Eve Duncan and Alan Holly, an Australian duo who will, with the use of moderns tehniques on two solo instruments, remind us of how we enjoyed at the Podium Festival last year, when our festival composer was Alan Holly. Holly will open the concert tonight. With the composition King Street we will walk to the second stage of the Podium Festival at Church of St. Damjan and Kuzma.
After dreary of Australia, Bartok's Romanian dances will follow, evergreen in classical frames. From the mixing palette for various instruments and compositions, we have chosen a combination of clarinet and guitar, which perfectly illustrate the simplicity of the melodic lines of Romanian folk music.
By the end we will reach the unavoidable standard of world stage festivals, the String Quartet in F major that will reveal the subtlety, richness and sharpness of Ravel's music.
The proximity of the sea, its depth, or the translucency, roundaboutness and secrecy, spontaneously leads to other states of spirit and mind. In the sea of compositions that inspired us to a look at our own depths and a quest for balance in everything around us, we will take you into musical meditation with Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel". We will start and finish the concert „Meditation and sea“ with Pärt's music, which is considered the most spiritual music of today. Though it is written in a modern minimalistic style, the character of his music is the simplicity that is the mirror of the composer's style of life and worldview, based on spiritual values and the pursuit of purity, truth and beauty.
The purest and most direct form of expression in music is singing, and the voice is the most natural instrument. Through the voice of performaning Ives and Gounod's compositions for mezzosopran and piano, meditation take on a more realistic form even though the boundaries between imagination and reality are very vague. In the compositions of this year's resident composer J. Kretz, Inselmusik, in a sophisticated modern expression, is the perfection of harmony through the aliquot series. The scale which is resulting natural series of tones, encourages us to quickly define disagree as harmony. Along with Debussy, the leading composer in the Impressionist style of Chopin, a representative of the most beautiful in love tunes of romanticism, the listener in his meditation is called to rediscover the most fundamental feelings for survival, falling in love, lust and imagination.
How much Kupelwieser liked the Brijuni was shown by the fact that he built a family mausoleum where his wife Maria and son Karl are on an eternal rest.
The book mentions two artists who have stayed on the island and drawn inspiration from the exotic and delicate natural beauty of the environment.
Tonight, we will listnen to their music. They are oskar Nedbal and Richard Strauss
The final concert of this year's Podium Festival puts us in front of the question of mutual dependence and independence. This question is actually imposed on us by this year's resident composer Johannes Kretz from Austria. He is a distinguished specialist and professor of the prestigious Vienna University who will introduce us to his world of modern music with the composition In(ter)dependence which would have a double meaning in the translation as a combination of words; interdependence and depencence. Movements of composition Independence, Conflict, Destruction, Migration, Empathy, Dialog and Harmony talk about people's dependence on each other, and on the other hand, their desire for independence and independence, a constant argument from different worlds that can not be together, but they cannot be one withouth the other. With his composition for saxophone quartet, live electronics and visuals, quartet will show unmatched art in his creativity and contemporary form.
Circled with the colors of the saxophone quartet we will have the chance and experience the Croatian young author who lives and works in Vienna. Her song Wilde Rose at the same time celebrates and destroys the tradition and re-examines the classical beauty. The four different colors of saxophones serve as a perfect basis for describing introverted longing and absurd impulses and building a whole that contains many different character traits.
The standard of the world classic stages at the same time as one of the most famous works of Dvořák's creation is certainly the "American Quartet". He was composing in his most respectable period of time in America from 1892 to 1895. At that time, besides the American Quartet, he also wrote his most famous IX Symphony, and these works are often called the "Magnificent Works of the American Period."
From romanticism period we will be returned by our local composer Branko Okmaca, a professor at the Pula Academy of Music. His "Woodwind Trio“ is intertwined with elements of innovation and tradition. The original Istrian melosque composition will leave us in an ethnical atmosphere.