Zagreb Festival Orchestra & Ivan Josip Skender
Biography Zagreb Festival Orchestra & Ivan Josip Skender
Ivan Josip Skender
was born in 1981 in Varaždin, where he took up music lessons with Desa Jovanović and Marijan Zuber. He began to study composition in a secondary school of music under the supervision of Davor Bobić. In 1997, he enrolled on the composition course at the Zagreb Academy of Music in the class of Željko Brkanović as the youngest ever student in the Academy’s history. Two years later, he also started studying conducting with Vjekoslav Šutej. He continued with further studies in seminars and masterclasses on conducting and choral conducting (under Klaus Arp, Krešimir Šipuš, Saša Britvić, Bertrand de Billy) as well as on composition (under Michael Jarrell, Goce Kolarovski, Joszef Soproni).
His compositions have been performed in Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, Poland, Macedonia, the USA, Canada and Mexico. He has received a composition prize at the Prague-Vienna-Budapest Summer Academy and the Zagreb University Rector’sAward for the performance of his work Heads and Tails at the Music Biennale Zagreb. The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia has recognized his effort in the promotion of Croatian music by giving him an award. He has worked continuously with several renowned foreign artists as well as with a number of Croatian musicians and ensembles, and has composed music for the theatre. At Music Biennale Zagreb 2011 his opera Stribor’s Forest had its first performance in Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka with numerous performances in the 2011/2012 season. As a conductor, he has given successful performances with a number of Croatian choirs and orchestras. Having become chief conductor of the Palma Collegiate Choir in 2004, he led them to winning the first prize three times at a national choir competition and the first prize at the international choir competition held in Ohrid in 2009. A s a conductor, he has dedicated himself to giving the regular and first performances of the works composed by contemporary Croatian authors. Skender works at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb as the Opera choirmaster and at the Zagreb Academy of Music in the position of Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Conducting, the Harp and Percussion. He is currently in the class of maestro Uroš Lajovic at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts.
The Zagreb Festival Orchestra
was founded in 1989, comprised of the top classical performers in Croatia and formed with the intent to record a single album. That intent was fulfilled with OVERTURES, a record of composer Gioachino Rossini’s greatest operatic works conducted by the acclaimed maestro Michael Halász, a resident conductor at the Vienna State Opera for 20 years, and produced by six-time GRAMMY Award winner Martin Sauer.
The album went on to worldwide commercial success, with its music featured in major Hollywood movies over the span of the decades, but the orchestra itself was never heard from again. Until 2018.
Nearly 30 years later, the Zagreb Festival Orchestra was reestablished as a recording and performing ensemble by PARMA Recordings and its CEO Bob Lord, featuring an all-star roster of handpicked musicians from the capital city and beyond. The orchestra’s first recorded appearance since its re-emergence, the contemporary music collection PRISMA vol 2 from Navona Records, was released in 2019.
