Blagoje Bersa’s Piano Journals
“The things my soul whispers I put into music.”
(Journal, 28/12/1914)
The part of Bersa’s opus written for the piano allows the very foundations of his musicality to be revealed. This is primarily so because the first materialisation of his musical ideas, their transfer into the outside world, and the first moulding of the magma of sound, hitherto identified only by his inner ear, always occurred in contact with the piano. Bersa also relied on the piano to think music when he conceived his symphonic or operatic worlds. This is the reason that an outline notated on the piano and one written for the piano are sometimes not (and
in any case should not be) one and the same thing. In the first moment and layer of the concretisation of an idea the graphic record could be, and often was, just a draft, only a captured, characteristic motif and rhythm, an imagined harmonic sequence of tension and relief, or perhaps an immediately summoned form, long consecrated by tradition, into which to place sound progressions or colours.
(Marija Bergamo)
croatian/english
Coproducers: Hrvatska radiotelevizija i Hrvatski glazbeni zavod, Zagreb
Cantus d.o.o., 2016.
98905200782
CD I
1. Balada (Ballad), op. 65
2. Notturno, op. 38
3. Novelletta
4. Ora triste, op. 37
5. Bizarna serenada (Bizarre Serenade)
6. Mélancolie
7. Na žalu (On the Beach)
Po načinu starih “Airs de ballet” (In the Manner of the Old “Airs de Ballet”)
8. Grave
9. Vivo
10. Grave
CD II
1. Sonata u f-molu (Sonata in F minor), op. 20
2. Serenada – Barkarola (Serenade – Barcarole)
3. Ballabile
4. Valse mélancolique
5. Venecijanska barkarola (Venetian Barcarole), op. 58
6. Riso e lamento, op. 63
7. Stari mornar priča (An Old Sailor’s Tale)
8. Rondo – Polonaise, op. 18
9. Valcer (Waltz), op. 3
