The musical programme of the 74th Dubrovnik Summer Festival brought yet another brilliant performance last night, 28 July in the Rector’s Palace, this time by the world-renowned bass baritone Marko Mimica and the award-winning pianist Marcos Madrigal, who, with a programme specially created for the Festival, showed in full glory all the possibilities of voice and instrument, i.e. the piano, to the great delight of the Dubrovnik audience.
From the very first piece on the programme, a high standard of performance was set, especially expressed in the very nature of Hugo Wolf’s Michelangelo-Lieder, the sound of which is characterised by asceticism and simple structure putting the performer and his technique to the foreground. Having conquered world stages, bass baritone Marko Mimica took to the festival stage in the Rector’s Palace last night showcasing the fullness of his dominant, penetrating voice of great range, confident presence, and intonational and rhythmic brilliance. The Palace was also the perfect setting for the slightly darker, more mystical tone of the first piece, but also for the enchanting songs of fiery and intoxicating Iberian character that followed, Maurice Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, written in the early 1930s for G.W. Pabst's film about the famous literary Spanish knight. Through the Prelude, op. 34 and Polka by Dmitri Shostakovich, the piano also shone under the masterful hands of Cuban virtuoso Marcos Madrigal, perfectly matching Mimica and his powerful vocals. The Songs and Dances of Death by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, inspired by the verses of Kutuzov, with which this great Russian composer masterfully depicts the gloom, suffering and inevitability of death, rounded off the concert, which was specially created for the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. The audience accompanied each piece with enthusiastic applause, which at the end invited these great artists to take a bow several times over, for which in turn they had shown appreciation with an encore, Stanislao Gastaldon’s Musica proibita.
Already tomorrow, 30 July the next concert awaits as part of the rich music programme of the 74th Dubrovnik Summer Festival, bringing Zvjezdan Ružić to the Square under Revelin Fort with his unique project Pianotron, free of charge for the Dubrovnik audiences and their guests. Tickets for other concerts at the Rector’s Palace, as well as all other Festival shows and event are available via the festival website www.dubrovnik-festival.hr or the service www.ulaznice.hr, at the box office in the Festival Palace (Od Sigurate 1) every day from 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and in front of the DTS building (Vukovarska St) from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.