If you’re a lover of classical music, head to Dubrovnik next week for a real gem!
If you stroll around the historic centre before sunset, make sure to visit the old apothecary in the Franciscan Monastery, opposite the Big Onofrio Fountain, in the main street. The apothecary is not only (one of) the oldest of its sort in the world, operating interruptedly since 1317, but its museum part will show you a number of old documents and artefacts. Among them is the oldest preserved sheet of music – not less than from 1102! Historians often take it as the beginning of music and of the musical life of Dubrovnik.
Nine centuries later, lots of music still echoes around its atriums, churches, palaces and squares, all year round. The Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra has been its main carrier, promoter and contributor for about 70 years now. Hundreds of conductors and soloists later, the Orchestra is pursuing with its usually sold out concerts at every part of the season.
And here is the concert we truly want to attend, at the Museum of Modern Art, on Tuesday the 23rd of May. The announcement is irresistibly promising : Uros Lajovic, conducting, Paolo Restani on the piano. And the Orchestra, of course. The impressive international career of Slovene conductor Uros Lajovic stands here as an undeniable promise of virtuous conducting, with his proverbial deep understanding of music and not any less, of the ‘mind of the musicians’ on stage.
We are so looking forward to hear ”Idyll”, the opening piece of the concert, by Dubrovnik born composer Blagoje Bersa (b. Dubrovnik, 1873, d. in Zagreb, 1934). Because, in our mind, this short movement (from Bersa’s Tragic Symphony) is simply one of the most beautiful pieces ever written!
To follow is yet another gem – Franz Liszt’s Malediction (‘curse’), his youthful composition for piano and strings, charming, modern, unusual and – not performed too often. Paolo Restani, the Italian pianist of an enviable international career, is certainly the one to take us away to the highest spheres of musical magic and unrestrained imagination.
The evening is going to end with Schubert’s Symphony no. 3, which Schubert wrote soon after his 18th birthday, and the music is very playful, chanting and melodic, so much that its last movement sounds as if written by Gioacchino Rossini, the grand Italian master of melody and rhythm.
Together with the beautiful ambiance of the Museum of Modern Art and the coziness of a springtime evening, all this wonderful music will certainly wrap us with that invisible feeling of happiness.
