Lana Trotovšek, Steven Loy, RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra

The closing concert of the 38th Slovenian Music Days is dedicated to contemporary creativity. It will be opened by one of the most globally successful Slovene composers, Božidar Kos, a multiple award winning artist who built his worldwide fame in the southern hemisphere and has established himself among the leading musical figures in Australia and the wider Pacific region. His musical language resonates with the vastness of distant landscapes combined with a hint of the cosmic. His Sinfonietta  for strings (1984) dates from the period in which Kos began to fuse the music of the European avant-garde with elements of Balkan folk music.
The heart of the programme consists of two works by composers with very different approaches who have both found creative inspiration in children. Premiered in 2023, both works were created as part of the artistic research project B-AIR, which looks at how sound influences people at all stages of life, from the cradle to the grave. Serbian artist Svetlana Maraš, who works at the interface of experimental music, sound art and new media, drew on the adventurous, fresh and boundless musicianship of children and their freedom of experimentation and improvisation for her piece Defiance of the Glorious Children.  Larisa Vrhunc, one of the first female Slovene composers in the history of Slovene creativity to achieve international recognition, focuses on the very youngest children in her composition So Quiet,  selected as a “recommended work” at the 69th International Rostrum of Composers in the Netherlands last year. This quiet music specifically created for babies and toddlers opens up the hitherto unexplored field of presenting music to the very youngest audiences.
Our festival of music comes to end with a performance of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 49,  by Janez Matičič, a virtuoso pianist who began his musical career as a violinist. This concerto, infused with the dynamics of sensuality and control, dates from the late 1970s, when the composer was already deeply imbued with the spirit of Paris. We will hear the work performed by the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra under conductor Steven Loy and the young, London-based Slovene violinist Lana Trotovšek, who over the past decade has built an enviable international career as a soloist.