Ivan Josip Skender: Circles, for Clarinet and Percussion

IVAN JOSIP SKENDER
/ composer, conductor /
(Varaždin, March 18, 1981)

Ivan Josip Skender was born in Varaždin in 1981. After graduating from the Secondary Music School and General Gymnasium in Varaždin, in 1997 he enrolled in composition studies at the Academy of Music in Zagreb, in the class of Željko Brkanović, as the youngest composition student in the history of the Academy, and in 1999 he enrolled in parallel conducting studies in the class of Vjekoslav Šutej. From 2010 to 2012, he attended a two-year postgraduate program in orchestral conducting in Vienna, in the class of Uroš Lajovic. His compositions have been performed in almost all European countries and in the USA, Canada and Mexico. His broad and versatile opus includes music for chamber ensembles, orchestras, choirs and theatre performances, as well as musicals and the opera Šuma Striborova (with its 27 performances, the most performed opera of the Zagreb Music Biennale). He was the first composer to represent Croatia at the European multimedia festival MusMA (Music Masters on Air, 2012). He won the Stjepan Šulek Award in 2017 for his composition Phantasmagoria.

As a conductor, he has collaborated with numerous Croatian and foreign orchestras and choirs. From 2005 to 2014, he was employed at the Croatian National Theatre Opera in Zagreb as a choirmaster, and from 2014 to 2019 as conductor of the Opera. He made his debut at the Vienna Musikverein in 2011, and at the Croatian National Theatre Opera in Zagreb in 2012 with the opera L’elisir d’amore by Gaetano Donizetti. He made his debut at the Staatstheater in Braunschweig in 2016 with a performance of the opera Tosca. In 2009, he became an assistant to Professor Uroš Lajovic at the Zagreb Academy of Music, where he is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Conducting, Percussion and Harp and the Department of Singing. He has been a member of several committees for competitions and festivals of Croatian amateur music. Since 2019, he has been a member of the artistic direcotrs’ team of the Music Biennale Zagreb, and in 2020 he was appointed a member of the Assembly of Representatives of the Croatian Composers’ Association.