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54. dubrovačke ljetne igre 54th Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2003. Hrvatska Croatia Akademski zbor Ivan Goran Kovačić Ivan Goran Kovačić Academic Choir Luka Vukšić Dirigent Conductor Atrij Kneževa dvora Rector's Palace Atrium 8. kolovoza 8th August 21.30 9.30 p.m. Georg Friedrich Händel: Canticorum iubilo Alessandro Scarlatti: Exultate Deo Marc' Antonio Ingegneri: Ecce quomodo moritur Tomás Luis da Victoria: Ave Maria Jacobus Arcadelt: Ave Maria Dmitrij Stjepanovič Bortnjanski: 34. duhovni koncert Sacred Concerto No. 34 Sergej Vasiljevič Rahmanjinov: Bogorodice djevo The Blessed Virgin Hector Berlioz: Quaerens me iz Requiema Quarens me from Requiem Johannes Brahms: Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen, motet za zbor a cappella, op. 74, br. 1 Motet for choir a cappella, Op. 74, No. 1 Langsam und ausdruckvoll Wenig bewegter Langsam und sanft Choral Franjo Dugan: Molitva Prayer Franjo Dugan ml. jr.: Zahvalnica Thanksgiving song Boris Papandopulo: Nad grobom ljepote djevojke The Tomb of a Beautiful Girl Josip Štolcer Slavenski: Voda zvira Water springs The Ivan Goran Kovačić Academic Choir was founded in 1948, under prominent artistic leadership from the very beginning, including Duško Prašelj, Županović, Adalbert Marković, Dinko Fio, Vladimir Kranjčević and Saša Britvić. Saša Britvić has been the artistic leader of the Choir since 1987. The Choir has pleased the audiences all over Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Hungary, the USA, China and Korea, and at most prestigious festivals as are Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Wiener Festwoche, the Settembre musica in Turin, the Flaneries musicales in Rems, the French Music Festival in La Chaise Dieu, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, the Varaždin Baroque Evenings, the Pula Summer Festival, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the City Theatre Orchestra from Florence, the National Opera Orchestra from Monte Carlo, the Bari Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Youth Orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchestra from Leipzig, the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, the Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra, the Croatian Radio Television Symphony Orchestra, the Croatian Army Wind Symphony Orchestra, under Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Dmitri Kitayenko, Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Hans Graf, Pinchas Steinberg, Gustav Kuhn, Lovro von Matačić, Milan Horvat, Kazushi Ono and Vjekoslav Šutej. The choir holds numerous recognitions and awards, including the Rector’s Award of the Zagreb University, the Zagreb City Award and the Vladimir Nazor Award. Conductor Luka Vukšić (1976) was born in Zagreb. He graduated from the Josip Hatze Music School in Split (1994) and later graduated in conducting from the Zagreb Academy of Music under Igor Gjadrov. He was awarded the Rector’s Award for his degree concert with the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra and received the scholarship of the Lovro and Lilly Matačić Foundation. He completed his postgraduate studies at the Liszt Ferenz Music University in Budapest under Ervin Lukács and Tamás Gál. He attended master courses of Ronald Zollman and Jury Simonov. Having returned to Zagreb he has been engaged as choir leader and since April 2003 as artistic director of the Ivan Goran Kovačić Academic Choir. He has performed with the renowned orchestras such as the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra, the Croatian Army Wind Symphony Orchestra, the Croatian Baroque Ensemble (which he also co-founded), the Pečuh Symphony Orchestra, etc. In November 2000 he was awarded the Ivo Vuljević Croatian Music Youth Award for Best Young Musician. The conductor of the Ivan Goran Kovačić Academic Choir, he adapted several major vocal-instrumental pieces including Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Requiems by Mozart, Verdi and Berlioz, Mahler’s Symphonies Nos. 2, 3 and 8, Brahms’ German Requiem, Bruckner’s Te Deum, Orff’s Carmina Burana and Catuli carmina, Weber’s opera The Freeshooter, etc. He is presently engaged in his postgraduate studies at the Vienna Music University with Leopold Hager. In addition to operas and oratorios, the great German master of baroque Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) also composed concertos for various instruments (oboe, harp, etc), concerti grossi, suites, chamber music and pieces for harpsichord, employing the music elements of German, Italian and English origin. His music equally expresses the joy of man who freely moves in the world - on a completely different pole from Bach’s worldview limited in the practical life – and the tragic loftiness of an individual whose efforts do not meet the understanding of his environment. Canticorum iubilo is a short and above all solemn fragment from Händel’s oratory Judas Maccabaeus from 1747. The piece is performed