”. This is not a new idea if we remember all the music that was inspired by modal archetypes or by certain folk themes that were assumed in the so-called “cultivated” music. However, to state that Doina and Balada represent “classical Romanian folk music” and to create your own works based on their archetypal syntax - this was a different message that gave a new meaning to his interpretive venture. Composed for the pan flute and organ and performed with Anna Strezeva, Doina and Pastorala, together with the piece în amintirea mamei (In Memory of Mother), are from beginning to end an expression of the modal thinking based on folk roots. However, listening to the melodic fluidity generated by the two instruments with essentially the same tubes and shapes, with the harmonic refinement accompanying thematic developments, from the lyrical, barely whispered, to the great dramatic peaks, ask yourselves if this can still be considered “creatively-enriched folk music”? What are these flashes ofbreath? These laments sounding like fatalities from a timeless world? What is this wail in the third octave (that sounds as if it were in the fourth!) which bursts open with suffering? This music contains great melodic themes, it is artful both at a general and detailed level, with a rich inspiration as basis. But the greatest accomplishment on the part of the author and performer is to sense and achieve the dimensioning and generalization of this music through the combination pan flute - organ. The organ’s presence manages to externalize the art of the Doina, to exalt and elevate its drama to the level of ineffable symbol. Vasile Iovu would reveal this Symbol to a fascinated public during a 1987 tour in France, together with Anna Strezeva, who described to the press an emoţional moment from this trip. During a concert presented by the Bassarabian artists at the Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre Church in Paris, Anna Strezeva’s organ assistant, a young French woman, stopped turning her pages and switching the ranks because her eyes welled up with tears at the sound of Pan’s flutes evoking the Memory of Mother. The cocert was a great triumph!

In order to get there, the one who debuted with Iovu’s Sîrba had to descend into folk music first as a soloist, then as an arranger, and then as the author of folk-style works, in order to show that it is possible to stop the flow of “folk kitsch” with a music that deciphers the uniqueness of an ethos, and doesn’t simply mimic it. In 1976, Vasile Iovu publishes a collection of “Melodies and dances for pan flute” which includes authentic folk music as well as folk-themed compositions that became equally known and beloved. Which one of them is more or less authentic? And which one of them are more or less enjoyed by the listener? Vasile Iovu aimed to recast the original folk model as a professional performer in order to present the essence of this music - “our eternal soul” - from a different perspective, not limited to the ethno-cultural tradition. He considered that “folk music must be enhanced”, and during the debates that took place in the 80s related to the danger of substituting “re-makings” for authentic itself, on condition that both be subjected to the value test. It is a point of view that reveals the concert performer that practices a concert repertoire, but who is also greatly gifted to follow his instincts and decide to express both the anonymous and his and inspiration with the force of native uniqueness.

 

When the first pan flute class opens in 1973 at the Art Institute, and 12 years later at the Music Academy “G. Musicescu”, the pan flute school, initiated, articulated and perpetuated by Vasile Iovu, was finally officially recognized; until then, this school practically did not exist in the Bassarabian space. The method of study in this class, whose mentor could be no other but Vasile Iovu, was based on the principie that adopts academic music as support for the study of a tradiţional instrument and repertoire. In other words, in order to be a professional, not an amateur, one needs to play Vivaldi, Cimarosa, Scarlatti, one needs to practice and cultivate the perfect proportions and forms of Bach, one needs to learn the beautiful lightness in Mozart’s music and the virtuoso techniques of the romantic repertoire. This principie was solidified in the “Pan flute Method” published in 1982 and applied in teaching several classes of students. Some of them were not even his own pan flute students, but rather fans who, having studied with other professors that had been among Iovus students, came to follow him, to assume his techniques, methods and repertoire, and to assist him in concerts and recitals that aroused their artistic imagination. Just as Iovu came to be obsessed with Gheorghe Zamfir and admired his mythical halo as “pan flute king”, Vasile Iovus pan flute became the object of obsession for some of his own admirers, students of new pan flutists generation, for whom he came to symbolize a living legend, a beacon, a model, if not a sacred monster to follow.

