Ninety years ago last Friday (23 August), Lojze Lebič, one of the most important figures in Slovene classical music, was born in Prevalje, a small town in Slovenia’s Koroška region. A composer, conductor, teacher and music writer, he has been giving meaning to, inspiring and connecting our musical world for decades.
While studying composition and conducting with Marjan Kozina and Danilo Švara at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana, he also completed a bachelor’s degree in archaeology, but in the end decided that his path lay in music. As a performer and interpreter, he led the University of Ljubljana’s Tone Tomšič Academic Choir and the chamber choir of what was then RTV Ljubljana, winning first prize with the latter in the contemporary choral music category at the 1972 international Let the Peoples Sing competition organised by the BBC.
In his book Slovenski skladatelji akademiki, dedicated to composers who are also members of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, musicologist Ivan Klemenčič describes Lebič as a composer who has travelled a path from expressionistic subjectivism to postmodernist maturity and who, over the course of this transformation, has constantly been aware that it is not possible to keep on shocking indefinitely with modernism, and that both the current message and the artistic meaning of a composition are important. His compositional oeuvre alternates between sonic intensity and meditative restraint, cosmopolitan modernity and a commitment to the heritage of past cultures.
He has received numerous awards and accolades for his work, including three Prešeren Fund Prizes and the main Prešeren Prize (1994), the Golden Order of Merit of the Republic of Slovenia (2004) and the Kozina Prize (2005), awarded by the Society of Slovene Composers for his complete body of work. He has been a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1995. In January 2020 he added honorary membership of the Slovenian Philharmonic to his list of accolades and memberships of prestigious institutions.
We are proud that such a distinguished artist has also collaborated frequently with the Ljubljana Festival. At last year’s Slovenian Music Days, opened by the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra at Cankarjev Dom, we paid homage to him with a concert featuring the first integral performance of his orchestral diptych Cantico I and Cantico II, which according to the orchestra’s artistic director Maja Kojc has never before been performed in this way.
“A man belongs to many things: a place, a country, a faith, a worldview and, most inevitably, his origin,” wrote Lojze Lebič in the introduction to his monograph Selected Choirs II, part of the Selected Works by Slovene Composers collection published by the Public Fund for Cultural Activities. To mark this occasion, let us listen to one of his compositions and in this way wish Mr Lebič a very happy birthday on this most auspicious of days!