in the Latin translation from the original written in English language. These are specific vocal fanfares composed in the A-B-A-B1-A form, wherein the A-fragments are energetic and strong and B-fragments quiet and somewhat restrained. The same segment appears in Händel’s oratory Joshua (1748). The prolific Italian composer Allesandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), father of the brilliant Domenico, is the most prominent representative of the transition period from the Venetian to the Neapolitan opera school. In his operatic output (about 115 operas) he developed and perfected the style principles of Monteverdi and his successors. His main features are: harmony of the form, melodic elegance and application of expressive contrast, from the restrained lyricism to the dramatic accents. He also significantly improved the instrumental works, and the precious style elements from the operas are also present in his chamber cantatas. Scarlatti’s vocal piece Exultate Deo is one of the most often performed motets ever. It is composed in the A-B-C-B form, wherein the central, quieter C-part is simple-homophonic in its first half, and complex-polyphonic in the second part. Italian composer Marco Antonio Ingegneri (1547-1592) was probably a pupil of Ruffo. Since 1576 he was the music prefect in Cremona Cathedral, where he became the Choirmaster in 1581. He taught Claudio Monteverdi and was a major representative of the North Italian school in the last third of the 16th Century, equally significant composer of madrigals and church music. His madrigals are marked by sudden rhythmic changes, fine and expressive chromatics, moderate means of tonal language and enchanting melody. In his treatment of the polyphony one can recognize that Ingegneri was raised on the Dutch tradition. Ecce quomodo moritur is a madrigal composed in a homophonic structure with the sound reminding of Orlando di Lasso. Composed in the A-B-A form, the piece is filled with a quiet and sad, mystical atmosphere in which the accords have not been completely defined. The central part of the madrigal, enriched by the polyphony, is composed only for the female choir. Spanish composer Tomás Luis da Victoria (1548-1611) began to study music as a choirboy at Ávila Cathedral; around 1565 became a pupil at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome. From 1569 to 1574 he was a singer and organist in Rome and since 1571 also a music teacher at the same Collegium. A bit later he succeeded Palestrina as chaplain at the Seminarium Romanum. In 1575 he was ordained to the priesthood and lived in seclusion as a priest of San Gerolamo della Carità Church till 1585 and since 1585 until his death was a chaplain at Descalzas Reales de S. Clara convent in Madrid. He composed only sacral music. Out of his 20 masses, 15 are parodies, 4 paraphrases, and only one is of free authorship. He used a distinctive melodic system and applied the true chromatics. His harmonies are clear and certain fragments are separated by cadenzas. He is considered one of the major Late Renaissance masters. The authorship of Ave Maria has not been confirmed till the present day. Its gentle and subtle, skilfully structured polyphony introduces interesting alterations of various sound levels. Dutch composer Jacob Arcadelt (around 1500-1568) was probably a pupil of Josquin des Prés, because his early works are inspired by the style of that great master. Arcadelt stayed in Italy for a long time, first (in the thirties) in Florence, than in Rome where he was a singer (tenor) at first and from 1540 to (at the latest) 1552 the singingmaster at the Papal Chapel. His three masses were published in Paris (1557) so he became the court conductor of cardinal Charles of Lorraine. Accompanying the cardinal he came to the French court where he got the title regius musicus. He mainly composed secular music, madrigals in particular (more than 200) and the French chansons (around 120). His madrigals won him a special popularity: Book I of his four-voice madrigals had 40 editions during his lifetime and madrigal Il bianco e dolce is an anthology piece. His style places him among the early renaissance madrigal composers; he regularly composed in four voices, while emphasising the higher voice is still in connection with frottola. His harmonies are pure, diatonic, his structure polyphonic, only at times in accords, the expression is melodious-lyrical, and the interpretation of the text (mainly by Petrarca) is markedly poetic. Ave Maria is a real motet masterpiece, actually a monologue of the soprano part with the accompaniment of other voices; the polyphonically more elaborated tissue appears only occasionally. Russian composer Dmitry Stepanovich Bortnyansky (1751-1825) first sang in the boys’ choir of the St. Petersburg court chapel and studied composition under Galuppi, who at the time resided in Russia. When Galuppi left Russia, Bortnyansky got a scholarship to follow him to Venice. He later studied in Bologna, Rome and Naples and his operas were performed in