Ivo Maček

Ivo Maček (24 March 1914–26 May 2002) was a prominent Croatian pianist, composer, teacher, editor and academician. He was born in Sušak on 24 March 1914 and died in Zagreb on 26 May 2002. On account of his diverse social work, for his work as a pianist, composer and editor, he was the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions.

Life

Ivo Maček was born in Sušak on 24 March 1914 and died in Zagreb on 26 May 2002. He inherited his love for music from his parents, Dr Pavao (1880–1932) and Marija Maček née Heffler (1892–1978). While his father, a history and geography teacher, played "two or three instruments" in his youth, his mother learned piano and violin and played the viola in the Society Orchestra of the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb until her death in 1978. In 1922, he started his music education with a private teacher, Vjekoslav Rosenberg-Ružić (1870–1954). From the very next year, he went on studying the piano with Rosenberg-Ružić in the Junior Music School in Zagreb, and then in the Secondary Music School (1927–1931), and then at the High School of the State Music Academy in Zagreb. In 1934, just a year after graduating from the Second Classics High School in Zagreb, he took a certificate in the piano, his major, taking the Vjekoslav Klaić Prize of the Croatian Music Institute as the best student of the year.

When his course was over, Maček went to Svetislav Stančić (1895–1970) for further studies, and then, although brought up in the tradition of the German pianistic school, he continued his studies in 1939 in Paris with the French pianist Alfred-Denis Cortot (1877–1962). With Cortot, he mastered an interpretative technique that was always there to serve style and poetic ideas. Amalgamating the best features of both schools, German precision, speed and huge sound, and French expressiveness and fine shading, Maček developed into a pianist who avoided any endeavour to find favour with the public via superficial virtuosity. He was a refined interpreter, precise and readable in his performance, with a discreet and unobtrusive style. He gave concerts in many cities of Croatia and the former Yugoslavia as well as in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland. His career as a soloist lasted from 1926 to 1958. He broke a long period of silence as a solo performer with a concert performance on 30 October 1994, when he gave the first performance of his own Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra at the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb accompanied by the Croatian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Pavle Dešpalj.

Maček took up chamber music in the Secondary Music School. In the context of the school's own performances from 1928 to 1933, the talented young pianist in his earliest chamber outings showed both musicality and a brilliant ability to accommodate his playing to the soloist. Later, as a leading chamber musician, he was a founder-member of two celebrated piano trios. His collaboration with violinist Stjepan Šulek and violinist Stanko Žepić (from 1935 to 1939) started not long after the end of Maček's studies at the Music Academy. They drew favourable comments from the public in a concert at the Croatian Music Institute on 16 May 1938, playing for the first time Maček's Piano Trio. In the opinion of the reviewers, Maček had shown in this compositional firstborn that he had both talent and knowledge; he had successfully mastered the form, adroitly worked out the ideas in terms of motifs, made use of interesting harmonies and successfully combined the three instruments.

The best-known Croatian piano trio, Maček–Šulek–Janigro, was founded at Maček's initiative. During their five years of working together (from 1940 to 1945) they interpreted works of different stylistic periods, opening up the roads for their own artistic maturation and virtuosity and the capacity for a profound understanding of what they performed. In association with cellist Antonio Janigro (1939 to 1941; 1944 to 1949) and Ludwig Hoelscher (1942), with Enrico Mainardi (1949 to 1950, 1953) and Mirko Dorner (from 1952 to 1953), Maček stood out as an excellent, reliable and valuable accompanist. The most successful of all these associations was with Mirko Dorner, in a duo with whom he won the first prize at the 3rd international music competition in Vercelli (1952). After many years of absence from public musical life (he gave his last chamber concert in 1957), Maček returned to the concert stage with the cellist Valter Dešpalj (from 1975 to 1979). During his chamber career, Maček worked with the violinists Stjepan Šulek, Ivan Pinkava, Zlatko Baloković, Zlatko Topolski and Aleksandar Szegedi, and created a celebrated piano duo with Jurica Murai (from 1952 to 1957). He also worked with vocal artists, such as the soprano Irma Turković, the alto Marijana Radev, the tenor Mario Djuranec, the baritone Ivo Lhotka-Kalinski and the bass Tomislav Neralić.