 

Previously, in Soviet Bassarabia, tediously named MSSR (Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic), music schools of all levels, including the Conservatory, taught Russian folk instruments, which produced professional balalaika and bayan players, while the study of local instruments was limited to marginal classes meant for amateur bands. The fight to open classes for naţional instruments in the 80s, including for the pan flute, and the achievement to ensure their survival and “westernization” amid the soviet occupation regime - that is a different story, one too long and dramatic to teii here, however one that today is part of the history of the glorious Bassarabian folk orchestras, and part of the biography of some well-known performers. What bears mention here is that, at the time when the authorities were pondering the dilemma of whether to accept the curriculum changes, an iniţiative which suspiciously bore resemblance to a “naţionalist drive”, Vasile Iovus personality, his prestige bolstered by awards and titles bearing Moscow’s endorsement, would convince the watchmen of cultural policy to acquiesce. The pan flute, the dulcimer, the tarragot-clarinet, as well as the folk violin would finally displace the balalaika, and later the bayan, the reconquered Conservatory department becoming naţional, rather than Russian. The instinct to survive in the empire, cornered and assaulted, would score a little victory.

 

Some would say that Vasile Iovu was born under a lucky star and they would be right; his artistic personality continued its course regardless of the weather and regardless of the authorities’ attempts to cast his as a cultural representative of the “great family USSR nations”. Vasile Iovu would be granted the titles of Honored Artist and Naţior Artist, he would be adored by the public and favored by the authorities, and the Studio “Telefilm-Chişinău” would produce four documentaries between 1970-80 about Vasi-e Iovu and his repertoire, which included the impressive journey of the pan flute in s of the most exotic countries, to Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, then to Australia and Japan, concurrently with his performances in European countries, both communist and capitalist. These incredible escapes were made possible courtesy of the Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a Soviet-type “impresario” and KGB structure set up to monitor cultural exchanges, however at the time the only means a folk music artist hâd of communicating with the musical establishment abroad. During one of his many tours with the “Mioriţa” Ensemble, this time to the Netherlands, while remaining a soloist: : the “Folclor” Orchestra of the Radio-Television, Vasile Iovu received his first employmerr offer as a pan flute professor at the Amsterdam Conservatory. This of course would ne: be mentioned in the “Telefilm-Chişinău” documentaries about Iovu. Moreover, the USSR embassy in the Netherlands never replied to the Bassarabian pan flutist’s applicatior.: work in the Dutch capital.

 

Winding back, at 25 years of age, his ship was just setting sail, on a long and exciting journey, one that would have a solid landmark - the deşire to always return home. Home were the “Folclor” Orchestra and his pan flute teaching classes, fertile grounds for his experiments, home was family, which he started at a young age, with the certainty the: Margareta Pînzaru, TV director and admirer of Romanian music and supporter ot the Latin script, which they used to write each other secret letters before getting married. would be the woman he would spend his life with. Although their marriage would talter years later and their divorce made headlines (as is always the case with local celebritic' their child, Doina (a rare name in the c70s in Soviet Bassarabia) and their grandchild. Alexandru, seem to have saved at least one beautiful episode of this marriage. His fate would nonetheless continue its trajectory, destined to accomplish the mission of the artist as we know it today. The folklorist Andrei Tamazlîcaru identified Vasile Iovu as the performer “who knew how to awaken our subconscious, the code of Romaniar. spirituality” during a time when he was opposed to the domination of the “drinking song”; during his tours, the boldest headline in the Bassarabian media of the 80s would audaciously announce that “Audiences everywhere stand up for the Doinaş and the Ballads”. Two very different geographical spaces united thanks to an excepţional artis:

 

The fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 changed not only borders but also mentalities, ar d stimulated a new order of things in a new and reborn world; the breath of freedom als< came to Bassarabia. The sequester of denationalization and of lies also fell, amid a stor:' hope, of the thirst for truth, which dispelled the old myths; this space was spontaneom overcome with massive Street protests, with tens of thousands of people, full of enthusiasm and waving the tricolor flag, feverishly rediscovered their own identity - a Romanian identity. This atmosphere was ideal for a pan flute concert in the National Square, led by Vasile Iovu who invited pan flutists of all ages from both sides of the river Prut. But first he wanted to see his dream come true - that of playing in Chişinău on the same stage with his idol, Gheorghe Zamfir. Iovu - Zamfir in a beautiful match on the stage of the National Palace and the Organ Hali - who could have dreamed such as feast? Concerts tuli of splendor and ecstatic passions, the two artists becoming an expression of hopeful times they would live together with their audiences. The blockages caused by nostalgia, errors and lost illusions would come later, however at that time the incandescent atmosphere fueled by the naţional spirit would reach its peaks, and the sound of the two Romanian pan flutes would carry the joy of that freedom. The creative freedom would fuse with the political freedom and - remember this historic moment! - would have the power to raise the artist to the level of naţional icon.

