Lovro Merčep: Dubrovački susreti / Dubrovnik Encounters

Lovro Merčep, saxophone
Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra
Ivan Hut, conductor

Although he comes from Samobor, Lovro Merčep is connected in many ways – familial as well as broadly musical – to the eternal city in the south of Croatia. This album – Lovro’s discography debut – recorded in Dubrovnik, realised with the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra, and featuring a work by a Dubrovnik composer, is touched by numerous tangents that speak in its favour. It therefore quite rightly bears the title Dubrovački susreti (Dubrovnik Encounters), because that is, to a large extent, precisely what it is.

The fact that he chose three Croatian “heavyweights” for his debut album speaks of Lovro’s readiness to undertake such a feat. Lovro is today an accomplished saxophonist, a distinguished member of the Croatian saxophone community. Thanks to the father of the Croatian saxophone school, Josip Nochta (who, incidentally, was a clarinettist), and his first graduates from the Academy of Music in Zagreb (members of the internationally recognised Zagreb Saxophone Quartet, to which Lovro’s father Goran also belongs), that community has put down deep roots in Croatia and continues to spread far beyond it.

Lovro has thus chosen for the album three concertante works that have every chance – and there is no doubt about this – of living on internationally. There is no need to waste words on Dešpalj’s masterpiece: it is, after all, the first such concerto in Croatian music. But even more importantly, it is a first-rate concertante work that has already entered the saxophone repertoire – and there is no sign that it will leave it any time soon.

Bjelinski’s Sinfonietta may be encountered somewhat less often here, though certainly unjustifiably so – despite the fact that it has been recorded and performed several times, and is included in the repertoire of many of our distinguished saxophonists (such as Nikola Fabijanić, for example, who recorded Sinfonietta on his discography release with the Zagreb Soloists in 2015). Together with Bjelinski’s oeuvre as a whole, we believe the time for Sinfonietta is only just beginning.

Finally, there is also Ivan Končić’s Concerto, the most recent work in Lovro’s selection – created through close collaboration between Lovro and Ivan, performer and composer peers, one Dubrovnik-born by origin and the other by birth – which, prompted precisely by Lovro’s release, may prove to be a major discovery, just as critics already foretold on the night of its premiere, which took place under the lights of a great stage – namely, none other than the Dubrovnik Summer Festival in 2015. What a first-rate selection! (excerpt from the CD booklet text by Borko Špoljarić)