After 40 years, the new first performance of Silvio Foretić’s Semi-mono-opera before an audience

On Monday, 10 October 2022, in Teater &TD the Music Biennale Zagreb is to present the revised version of composer Silvio Foretić’s Semi-mono-opera. This 1979 piece made for a singer and tape that was first performed that same year at MBZ is to be reintroduced to the audiences in a new manner. The composer prepared it in collaboration with Višeslav Laboš and Tihomir Vrbanec, and it was performed by tenor Ladislav Vrgoć with tape.

With each professional endeavour, Silvio Foretić reaffirms his deep roots in the contemporary music and electronic genres as a composer, conductor, pianist, and singer who regularly performs his compositions. His works emanate a good dose of humour, which the eminent musicologist and fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts Nikša Gligo interprets as a reaction to hardships in a manner in which Foretić ridicules reality. Silvio Foretić is also the winner of the Porin Award for lifetime achievement, and numerous other acknowledgments. 

The MBZ Stories series inquired Foretić if he had ever wondered what 2021 would look like back in 1979, to which he responds: 

“I did not dwell on it. I never wanted to be some kind of prophet, or a fighter for the fate of music, although some believe they must. But you cannot write that way. I just wrote music – once more conservative, another time more modern, the third time more fun, the fourth time sadder… I did my own thing.”

The participants involved in the revision of the opera, fully entitled Semi-mono-opera, a “semi-opera, semi-seria” for a singer and electronics, were the director Mario Kovač, set designer Andreja Lipej, costume designer Iva Matija Bitanga and light designer Bojan Gagić. Višeslav Laboš and Tihomir Vrbanec managed the music, while Ivan Josip Skender was in charge of the final recording production. 

This revisited premiere was originally planned as part of the previous year’s festival but was postponed due to technical matters. It will now mark the start of the Biennale's pre-program which the audiences will be able to follow up until April 2023 and the new edition of the Music Biennale Zagreb.

Watch and listen to the Semi-mono-opera on Monday, 10 October 2022 at &TD Theatre at 8 PM.

Photo: Vedran Metelko