 

The start of the 90s was generally appearing favorable to Iovu’s idea of building an academic repertoire, which fell on fertile ground: Pan’s flute was perfectly assimilated and the access to Western concert halls was open. If Doina’s revelation came to mean the expression of the timbre, its mystery could not be understood in depth and revealed without exploring the classic scores. This was a natural conclusion for the performer-professor who saw the entire teaching repertoire metamorphose and emerge in its shining glory on stage. In 1992 he established a chamber ensemble to accompany him on his tours, the “Vasile Iovu” Ensemble (two violins, a dulcimer, a base, a clarinet and two pan flutes, one of them his of course), and thus was able to finally see his dream come true. That of weaving the voice of his pan flute with the most distinguished and refined classical operas in front of European audiences. The baroque splendor, Albinoni, Vivaldi, Corelli, Caccini, would be the surest way toward a concentrated expression of a popular repertoire, together with the classical, “painfully melodic” classical hits. It is here that the myth of the Pan God appears to become reality, spreading a thrilling, passionate perfume in Mozart’s Elvira Madigan, or exalting the melancholy and lyrical effusions of romanticism when the breath-soul of the pipes animate Schubert’s Serenade, or Solveig’s Song by Grieg, or the excessive emotions permeating each sound of Tchaikovsky s Sentimental Waltz. His temperament would stubbornly gravitate towards the h rical pan flute, towards that sentimental floating that would take the shape of the harmon: us sounds, of the warm timbre, of its mysterious energy discreetly surrounding the mei c its suppleness and absolute beauty. Or... perhaps the performance itself create' ane shapes the artist, helps him find his own emotions and reveal them to himselt and those who listen? Whatever the answer, the exaltations of the soul, those heartbreakings laments that pour out of his lyrical pan flute, this emoţional efficiency, this voluptu and pleasure to bare himself to the audience can only spring from the fantasy and crea:: ir. of his artistic mind and soul.

 

Behold an expert legato, profound and ample, with a generous breath, to be admired in Bach’s Chorale in G major; as well as in the Minuet from the Suite in B minor, after it had been thought for the longest time that an instrument like the pan flute is limitec to a reduced set of capabilities. In short, that it counts exclusively as a staccafo-playing instrument. A simple or double staccato would be Vasile Iovu’s ace reserved for Dans ţărănesc, a cello work of “imagined folklore” by the Romanian composer C. Dumitrescu as well as for the Scherzo from the same Bach Suite, or for Mozart’s Concerts in G and D major for flute and orchestra. Transposed for Pan’s flute, accompanied by piano or ensemble, and representing two different worlds, Dumitrescu’s fierce color and waggish tone and Mozart’s “playful sound”, though a playfulness necessarily pushed to emotion. these creations would confirm the looseness of an instrument that is perfectly adaptable t compositions that represent completely different styles and eras. Of course, on condition that it’s absolute sovereign is Vasile Iovu.

 Some classical and folk music adaptations for the pan flute would appear between 1993-2003 on four CD’s and several audio tapes produced in Austria, as well as by the record labei company Music Maşter from Chişinău. Recordings were made at the Radio-Televisior. studios, where Vasile Iovu would make permanent his soloist status with “Folclor” Orchestra, and would continue to search for the areas, always changing, where he could exercise his vocation as a complete artist. Among these, the CD “The Legend of Bassarabia has come to confirm, in time, the originality of his personality, launching many successful recordings over the years with “Folclor” Orchestra, anthological recordings with Vasile lovu’s version of the Ciocîrlia, together with Hora staccato by Grigoraş Dinicu and Lacrimile Prutului, signed by Vasile Iovu in a perfect Doina style.

 

The pan flute’s ability to approach different styles and genres would lead to the association and presence of Eugene Doga’s music in Iovu’s current repertoire. Theirs was a relationship of communicating vessels, productive and stimulating for both sides thanks to the composer’s insistence that Iovu’s pan flute - his sound, timbre, color and originality -be present in Eugene Doga’s scores, which graced the grandiose music shows organized in USSR’s largest cities and continuously provided material for Mosfilm’s soundtrack needs. A partnership that lasted, loyally and soundly, over many years, from one century to another and from one era to another, the Soviet era being replaced by the transition period, opening new avenues and stages, including the Romanian ones. Would the two artists, formed during the failed empire and applauded before in Moscow, Leningrad,

 

Kiev and Minsk, and in icy Siberia, imagine that they would be together again, this time on the stage of the Romanian Athenaeum, on the occasion of the Great Union’s 90th anniversary? That they would be (yes!) Romanian artists and not “Soviet Union cultural representatives”? The two artists are united through the ancestral sound of the pan flute, as well as through their own creative force, always looking for and finding each other: Doga - in the creative performance of Vasile Iovu’s pan flute, and Iovu - in the melodic bliss and lyrical intensity of Doga’s music. Their personal and artistic friendship would follow different laws than those dictated by circumstanţial suspense, which would defeat many great names of the music art on Prut’s left bank, such as Canio’s famous tenor, or the distinguished baton, grizzled in time, of the Symphonic Orchestra of the Teleradio Moldova Company, who, under political pressure, would give up participation at the Union show in Bucharest. For Doga and Iovu, however, it was an extraordinary chance to definitively test their creative friendship and their affiliation with the same values, both Romanian and universal in nature.

