Horvat, Stanko: To Stanko, In Memory!

When, after the death of Stanko Horvat on October 30, 2006, I was given the task of preparing a commemorative meeting and memorial in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, for the first time I came up against the huge and extremely diverse oeuvre of this composer of ours. But even then it was possible to ascertain that this oeuvre of his was only marginally a component part of our canonical repertoire. In 2011 Cantus/HDS printed a festschrift

commemorating him, once again, primarily to recall his unacknowledged greatness. But nothing had, of course, essentially changed. A few months ago, Vjekoslav Nježić, the last of Horvat’s composition students (graduating in 1999), proposed that we might together consider the issue of the recordings of some of his essential compositions that were also completely forgotten. For months, Vjekoslav listened to recordings from the recording library of Croatian Radio, checking out, in fact, the credibility of his own attitude to Horvat’s oeuvre, and clearly, again, arrived at the perception that this body of work in no way deserved the silence to which it was condemned. He sent me a lengthy list of compositions that could be considered for inclusion on a CD. We made a short list and proposed the issue of a double CD to Cantus.

(Nikša Gligo)