Wind Quintet

„One internal memo of the Universal Edition publishing house from Vienna, dated January 22, 2003, shows that Mandić’s Wind Quintet (1930; first premiered by the Prague Wind Quintet on February 12, 1931 in a concert of the Contemporary Music Society (Spolek pro moderní hudbu) at the Mozarteum in Prague) was supposed to be published (under number EU 10382). For unknown reasons, this edition never saw the light of day. As far as the musical structure and form of the Wind Quintet are concerned, we may conclude that they match his String Quartet in a number of elements and that the musical language is perhaps the most modern and the most radical, considering the use of dissonance, of his entire oeuvre. Regarding influences, the work contains some characteristics of Béla Bartók’s musical language, which can be traced in comparative samples of Mandić’s works and Bartók’s early compositions. The harmonic expression of the composition is especially avant-garde and modern for the time, and in that aspect, it is comparable to the harmonic idiom of Ernest Křenek’s compositions from his pre-twelve-tone technique (or method, as Schönberg called it) period. Mandić is only a small step away from the twelve-tone technique; he actually applies free atonality, melodic lines and themes structured in a way to sequence the twelve tones of the chromatic scale with almost no repetitions.“ (Davor Merkaš)