The world's greatest cellist hoped to outlive fascism. The cellist died first. His spirit survived.

The Festival Pablo Casals Prades Collective is the awkward name for the six-person classical music ensemble that Chamber Music Monterey Bay is bringing to Sunset Center this Saturday evening to open their new season. The name is really just being explicit. Like the musical ensembles Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour or the Carmel Bach Festival Players.

I asked the festival's artistic director and the touring group's clarinetist, Michele Lethiec, about the man who spawned the festival that spawned the ensemble, Pablo Casals.

"Thanks you for the question," he replied in an enthusiastic and strong French accent. "As you know he was a fantastic cellist, but also a very important humanist."

Casals, who was born in Spain in 1876 and lived to 1973, was considered one of the best cellists of the 19th century. He was gifted musically, and rose up through the ranks of formal schooling, mentorship and recitals until he was playing prestigious concerts—at London's Crystal Palace before Queen Victoria, at the White House for President Theodore Roosevelt.

Before World War II, when the Spanish Civil War erupted 1936-1939 between the Republicans (different kind of Republican) and the Nationalists (aka Fascists), Casals, as part of the three Pablos—poet Pablo Neruda and painter Pablo Picasso being the other two—left Spain. 

"He became a refugee in Prades [France], a very small city close to the Spanish border. He was there during the second world war, when Hitler died, when Mussolini was killed, but Franco was still in power. [Casals] decided never to come back to Spain until Franco was out. But Casals died first."

But for most of his adult life, Casals had built up an enormous reputation as a sublime cellist, especially of Bach's Cello Suites. Everyone wanted to hear him play, but he would not play any country that recognized Franco's rule of Spain.

"Everybody was saying 'You can have any money you want, come back to America, to New York, to Paris. He refused. The most important musicians came to him in Prades. They said 'Pablo, we understand you don't want to play anywhere in the world. Can you accept that we come to play with you?'"

Thus the Prades Festival was born, in 1950, in a quaint little village on a hill. It's one of the longest-running festivals in classical music. And its commitment to Casal's humanism and resolve is still there.

"Yesterday I had dinner with Mrs. Casals in Washington, DC," Lethiec says. "We are musicians, but music is there to give a message to people. We try to give the idea from the composer. Casals was using the music until the end of his life to say we have to fight for the peace of the world."

How that will translate this Saturday in Carmel is in a program that reflects Casals' life and travels, Lethiec says. Faure's "Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor" represents France and was written in 1876, the year Casals was born. The second movement of Mozart's "Clarinet Quintet in A Major" was played at Casal's funeral by his request. Milhaud's "La Creation du Monde" ("The Creation of the World") was a reflection of a European's fascination and admiration with America, as Casals was. (He lived also in Puerto Rico, where his mother was from, and established a festival there and is buried there.) And then there's Prokofiev's "Overture on Hebrew Themes," which harkens to his solidarity, as a refugee, with Jews persecuted by fascists. 

The six musicians coming to open Chamber Music Monterey Bay's 2014-15 season, touring for the first time in the U.S., offer pitch-perfect interpretations of the music. They are Lethiec on clarinet, Kyoko Takezawa on violin, Elina Vahala on violin, Nobuko Imai on viola, Arto Noras on cello and Melvin Chen on piano.

"We are the best musicians in the world coming [to Prades] every summer, playing, teaching, touring," Lethiec says. "It's a beautiful story."