Farewell to honorary member Juraj Pajanović

With sadness we announce that our friend and singing colleague, honorary member of the Slovenski oktet, the bass Juraj Pajanović, has unexpectedly passed away in his seventy-first year.

He was a member of the Slovenski oktet from autumn 1996 to spring 2000.
We will keep him in fond memory. May he rest in peace.
Slovenski oktet

Excerpt from B. Pangerc: Slovenski oktet, Ljubljana, 2007

Juraj Pajanović was born in Sarajevo on 26 May 1950 and moved to Ljubljana in 1995. He sang bass in the Slovenski oktet from 1996 to 2000.
Although he had always loved singing, he came to the singing profession entirely by chance. He himself was enthusiastic about computing and says he became a singer by force. “I worked at the Alhoz factory in Sarajevo; together with fifteen other colleagues I was among the pioneers of computing. In 1972 we also attended a course organised by Intertrade IBM in Radovljica and at Bled. At the same time I was singing in the Academic Choir in Sarajevo, which was preparing Handel’s mass, and one of their key bass singers suddenly fell ill. The conductor asked me to save the situation. The performance went so well that in June 1974 I became a regular member of the Academic Choir, in September of the same year I was accepted into the RTV Sarajevo choir, and a year later I was engaged at the opera, which turned my life upside down. I don’t regret it at all, not in the least!”
He received much of his musical education privately and studied solo singing with Prof. Bruno Špiler at the Academy of Music in Sarajevo. His choral activity was rich. For twenty-five years he sang in the Academic Choir in Sarajevo and in the RTV Sarajevo Choir, then in Ljubljana in the octet Prijatelji; in 1995 he found employment as an opera singer at the Slovenian National Theatre Opera and Ballet in Ljubljana, where he began singing in the chorus and shaped small and medium roles on stage.
At the Opera he met Maestro Anton Nanut, who in 1996 conducted Šivic’s opera “Cortesova vrnitev” and at the same time began to form the new Slovenski oktet. In the opera Pajanović sang the role of Don Antonio, and Nanut drew him from the stage straight into the emerging new ensemble.
Juraj Pajanović sang in the Slovenski oktet until February 2000, when, because of increasingly frequent professional duties and growing family obligations (his second child had been born), he was faced with a choice.
Above all he has fond memories of the time he spent with the singers of the Slovenski oktet. He cherishes the friendships, especially with those singers with whom he is still in touch through work.
As someone devoted to singing, he enjoyed singing all kinds of songs and programmes with the octet.
“What Nanut and Vidic chose always suited me. In any case, I always sang with a professional approach. Perhaps I was most drawn to the old Slovenian masters with their folk arrangements, and I enjoyed it most when Vladimir Čadež and Jože Vidic sang their solo parts. Since I fell in love with singing, I also like to sing songs from the Russian or Old Church Slavonic liturgy. That is because my voice matches the nature of these songs, as they demand vocal depth and a firm column of sound.”
During the time Juraj Pajanović sang in the Slovenski oktet, the ensemble mostly performed in Slovenia; there was not as much travelling abroad as in earlier times. This period of course also coincided with the time when the new octet was still pursuing its new vocal identity and at the same time sorting out its internal relations, above all coordination with the individual members’ professional commitments.
Yet in four years of octet life the bass Pajanović, too, gathered countless experiences and amusing anecdotes.
“Among the strongest impressions certainly remain those of the concert in Sarajevo, right after the end of the war. My former singing colleagues and many friends who were thirsty for singing came to the concert. The performance took place in a special atmosphere that encouraged us on stage, so I must say it was a really good concert. The listeners were enthusiastic too, even though it was not the Slovenski oktet they were used to.
I also vividly remember a concert that never took place. In Hrvatini near Koper our organiser had arranged a full-length concert. We arrive, warm up, change – and there are no people anywhere. There was no advertising anywhere, either. We turned the awkward situation into a joke and soon got over it.
At the castle in Miren near Nova Gorica the baritone Zdravko Perger sang in a wheelchair. He was white as a sheet and full of fear, because he had run away from hospital. In Slovenj Gradec both baritones, Perger and Vidic, came to the concert on crutches; we sang in the choir loft, and as they slowly clattered up the steep stairs, we teased them that it is, after all, a steep road to heaven…
In Rečica ob Savinji the announcer told the story of the octet; she said that once there were dozens of singers, but in the end only eight remained. And she said it so seriously and convincingly that we could not help it and – perhaps a little impolitely – burst out laughing.

The hardest was in Gorenjska, in a small village where they had no proper hall and we sang as if in a kind of warehouse. The room was so dead that we could not hear what we were singing, and we had to watch each other’s lips to pronounce the words together.
The nicest adventure I had in Rijeka. During a concert I received a note from the audience on stage that read: Molim Dvenadcat razbojnikov. Hvala! Dvanajst razbojnikov was my hit – my signature song.”

Do you regret anything from that time?

“That I am no longer with the octet, not at all, because that was my choice. I make my living from professional singing and I was at a crossroads. But I am sorry that I have no more serious recording from that period, or that we did not manage to release our own CD at that time. We did try to record in Škofljica, but it was not the right time for it… Otherwise I have fond memories of the octet. With the octet members who live and work in Ljubljana I have stayed in good friendly contact. With some I even share a job at the Opera, so in essence we are still somehow singing together. I must say that with the octet I learned a great many Slovenian songs. Once, when I was warming up, I was surprised myself at how many I know…”

(Ljubljana, 21 June 2006)

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