RTV SLO Symphony Orchestra, Steven Loy and Žiga Stanič

Slovenian Music Days comes to a close with a celebration of the contemporary creativity that connects domestic and international musical currents and reflects the openness of Slovenia’s musical landscape after a century of radio broadcasting of art music. The closing concert is performed by the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, which is celebrating its 70^th anniversary in 2025 and has been characterised since its foundation by musical excellence and the highest level of performance. Conducted by Steven Loy, an internationally renowned interpreter of contemporary music who has conducted numerous premiere performances of 20^th-century works in Slovenia, the evening will culminate in a celebration of stylistic diversity.

The soloist is pianist and composer Žiga Stanič, a graduate of the Ljubljana Academy of Music and a former winner of a Student Prešeren Prize for composition, who since 2002 has also been music producer of the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra. His compositional work is based on an exploration of the psychological effect of musical expression, the relationship between euphony and dissonance, and the expressive possibilities of repetition and the prepared piano. His Piano Concerto No. 2 opens the evening, which continues after the interval with a journey into the musical worlds of Paul Clift and Vinko Globokar.

In Landscape (overexposed), Clift interweaves the contemporary musical idiom with the concepts of musical memory and tradition in his characteristically thoughtful way. Through the layering of colour, light and tonal shading, recognisable fragments of the Adagio from Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major by Ludwig van Beethoven appear and recede in different sections. Globokar’s orchestral version of Eisenberg represents a wholly different creative pole, based as it is on a score that primarily defines the formal structure, while the sonic fabric is created spontaneously according to specified rules. A musician of irrepressible creative energy, Globokar champions music as an active and critical force. Accordingly, this work too is strikingly direct, unpredictable and “earthly” and its performance requires imagination from the performers and an openness to a new sonic space on the part of the listeners. As one of the most influential European composers of the second half of the 20^th century, active between Paris, Cologne and other world music centres, he consistently upheld the view that music must have an impact, must stir and transform our perception of the world – an aesthetic principle that resounds in Eisenberg with its full expressive power.