Italy. Having returned to Russia (1779) he become court musician at the court of the great prince Paul Petrovich, and in 1796 he was appointed the court chapel master, which developed into a major centre of Russian choir singing. The most talented Russian composer of the 18th Century, he composed musical and stage works, instrumental pieces and solo songs under the Italian influence. However, the most numerous and significant are his church pieces, particularly the sacral a cappella concertos, in which Bortnyansky avoids frivolous virtuosity but expresses a masterful polyphony, introduces the Ukraine folk melodies and closely blends the word and the tone. He managed to achieve monumental effects in his concertos for two choirs, which were suitable to aggrandize the court festivities. His church pieces become a model for the Russian church composers until the middle of the 19th Century. His Sacred Concerto No. 34 is a classically complex, fourmovements piece consisting of four connected miniature movements, none of which exceeding one minute. The first (Allegro) is a quick, buoyant-solemn movement and the second movement (Largo) is in a calm and contemplative mood. The third movement (Andante maestoso) is a powerful and loud segment filled with heavy, festive chords and the fourth and final movement (Allegro moderato) is a Mozartian effective fugato, which eventually calms down and gradually disappears. Russian composer, pianist and conductor Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov (18731943) is famous for his popular piano concertos and above all effective solo piano pieces. He successfully proved his fresh and always interesting melodic and harmonic invention in several grand church pieces among which particularly prominent are the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the All-Night Vigil and the motet Deus Meus. The Blessed Virgin is a short, homophonic piece, fortified by occasional polyphonic blocks, which give evidence of Rachmaninov’s mastery. In 1836, the French Minister of Interior Affairs, count Gasparin, commissioned a Requiem or High Mass for the Dead for tenor solo, choir and orchestra, Opus 5 from the young composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) for a fee of three thousand francs. The piece was to be performed in 1837 at the festive concert for the victims of the July Revolution that took place seven years before. After many troubles, because at the time famous academician Cherubini and his followers interfered in the commission game, the piece was first performed in October 1837, on the occasion of the funeral of general Damermont and the French soldiers killed in the Algerian battles, under the baton of François-Antoine Habeneck. The Requiem was met with general acclaim by the protagonists of the Paris artistic life. The piece offers numerous powerful, interesting contrasting moments with particularly accentuated colour. Berlioz (like Verdi, later on) concentrates his expression power on the dramatic image of the Last Judgement in the movement Dies irae. The text is considered to be written by Tommaso de Celano, who died in 1250. His text was used in even five sections of the first part of the Requiem (from Dies irae to Lacrymose). The three great music blocks are inspired by the beginning, middle and end of this moving poem. The humble-slow Quarens is the fifth excerpt from the Requiem with the female choir unison singing, while the male singing parts are just a modest setting for their meditation. The almost twenty years long career of chapel master of Johannes Brahms (18331897) can be divided into four different periods. From 1857 to 1859 he was the conductor of the Court Choir in Detmold and from 1859 to 1861 worked with the Hamburg Female Choir, a small vocal group of twelve female voices that made a great success under his firm leadership. He left this choir very reluctantly when appointed the conductor of the Vienna Singakademie in 1863 for which he soon composed a huge choir repertoire without instrumental accompaniment. During his last engagement as choir leader that lasted from 1872 to 1875 he was artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Music Lovers Society) in Vienna. When the structure is concerned, in many of his choir pieces, Brahms continued the great German choir tradition from H. Schutz to J. S. Bach. Like in his other works, the vocal structure is based on the experience of the old masters (particularly those from the periods of renaissance and baroque), but the thoughts and feelings are his own. In this tonal tissue the rhetorical music articulation perfectly matches the distinctive romantic rapture, which is essentially focused on the melodic, harmonic and, generally speaking, lyrical expressive tension. While doing so, Brahms never betrays the basic principles of a cappella choir singing: its clarity, flexibility and spontaneity. The most successful of Brahms’ motets are those from Opus 29 (from 1864), 74 (from 1879) as well as 109 and 110 (from 1890). Brahms composed his Two motets