In the modern world of music, there are a few musicians who can be called a renaissance type, which means that their activity covers many musical and music-related areas. Such comprehensive occupations are often based on quality professional education supported by a true passion for musical expression. There are only a few of such people in Croatian music, but still – there are some, and their traces and influences are felt in many and diverse musical areas.
One of such artists is Marijan Makar (Zagreb, February 7, 1933). The first association linked to his name is the guitar, a musical instrument that he has played intermittently throughout his life. However, Makar’s decades-long active artistic life is not so simple, even though the structure of this anniversary discographic edition doesn’t resist the claim about the orientation of his life’s choice. This CD is important for two reasons: on the one hand, it is the source and confirmation of some crucial biographical facts, and on the other, it shows the height and refinement of artistic knowledge that he translated into skilled interpretations. Makar is a multiinstrumentalist; in addition to the guitar, he plays the tamburica, mandolin, double bass, sopile, bagpipes, lijerica, piano and perhaps a few more we failed to mention. That variety must have helped him cultivate a special relationship with the sound emission. Tonal beauty is a feature of Makar’s interpretations. The fineness of his finger’s encounter with the string seems to have determined in advance the quality of the tone that will result from that concurrence. It is a warm, rounded and noble tone, and the lightness of his playing is equally present in technically more complex situations as well as in the cantilenas and while refining certain characteristic motifs. Makar plays on a musical instrument built by Paulino Berbane, renowned among guitarists as the world leading luthier, so maybe some credit for the emission of tone should be given to this as well.