 

While Vasile Iovu’s performances would become less frequent and only on the occasion of “creative evenings” as part of various programs sponsored by event organizers, his priorities would change and he would connect with impresario agencies from abroad.

 

In a sign of respect for his artistic status, first managers from Moscow, then the German agency “Althoff”, specialized in the former Soviet space, and, at last, his brother Gheorghe Iovu’s company in Austria, would organize and monitor the soloist’s tours with his “Vasile Iovu” Ensemble in some of Europe’s most prestigious concert halls. On the stage of the Berliner Philharmonic, or the Mozart Hali in Mannheim, or at the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, or on the stage of the Congress Hali in Strasbourg, or in Vienna, in the huge Votive Church, able to accommodate two thousand people and famous for its acoustics - everywhere he went, maestro Vasile Iovu’s Pan’s flute - flute de Pan - Panflote - Pan-pipe would honor the sacred monsters and the establishments that bear their names with programs whose posture, style and rigor would ştir the admiration of his audiences. The pan flute show would appear in a double role: during the first act, wearing a bow tie suit, the ensemble would play classical music, and during the second act, wearing folk clothes, they would play tradiţional folk as well as folk-style pieces from aii the areas of the Great Romania. “Have we ever seen such ovations?” rhetorically asks the German newspaper “Dienstag” in November 1995. “The prolonged applause were the audiences thanksgiving for an excepţional concert to musicians who deserve the highest qualifier of internaţional class” - this excerpt deserves to be reproduced ad literam, especially since it is known that the German public and press are less exuberant and naturally calculated in offering exaggerated “epithets”; this time they would not restrained thcir admiration, with many newspapers calling these concerts “Fest der Panflote” - “Pan flute Fest”.

 

The three CD’s launched by the “Vasile Iovu” Ensemble in 2013 paint a loyal picture of this period and its original style, with a hallucinating excursus from the European compositional tradition to the folkloric one, and then on to the entertainment style, a picture that expounds upon each soloist’s degree of mastery (pan flute, clarinet, violin, dulcimer), upon the ensemble as a whole, which has been appreciated in Western concert halls over more than 20 years. Fiere we have a folk and classical music bând, dominated by the pan flute, unique in Bassarabia, which would iniţiate a European foray; a group of professionals, always different, but having a constant guide and the same principles of repertoire and performing requirements; a laboratory for the adaptation and transposition of dozens of scores from the universal and naţional music literature to the pan flute and other instruments; an “instrument” which, by way of its introduction to the Western European concert circuit, would in fact test the performing art of Pan’s flute in particular and of the Bassarabian performing arts in general, formerly considered as provincial.

 

This foray would also validate an artist against his ensemble, without whom he would have perhaps remained within the pre-defined parameters of USSR cultural-artistic delegate touring the world thanks to the so-called pacifist missions of the Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. The new concert season of his life, one that was' marked by freedom, difficulty, pragmatism, independence and commercialism, would in fact reconfirm the identity of a professional artist, his passion for performing, his ability to win over audiences regardless of era, political system, manner of organizing and compensating performances: in the Romanian Ciocîrlia or Schubert’s Ave Mar ia, his pan flute would be applauded with equal enthusiasm in Moscow, Delhi, Manila, Tokyo or, more recently, in Ziirich, Vienna, Mannheim, Bonn or Rome.

 

As an artist in full glory, after many years of hesitation and loneliness, Vasile Iovu would marry an unknown singer of folk music from the countryside, Maria Strătilă, the woman that would embody for him everything that a disappointed man and a lonely artist needs. Spicy and beautiful in her own way, with Black eyes and dark hair, 13 years younger than him, her voice was in the exact register (upper register) that he liked from the moment he heard her sing as part of an amateur folk bând in Şoldăneşti. Though she would never go on to become a professional singer, her discreet, warm and feminine voice would appear alongside her husbands pan flute in their CD symbolically titled “Love is like a flower”. For the duration of their marriage, suddenly interrupted by Maria’s terrible death due to a medical error, she would choose to do what she liked best: manage their own small, private restaurant, as well as the family money, supervise, stimulate, protect and care for her husband, loving the artist in him. This was her way of being an artist’s spouse, though it is rare when love extends beyond the human condition to become part of the shadow of an artist’s glory. Busy with tours, his repertoire, transpositions, orchestrations, teaching, everyday practice, he would have the certainty that his day-to-day life is safe, protected by her. Sadly, Maria’s life ended suddenly. A year after her passing, he would dedicate to her memory a concert of the grieving pan flute, “A love broken by fate”, a concert that translated into music the pain of his loneliness, which snatched him from his happy life and left him face-to-face with himself- the artist of great lyrical passions, emanating from his lonely soul, left from now on without his Iove.