for the four to six voices choir without instrumental accompaniment, Opus 74, in 1863, i.e. 1877, dedicating them to Philipp Spitta. The First motet, Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen (Why is the light given to the wretched man), is an anthological piece inspired by the texts from Job (3:20-23), Laments (3.41), Jacob (5:11) and Martin Luther. It consists of four different fragments. The slow and expressive first fragment is a masterfully composed fugue in four voices that is two times interrupted by the beginning and closing cadenza to the question (which haunts the man from the beginning) Why? The slower second fragment is a four-voice imitation that starts from the beginning two times (that is why it repeats the four first bars), and, feeding on Bach’s symbolism, the highest tone f2 rises (and persistently repeats) when the key words: Heaven, us and God appear. The third fragment is the slow and docile-gentle choral in six voices (with doubled sopranos and basses) with an expressive melody in the highest voice. It consists of two parts: while in the first one (4/4 measure) the basic unit is the quaver, in the second one (6/4 measure) this role is taken by the crotchet. The fourth and final fragment is a chorale consisting of six parts with a slow ending, partially inspired by the old modes. Owing to his instrument, the Croatian composer and famous organ player Franjo Dugan (Sen) (1874-1948) was profoundly fond of church music, with which he was engaged during his entire life. Following the principles of the great masters of polyphony, Dugan had an aversion to every extreme and structure fatigue and therefore in his distinctive motet Molitva (the Prayer) he skilfully combines polyphony and homophony, reaching to the very core of music applying apparently modest means. The pupil of his father, Franjo Dugan (Jnr) (1901-1934) also an engineer employed on the railway, was mainly engaged in vocal music and folklore. He diligently and with a lot of taste harmonised folk melodies and later convincingly incorporated them into his not very huge but valuable composing opus. His Zahvalnica (Thanksgiving song) is a secular piece composed in the A-B-C-A form. Vividly and pleasingly, the piece cheerfully celebrates the harvest, crop, vine and nature in general. The general complexity of the theme and proved mastery of his trade that enables the prolific Croatian composer Boris Papandopulo (1906-1991) to convincingly blend the world and folk idiom – are the main features of his major composing period from 1930 to 1940. Inspired by the Collection of Folk Poems by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Papandopulo composed his anthological Dodolice, the folk ritual for soprano solo, girls choir and piano in 1932 and about a year later the exceptionally successful sophisticated-lyrical short choir piece Nad grobom ljepote djevojke (The Tomb of a Beautiful Girl) in which he achieves a perfect balance of colours equally by a careful distribution of sections both in the homophony and polyphony. The piece is interrupted by the interesting occasional breaks-cadences, which do not disturb the music but give it a new power. The end of the piece is very effective with the lingering of female voices that conjure up an impressive tonal image of the immortal girl's soul. The powerful personality of Croatian composer Josip Štolcer Slavenski (1896-1955) laid the foundation of the contemporary Croatian music. Belonging to no school and not limited in his standpoints, Slavenski foresaw almost all questions of the new sound, finding the solutions that would in similar variants be found with other world composers only several decades later. Among other significant ideas, there is his conception of an all-encompassing sound synthesis regarding the space and time, which includes the author’s distinctive affinity for the endless spaces of the universe. There is also an individual treatment of the harmony in which the multiple definition of the tonality rises above the Schönberg's theory of pan-tonality. Discovering some new laws of harmony, Slavenski introduces into Croatian music the idea of the tonal cluster almost 30 years before the appearance of the new Polish school. In his relation to rhythm, he has a very authentic standpoint about the accident, the structural music of coincidence; in some movements of the Orient Symphony the principle of the free performing reaction and its mutual signalisation appear for the first time in the modern European music, which leaves an impression of a different broken condition of music and a new freshness of the metro-rhythmic move. The infinity of his melodies seems to be inspired by some other civilisations; the influence of the East, the last great announcement in the output of Josip Slavenski, is an idea that haunted the European music of the 20th Century. The piece Voda zvira (The Water springs) is probably the most precious jewel in the crown of his distinctive arrangements of the original melodies from his native Međimurje. D. Detoni