Springtime in Yugoslavia
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Label: Australian Eloquence
Cat No: ELQ4840200
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 2
Release Date: 15th March 2019
Contents
Works
Licitarsko srce (The Gingerbread Heart): ballet musicLachian Dances (6)
Taras Bulba
Davo u selu (The Devil in the Village): Suite
Simfonija Orijenta 'Religiofonija'
Artists
Melanija Bugarinovic (mezzo-soprano)Dusan Cvejic (tenor)
Dusan Popovic (baritone)
Zarko Cvejic (bass)
Orchestra of the National Opera House, Zagreb
Belgrade Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductors
Fran LhotkaKresimir Baranovic
Francois Huybrechts
Zivojin Zdravkovic
Works
Licitarsko srce (The Gingerbread Heart): ballet musicLachian Dances (6)
Taras Bulba
Davo u selu (The Devil in the Village): Suite
Simfonija Orijenta 'Religiofonija'
Artists
Melanija Bugarinovic (mezzo-soprano)Dusan Cvejic (tenor)
Dusan Popovic (baritone)
Zarko Cvejic (bass)
Orchestra of the National Opera House, Zagreb
Belgrade Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductors
Fran LhotkaKresimir Baranovic
Francois Huybrechts
Zivojin Zdravkovic
About
This release forms an important appendix to the Eloquence reissues of the seven Russian opera recordings made by Decca with the company of the Belgrade Opera in 1955. Two further orchestral albums were recorded at the time, featuring three of the most significant Yugoslav composers of the day. The first of them features brightly coloured, picture-postcard suites from two folk-inspired ballets, The Gingerbread Heart by Krešimir Baranović and The Devil in the Village by Fran Lhotka. They were conducted with idiomatic elan by Baranović himself, who was then the chief conductor of the Zagreb Opera, and director of several of the Belgrade opera recordings (he also conducted The Gingerbread Heart at the 1951 Edinburgh Festival to great success).
Several vocal soloists from those recordings feature on the Simfonija Orijenta, an extraordinarily ambitious work that attempts a portrait history in music of the world’s great religions over the course of seven movements and 40 minutes, concluding with a grand Soviet ‘Hymn of Toil’. It was composed by Zagreb-born Josip Štolcer-Slavenski, the first Yugoslav modernist, who went further than either Lhotka or Baranović in studying and then deploying folk idiom, to which he added avant-garde techniques that earnt his music a place at some of Europe’s premier new-music festivals in Donaueschingen, Paris and London.
Slavenski’s work has a thrilling angularity and unpredictability, as individual in its way as the language of Leoš Janáček, whose Taras Bulba and Lachian Dances featured on the debut album for Decca by the Belgian-born conductor François Huybrechts. A rising maestro during the 1970s, he was a prizewinner of the 1968 Dimitri Mitropoulos International Music competition for Conductors and the 1970 Karajan International Conductors’ Competition.
‘Nowadays many people are suspicious of modern music that is attractive at a first hearing. If you have not reached that degree of sophistication you will enjoy this record.’ – Gramophone, July 1955 (Baranović/Lhotka)
‘The recording is splendidly vivid, the orchestral playing assured and vivid, the soloists strong and secure, and the choral singing first-rate.’ – Gramophone, July 1955 (Štolcer-Slavenski)
‘We’ll be hearing again, and often, from so promising a youngster as Huybrechts - and meanwhile his Lachian Dances should not be missed.’ – High Fidelity, October 1972 (Janáček)
Recording locations:
- National Theatre, Zagreb, Yugoslavia, March 1955 (Baranović)
- National Theatre, Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 1–13 April 1955 (Lhotka, Štolcer-Slavenski)
- LXT 5058 (Lhotka, Baranović)
- LXT 5057 (Štolcer-Slavenski)
- SXL 6507 (Janáček)
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