 

The Bassarabian pan flute’s initiation road into the world that began in the 70s woidd continue and grow. In 1983, in Japan, Vasile Iovu was asked to teach the first pan flute lesson, and would receive as a gift a Japanese... Pan’s flute.

 

Then in 1989, in Australia, he would be invited for maşter classes and a professorship at the Brisbane Conservatory.

At the end of the 80s, French audiences would curiously mount the stage after a pan flute - organ recital in order to “better see the little organ”, and soon after, during the last decade of the century, many music schools in several European countries would open study classes for the new instrument. The instrument’s students in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland would follow “Vasile Iovu” Ensemble’s tours from city to city in order to receive pan flute lessons during the shows and after the shows, this “method” being so reminiscent of Vasile Iovu’s first escape to Vilnius in order to meet the “pan flute king”, Gheorghe Zamfir. Everywhere, he would meet passionate pan flute amateurs and pedantic collectors of records of the greatest performers, beginning with Gheorghe Zamfir and Vasile Iovu, and became convinced that the empire of the Pan God is expanding and conquering new lands. Lands where listeners’ hearts and souls belonged to him. Is it the sound that generates such fascination? Harmonies that produce an inexplicable emoţional effect through their vibrations in Doină, or in the ideal lines of Bach’s music, or in Schubert’s rustling? andforemost, be himself.

The ancestral tubes of the Lonely Shepherd seem to belong less to its author, James Last, and more to Gheorghe Zamfir. Their breath that melts into such an unmistakable lyrical passion, the emoţional intensity they arouse, their supple and refined breath that perfectly follows the beauty of the music, this Lonely Shepherd that belongs to a sensibility that cannot be comforted, just like the longing for home cannot be comforted, for the mountains, the sea, the sky of Romania, this nostalgic and mysterious “loner” would certainly belong to Vasile Iovu’s pan flute. In a contorted world that serves up too much truth, today we need more beauty. This is an older idea, sustained by the balance between the classical harmony and the new, between the musical substance and the novelty of the sound layer that seems to create an unexpected “frequency” of beauty. Flashes of pan flute sound we can all admire like “flowers that never disappoint”.

Just like the French, at one point we would ask ourselves: what is this “little organ” of maestro Vasile Iovu? This instrument would reveal the generosity of its horizons and its universal vocation, although we ourselves considered it anciently indigenous. Miraculously, it would elegantly acquire the French art of discretion and grace, it would navigate, vibrating, the sublime cantilenas of the Italian music, it would trace the perfect shapes of the Viennese classicism, and would easily embody the convolutions of modern music, while remaining the same instrument manufactured by the known pan flutist and self-taught folk artist, Petre Zaharia, the authentic pan flute which, in time, has the same age as Romanian folklore. Flutist - pan flutist? Performer - professor? Bassarabian - Romanian? European artist? Partially all of the above, Vasile Iovu would, first and foremost, be himself, the artist that absorbed a tradition and himself became a new tradition in the history of Pan’s flute. Objectively - or luckily? - Moldovan authorities ot all political colors would always be loyal to him: in 2000, on his 50th birthday, he would be awarded the Order of the Republic and the National Award, and a year later, he would receive a university professorship at the pan flute class of the Music Academy. Today, several generations of pan flutists, the younger Iulian Puşcă, Andrei Donţu, or those already established, Ştefan Negură, Ion Malcoci, Marin Gheras, Igor Podgoreanu, to name just a few of the best, are proof of the entrenchment of new techniques and a new repertoire that are the product of a new pan flute school, so spectacularly displayed in 1993 at the International Pan flute Festival in Chişinău. Vasile Iovu, the Pan’s flute artis: that would be called to naturalize this instrument in countries with totally different traditions than his birth place Bărdaru, would choose the left bank of the river Prut.

 

The sourse of information is the book Păstrătorul solitar sau Naiul lui Vasile Iovu written by Rodica Iuncu.