Trio Elogio: Quasi Ritorno

Contemporary music is an artistic field that offers a wide spectrum of creative directions, freedoms, and exploratory approaches, while also presenting composers with a number of challenges. One of these is undoubtedly composing for the guitar, perhaps the most popular instrument, which through its history, use, and popularity has also acquired a certain stigma. Momentum in approaches to guitar composition is mainly found in the work of composers who are also guitarists, while most composers choose the customary techniques and topoi associated with the instrument. The bond, creative collaboration, and trust between composer and performer thus emerge as one of the key steps toward expanding the body of contemporary guitar repertoire, so that it might move beyond mere premiere performances and become part of the concert repertory.

Valuable work in this field is being undertaken by the members of Trio Elogio – Petrit Çeku, Pedro Ribeiro Rodrigues, and Tomislav Vukšić – bringing their own creative imprint, ideas, and approach, while at the same time continuing the important mission of their predecessors. More than 330 works including guitar in original compositions or arrangements by Croatian composers form the body of the Croatian guitar repertoire (of which 20 are concertante works and 45 are for solo guitar), relying to a great extent on the impetus, inspiration, and wide range of possibilities that the musicians of the Zagreb Guitar Trio offered to composers. Two works on this release were written specifically for that ensemble, whose role as a prominent protagonist of contemporary music is now being continued by Trio Elogio, to whom the remaining two works are dedicated. They embrace interpretative as well as mediating work, which includes understanding and translating composers’ ideas into the language of their instrument, with joy and interest.

Through their interpretations of the scores, their (first) performances on numerous stages, and finally through meticulous studio work in sound recording, they have enriched the aura of the works whose final form they have thus completed and permanently preserved. In addition to encouraging and promoting works by Croatian composers, the members of Trio Elogio also reflect on and expand the guitar repertoire in other ways. They identify gaps in the historical fabric of repertoire written for their instrument and, by selecting works from periods rich in significant oeuvres previously inaccessible to guitarists, they reveal music originally written for other instruments to audiences and fellow musicians in a new light, in a guitar guise. Such engagement also shapes their approach to the interpretation of new works, in which they prove to be reliable and inspiring partners to composers.

Guided by the balancing of ideas and playability, in the service of musical logic, they have added their own contours to the final form and sonic image of four works for guitar trio by Bruno Vlahek, Hugo Vasco Reis, Zoran Juranić, and Krešimir Seletković. The undisguised multiple identities of the composers (who are at once electronic musicians, producers, conductors, performers, and researchers) whose works appear on the programme further enrich the listening experience and reception, reflecting a focus on the poetic, the characteristic, the dramaturgical, or the sonological. (excerpt from the CD booklet text by Karolina Rugle)