Opening of the 40th Slovenian Music Days

Radio emerged in the 20^th century as a key nexus between musical creativity and technological progress. It shaped listening habits, broadcast the latest interpretations and encouraged the development of recording processes that transformed the radio studio into a space for the research of sound as musical material in its own right. It was precisely from this “laboratory” environment that musique concrète emerged in France – a composition practice inseparably linked with the radio studio, the editing of recorded sounds and the opening up of new possibilities for sound manipulation. Its theoretical basis was developed by Pierre Schaeffer, who used studio equipment to pioneer an entirely new approach to composition while working as an engineer at France’s public broadcaster RDF.

This creative circle also included Janez Matičič, the sole composer featured in the opening concert of the 40^th Slovenian Music Days. Trained under Lucijan Marija Škerjanc and still loyal to tradition in his early works, he began to interest himself in more contemporary musical currents while studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. A decisive stamp was placed on his creative endeavours by his years of collaboration with Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), in which he created a series of electroacoustic works between 1962 and 1975 and developed his own distinctive, expressively refined sound world.

Matičič significantly enriched the Slovene piano repertoire and piano music in general through his teaching and composition. His works for the instrument include his Piano Concerto No. 1 (1965), which opens the programme. The focus that would characterise his subsequent instrumental works for classical instruments was already clearly apparent in this period: he composed them according to a similar logic to that which he applied to his electroacoustic music, replacing the traditional parameters of harmony and melody with tone colour spectra, an emphasis on texture and layering, dramatic outbursts and dramaturgically shaped tensions. His forays into the symphonic genre predate this period and his Symphony No. 1 (1953) still shows the influences that shaped his earlier style, characterised by more traditional compositional techniques.

The opening concert is performed by members of the SNG Maribor Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simon Krečič, since 2013 the artistic director of the SNG Maribor Opera and a recipient of the City of Maribor’s Glazer Award for outstanding achievements in culture. The soloist is pianist Lovorka Nemeš Dular, a versatile musician whose activities include solo and chamber performances, teaching and musicological work, and whose musical career has also been marked by her close collaboration with Janez Matičič.