Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C sharp Minor, No. 2

Stjepan Šulek (1914 – 1986), composer, violinist, conductor and music educator must be counted among the most all-round of artists in the history of Croatian music. He graduated in violin at the Music Academy in Zagreb in 1936 in the class of the celebrated educator Vaclav Huml; he also attended composition lectures from Blagoje Bersa. His career is almost entirely connected with Zagreb. As well as for composing, he is well known for his performing and educational activities, and left an indelible trace in all areas of musical activity. Several generations of composers came out of his school of composition (Kelemen, Horvat, Detoni, Kempf), the strictness and consistency of the teacher being no obstacle in the way of their finding their own path in the art. Šulek belongs among those composers whose aesthetic premises are clear and very precisely formulated in many dialogues and essays about music, touching on questions of style, composing technique, attitude to the tradition, the rationale and communicative capacity of music and the motifs that trigger in the artist the creative act. Šulek’s musical writing is mostly defined as a synthesis of Baroque polyphony and classical form as well as the harmony and expressiveness of Romanticism; from this it is very easy to conclude that the composer’s attitude to tradition is very positive. Tradition provides the artist with the necessary material from which to start, while the criterion for selection, in Šulek’s mind, lies deep in the subconscious; sometimes inaccessible even to introspection.