INTERVIEW
What is the best thing about being a musician? For me, the stage is the right place to share my feelings with friends, colleagues and the public; feelings that I can only express through my musicianship and which I could not put into words or express better in any other way.
The most inspiring composer: I don’t think of any one composer as “most inspiring”, but I find several composers interesting, all for different personal reasons. The ones I feel closest to might be Haydn, Schubert or Shostakovich.
How do you spend your free time? Experimenting in the kitchen, reading, playing chess, listening to the music of the forest…
What’s the last book you read? Skandal: Kunst! A book that explains the political, social or artistic reasons for which specific pieces of art created a scandal at the time of their creation.
What CDs would you want with you on a desert island? Offstage I enjoy silence. If I play any CD, it will probably be one of Giora Feidman’s.
BIOGRAPHY
Jaan Bossier is a founding member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a clarinetist in Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt, and bass clarinetist in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. He is also founder and leader of the Jaan Bossier Quartet, for which he writes and arranges all the music.
From 2009 until 2015 he has been a teacher for clarinet, bass clarinet and contemporary music at the Musikhochschule Bremen. Since 2014 he is a teacher at the IEMA (International Ensemble Modern Academy) at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt am Main. Starting the school year of 2022-2023, Jaan is a professor of wind chamber music at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt.
As a solo clarinetist, he has been a regular guest with Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra among others. As a soloist, he has played concertos or works by Max Bruch, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, George Aperghis, Martin Matalon, Yannick Robin, Enno Poppe and Michel Van der Aa with both Ensemble Modern and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
He has been invited for various chamber music concerts and masterclasses around the world, including the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival (Germany), the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (France), the International Music Festival Vitoria (Spain) and the Korsholm Music Festival Vaasa (Finland).
As a chamber musician, Jaan partners with soloists from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, his colleagues in Ensemble Modern, members of the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, Rainer Honeck (concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra) and pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips.
In December 2000 Jaan Bossier made his debut as a conductor with the Belgian ensemble for contemporary and experimental music Champ d’Action. Since then, he has conducted at the Festival Wien Modern, Ars Musica Brussels, deSingel Antwerp, Concertgebouw Brugge and the Museum Reina Sofía in Madrid. From 2010 until 2013 he was the conductor of Ensemble 306, an ensemble for contemporary music in Eindhoven.
Jaan Bossier studied the clarinet with Prof. Walter Boeykens and the piano with Prof. Robert Groslot at the Royal Flemish Conservatory of Music in Antwerp. He took conducting masterclasses with Jorma Panula, as well as private lessons with Pierre Boulez and Zsolt Nagy.
He has appeared on CD and DVD recordings with the Jaan Bossier Quartet, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, Champ d’Action, Ensemble 306 and Clarinetnews.
Jaan Bossier is an Artist of Vandoren.
