The Cantus Ensemble’s new season begins—with a soaring start! On Monday, October 12 at 8:00 PM, the Vatroslav Lisinski Small Hall opens its doors for the first concert of the 2026/2027 cycle, symbolically titled Volare, volare. And Cantus is not taking flight alone this time: it is joined by Italy’s Icarus Ensemble—one of its long-standing artistic partners—along with mezzo-soprano Matilde Lazzaroni and conductor Tommaso Ussardi.
This meeting of the two ensembles continues the Italian thread that has run through Cantus’s story for years—through guest appearances, premieres, and joint projects, as well as artistic friendships that span multiple concert seasons. Consequently, the program once again features composers whose music is familiar to Cantus: Nicola Sani and Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, alongside Paolo Perezzani, Giovanni Verrando, and Croatian composer Helena Skljarov.
The evening opens with Perezzani’s Es muss sein! (Omaggio a Beethoven). Rather than quoting Beethoven’s music directly—referencing the famous “Must it be? It must be!” from his final string quartet—the piece draws upon the idea of the inner necessity of creation: an impulse from the past that can still pave the way for something new.
A completely different realm is explored in Hind by Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, a composer who has spent years investigating how the rhythm, melody, and meaning of human speech can be transformed into musical material. The work is inspired by the final words of the Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, once again demonstrating Ciardi’s desire to use music to give voice to things that are easily suppressed amidst the noise of everyday life.
This composer is also linked to the Cantus Ensemble through a recent collaboration on the multimedia project Voci vicine 2.0, realized with the Icarus Ensemble—the very partner now arriving in Zagreb to open the new concert season.
Electronics also play a prominent role in the second part of the program. In Dulle Griet, Giovanni Verrando draws inspiration from the painting of the same name by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, capturing its chaos, multitude of figures, and peculiar internal order. Nicola Sani combines mezzo-soprano, ensemble, and electronics in the work Per incantamento; he, too, is a long-time acquaintance of the Cantus Ensemble, with a collaborative history spanning years.
However, the evening’s newest voice belongs to Helena Skljarov. A composer, musicologist, and member of the Cantus Ensemble’s Program Committee, she has written Phenomenon—a piece for ensemble, video, and electronics dedicated to the Icarus Ensemble—specifically for this occasion. Its starting point is water, but also the “phenomena” with which the media bombards us daily: facts, claims, and sensationalist headlines demanding a reaction, regardless of their veracity. Musically, the natural and the artificial collide—human breath and whispers meet electronics, narration, and the machine.
Phenomenon will receive its premiere on October 12, rounding off an evening where long-standing collaborators reunite and new soundscapes emerge from established artistic connections.
The Icarus Ensemble visits the Cantus Ensemble—five compositional voices and a new season ahead. It is time for—Volare, volare.
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