Entering the finals of this year's edition, KotorArt has planned two piano recitals in its program.
One of them, in the monastery complex of St. Nikola on Thursday, August 10, was held by pianist Ratimir Martinović, presenting part of the piano opus of Vasilij Mokranjec, one of the most prominent Serbian artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Ratimir Martinović is the only pianist who in his career dealt, and continues to deal, systematically with Mokranjč's piano compositions, who, in one of the outcomes, recorded the author's piano opus as a whole (Grand piano, 2019).
With this year's performance at KotorArt Don Branko's days of music, he presented his artistic interpretation of Mokranjč's works to the festival audience for the first time.
Placing the compositions in chronological order, he provided the audience with a sound insight into the various creative phases of the author, as well as the richness of the composer's poetics anchored in the neoclassical style, with directions towards neo-romanticism, neo-impressionism and neo-expressionism.
At the beginning of the concert, the pianist performed Theme with Variations, Mokranjc's student work, and then the works that form the backbone of the composer's first creative stage. By interpreting the Seven Etudes, Fragments and Six Games, three thematically different cycles, Martinović emphasized the finesse of the composer's poetics, underlined the influences of jazz and the styles of the author's predecessors/contemporaries. Although the pieces of these cycles are performed independently in practice, the idea of their coherence is consistently presented through interpretation.
Considering that during the second creative stage, Mokranjac did not play the piano as a solo instrument, Martinović performed works from the third stage - Intima and Odjeka, both composed in 1973.
Showing a higher degree of the composer's idea of the unity of the cycle of the svitno-poem prosedeo, the pianist highlighted the neo-impressionist aesthetics of Intim, underlined the scent of folklore through citation procedures, the atmosphere of intense contrasts as a result of Mokranjč's view that reality.
On that path of depicting the composer's inner world, the piece Odjeci was the highlight of the recital, a representative of the composer's philosophical and ontological reflection. The pianist ended the concert with the Prelude, a piece of airy atmosphere, creating a kind of anti-climax of the recital as a whole.
In the complexity of Mokranjic's invoice, which implies a high level of virtuosity, therefore presupposes a developed piano technique, Martinović underlined the constructive value of various technical requirements. Thus, skilfully tamed interpretive challenges - from toccata figures, numerous repetitions, tremolo, to widely placed chords, furious passages and often fast tempos, became the starting point in discovering the deeper levels of the musical work. In other words, by working within the framework of Mokranjč's opus, Martinović redefined the standard of performance of the author's piano music, but also offered a mode for understanding the composer's introspective processes.
Bonus video:
