Cantus Ensemble on the 25th Music Biennale Zagreb
The first Biennale Saturday, April 17th, began with Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon based on the text by George Gordon Byron. The work was performed by baritone Josip Lešaja and the Cantus Ensemble in their first appearance at the festival, with several more planned to follow, under the baton of Ivan Josip Skender. Before they performed, actress Urša Raukar read the Ode which was translated into Croatian by Enisa Hadrović. Schoenberg decided to draw on Byron's text because the poet's support to Greek independence was reflected in Schoenberg's advocacy of the European fight against Hitler, so he wrote, ‘I knew that the intelligentsia had a moral duty to stand out against tyranny.' The composer also noted that a singer should have ‘a panoply of nuances so that he/she could express a hundred and seventy kinds of sneer, sarcasm, hatred, mockery, contempt, disapproval, etc., which I have tried to show in my music' and that ‘a recitation must be realistically natural so as to render music invisible'.
A capacity audience at the Mimara Museum noticed that music was still there and gave a standing ovation to the superb performance of the intricate musical texture as well as to Lešaja's brilliant combination of recitation and singing.
