Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra & MBZ

Ivana Kuljerić Bilić is an internationally recognized marimba virtuoso and a versatile percussionist who regularly performs with European orchestras and at major international festivals. Christoph Grund is a composer and instrumentalist, who, as stated in his biography, knows very well how to give the familiar music an aura of novelty. Grund is also adapt at offering the audience safety due to his music-historical and theoretical expertise when performing brand new, previously unknown pieces. The Zagreb Philharmonic will be conducted by Yalda Zamani, one of the most passionate promoters and interpreters of contemporary music of her generation. To find out more about Yalda, please see the MBZ story created for her participation in the 31^st Music Biennale Zagreb

In addition to compositions by Franck Bedrossian, Olga Neuwirth and prominent local composer Dalibor Bukvić, the repertoire also includes a composition by Luna Alcalay, Austrian composer, pianist and music teacher born almost a century ago in Zagreb. The composition sphygmogram signifies pulsation—it is also a building element of the piece’s entire structure: its rhythm, time, tonality, musical form, etc. In her early avant-garde phase, Luna Alcalay composed in the spirit of serialism, having first encountered new music during summer courses in Darmstadt in the 1960s. She began developing her most progressive ideas, that is, her own composing system in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, when sphygmogram was written, reached her artistic peak, accompanied by the improvement of her already pronounced critical awareness of the musical tradition, genres, methods and musical languages in general.

In between the orchestral works Laura Muller will perform Recitations by the Greek-French avant-garde composer Georges Aperghis, who mostly created chamber compositions or compositions for experimental forms of performing arts (musical theater, opera, etc.). The score of his Recitations was handwritten, and it is so graphically dense and hermetic–filled with graphs and various forms—that the performer can barely grasp it, yet it is at the same time very loosely shaped, so the performer has to heavily rely on their interpretative abilities.