Musicians from Zadar play Bjelinski
Adrian Valčić, Silvija Magdalena Šimić, Antonija Šoša, Ivan Štorić: piano
Antea Poljak: soprano, Luka Šindija: tenor
Ana Lakić, flute
Bruno Bjelinski
The final concert of this year's edition of Musical Evenings at St Donatus is again dedicated to Bruno Bjelinski, a composer of childish playfulness and authentic composition, most frequently associated with neo-Classicism. A great part of Bjelinski’s oeuvre was inspired by children’s topics; thus, it is not surprising that this year’s Musical Evenings started with Peter Pan and ended with Ciciban. If we consider that besides the mentioned ballet and song cycle Bjelinski also composed the opera Maya the Bee, ballets Pinocchio and The Cat in Boots, one can see an image of a composer who, until his death on the island of Silba in 1992, was truly a young man of a joyful spirit. He spent most of his life as a professor of the Music Academy and his students, today all pensioners, remember him as a devoted professor with a lot of affection for the courses he was teaching and the young people he worked with. However, Bruno Bjelinski (born as Bruno Weiss) had another side, in which he experienced and demonstrated the life’s hardships, and which the audience will be able to encounter in the cycle Songs for the Nameless.
Bruno Weiss was born in Trieste in 1909 in a Jewish family. After the untimely death of his mother he returned to Zagreb, where he spent the childhood with his grandmother. The next shock in life occurred in late 1920s, when his father went bankrupt due to the great global recession. However, the real problems in the life of a young Jew started with the onset of World War II, when 32-year-old Bruno ended up in a forced internment in Korčula and Bari, to finally join the Partisan movement after the fall of Italy in 1943.
Bjelinski was not only a multi-talented man (he wrote poetry and prose, and he drew), he was also a highly educated man. Apart from studying composition in the class of Blagoje Bersa and Franjo Dugan, graduating in 1936, he was one of the composers who also enrolled in law studies. However, unlike somewhat older Jakov Gotovac, who quit his studies to dedicate to composing and conducting, Bjelinski obtained his degree of Doctor of Law in 1934. Prior to World War II, he was building his career in legal profession for some time, working as a junior lawyer and court interpreter. Nevertheless, looking into the eyes of death in the early 1940s must have left a great impression on young Bjelinski, who decided to dedicate his professional path to music after the war. For a few months before the end of the war, he worked as a music-school teacher in liberated Split, and already in autumn of 1945 he moved to Zagreb, where he taught counterpoint and polyphonic composition at the Music Academy for more than thirty years. In a Music Academy classroom he met a piano student and his future wife Ljerka Pleslić (today Pleslić-Bjelinski), who thirty years after his death still honours memories of happy days with the composer-boy, as well as the better part of his legacy.
Although dedication to polyphonic composition is visible in many compositions by Bjelinski, it would be wrong to think that the composer had not left the neo-Classicist framework. Bjelinski also flirted with exotic elements, such as the South American folklore, visible in Serenade for trumpet, piano, strings, and percussions from 1957, and Candomblé for soprano, piano, and percussions from 1972. As well as his somewhat older colleague and friend Boris Papandopulo, Bjelinski had discovered the charm of blues and rock and roll, elements of which we can find, among others, in the score of the opera Orpheus of the 20th century, from 1978.
Besides the mentioned musical-stage works, Bjelinski has left a great cycle of 15 symphonies, composed between 1954 and 1988. This unique symphonic cycle in the history of Croatian music is predominantly programmatic in character, starting with the Symphony No. 1, titled Symphony of the Summer, until the last movement of the final symphony bearing the subtitle Requiem. Other symphonies are thematically related with people and places Bjelinski had been in touch with – such as Symphony No. 3, or Music for Friends, Symphony No. 8, subtitled Four Joys of Life (Love – Music – Play - Nature), or Symphony No. 9, Symphony of the Island, dedicated to his beloved island of Silba. The rich oeuvre by Bruno Bjelinski, from which several great works are performed in the last concert of the festival, is a great gift, but also a commitment, both for performers and explorers of Croatian Music.
(Domagoj Marić)