Programme:
Frank Zappa:
Dog-Meat (Dog Breath Variations & Uncle Meat)
Revised Music for Low Budget Orchestra
Outrage at the Valdez
The Black Page
***
Frank Zappa:
Naval Aviation
Put A Motor in Yourself
Moggio
The Adventures of Greggery Peccary

The American composer, multi-instrumentalist and improviser Frank Zappa is seen as one of the most innovative and influential musical figures of the 20th century. Having begun his musical career as a drummer at the age of 15, he later developed into one of the world’s most celebrated guitarists. At 21 he founded the Mothers of Invention, a rock group he shaped into an ensemble producing what he himself described as “electrical chamber music”. The group’s first album Freak Out!  attracted enormous interest from music fans and other groups, the Beatles among them. Zappa collaborated with conductors and orchestras including Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra, and Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain. The Zappa Day in Ljubljana concert presents a selection of pieces written by Frank Zappa towards the end of his life for the Ensemble Modern and included on his final album Yellow Shark,  along with some works arranged for chamber ensemble and recorded after his death. The concert will be performed by the 30-member Ensemble Dissonance. Founded by Klemen Hvala, the ensemble has established itself as an acclaimed interpreter of contemporary Slovene and foreign works and classical masterpieces. It will be conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, who regularly performs the music of Frank Zappa and has enjoyed very successful collaborations with Ensemble Dissonance in recent years. The evening’s guests will be the legendary guitarist Vlatko Stefanovski, who will offer improvisations on Zappa’s music, and the actor Blaž Šef, who has also made a name for himself as a singer in musicals and at concerts of contemporary and experimental music.

• Frank Zappa released 62 albums in his lifetime; the Zappa Family Trust has released 64 more since his death
• Frank Zappa was a supremely eclectic artist, working in the rock, jazz and classical genres
• Frank Zappa was awarded a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997
• Jonathan Stockhammer is a remarkably versatile conductor who specialises in opera
• Jonathan Stockhammer has conducted acclaimed orchestras at world-famous venues such as the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera), Opernhaus Zürich (Zurich Opera) and Berliner Staatsoper (Berlin State Opera)