The Garden of Epicurus, for Symphony Orchestra

Legal scholar and composer Ivo Josipović (1957) took his bachelor’s and doctorate in law at the Faculty of Law in the University of Zagreb. He also took a degree in composition at the Music Academy in Zagreb, having been taught by Stanko Horvat. He also did further law studies at distinguished institutions and universities abroad. In 2003 he was elected a member of the Croatian parliament, and from 2010 to 2015 he held the office of President of the Republic of Croatia. His composing oeuvre, consisting of fifty or so works, encompasses orchestral, concertante, vocal, vocal and instrumental, chamber and solo works. The composition The Garden of Epicurus, for symphony orchestra (1985) was inspired by the work of the same name by the German philosopher Eugen Fink. In a note on the recording of the Ivo Josipović album (MIC 1994) musicologist Erika Krpan says that The Garden of Epicurus is a composition „of free expression and numerous tastefully deployed elements, the form determined primarily by the swell and decline of tension and the intensity of the passages...” going on to remark that „it is even handed in its use of freedom and restriction, with broad thematic blocks of sparsely but deliberatively noted transitions, and the almost sensual vibration of one of the demanding number of percussion instruments, complex sequences of repetitive formulae... The sudden and frequent changes of metre are supported by a sequence of perambulating accents, and change the figure of the individual repetitive patterns, surrounding, at last, this miraculous garden in which everything is in constant change while at the same time unchanging.“