The Zagreb Guitar Quartet
Melita Ivkovic of The Zagreb Guitar Quartet is a wonderful example of how musicians are leveraging the power of the blogging and social media. Melita’s detailed submission email explains many of their online methods.
I use Last.fm rss feed to display our upcoming concerts on our website, and use tools to feed my website posts (through RSS) to Facebook page, Last.fm page and Twitter. Also, I link Quartet Last.fm events to Flickr photos from the same events (via machine tags). On the website we have music player with an xml playlist that streams our free tracks from last.fm. On the Recordings page, I embedded our CD from the bandcamp.com site where our fans can stream and buy our music, etc etc… Possibilities are endless. That is why I am sad to see most of the musicians still have 1997-style websites with 30-seconds Real Audio clips, no RSS, no interaction, just ugly dead-end parts of the web.
Clearly, Melita is a musician who understands the internet and the vast potential power of blogging. Guitar4.com, the Wordpress powered blog of The Zagreb Guitar Quartet, is clean and professional, allowing easy access to the quartet’s releases, press information, photographs and biography, which reads as follows.
The Zagreb Guitar Quartet was founded in 1990 by Ante Cagalj, one of the leading guitar teachers in Croatia. Cagalj assembled the Quartet from his students and he is still the ensemble’s artistic director. The Quartet’s current members are Tomislav Vasilj, Krunoslav Pehar, Melita Ivkovic and Mak Grgic.
This experienced ensemble of young musicians has given a multitude of concerts in Croatia and in other countries, from Canada to India, from Russia to South Africa – including appearances at the Austrian Parliament in Vienna, Pontificio instituto di musica sacra in Rome, Les Invalides in Paris, Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Kamani Auditorium in New Delhi, Amici del Loggione del Teatro alla Scala in Milan and Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. It has successfully appeared at several prestigious international competitions, winning first prize at Trofeo Kawai in Tortona, Italy (1996) and at Simone Salmaso in Viareggio, Italy (1998), as well as the Grand Prix at the Ghitaralia Festival Competition in Przemysl, Poland (1998, when Zbigniew Dubiella wrote in Swiat Gitary: For more than few years I haven’t heard something so exciting - after their performance, all that one could do was to get out and scream: Viva guitarra!). At the Varaždin Baroque Evenings in 1998, the Quartet won the Ivan Lukacic Award for the best performance of the festival.
Two years later at this same festival, the Quartet treated the audience to the world premiere of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue arranged for four guitars, receiving rave reviews from Colin Cooper, the editor of the well-known magazine Classical Guitar: it was one of the most extraordinary and vivid experiences including the guitar I can remember.
The Quartet has mastered a huge repertoire ranging from Renaissance and Baroque masters to contemporary composers. It is not afraid to make excursions into jazz and other music, and has made brilliant arrangements of traditional compositions from the Croatian coast and mainland. The Zagreb Guitar Quartet members are also distinguished by the special attention they pay to living Croatian composers amongst whom Željko Brkanovic, Miroslav Miletic, Andelko Klobucar, Vlado Sunko, Adalbert Markovic, Sanda Majurec, Tomislav Uhlik, Ivo Josipovic, Krešimir Seletkovic and Ivan Josip Skender have all dedicated original works to this artistically inquisitive ensemble.
Visit The Zagreb Guitar Quartet at guitar4.com.
This entry was written by , posted on February 11, 2009 at 12:09 pm, filed under Musicians and tagged Ante Cagalj, Classical, Croatia, Guitar, Krunoslav Pehar, Mak Grgic, Melita Ivkovic, The Zagreb Guitar Quartet, Tomislav Vasilj. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
