Slovenian Youth Orchestra tonight at Križanke

At 20:30, the Slovenian Youth Orchestra will once again perform in the summer auditorium under the baton of its founder and artistic director Živa Ploj Peršuh. Lauri Porra is announced as soloist on electric bass, with Marcel Štefančič as host. The evening will be largely devoted to film music by international and Slovenian composers.

Film music was initially strongly influenced by Richard Wagner and his leitmotif technique, whose purpose is to announce characters, objects and situations; it then developed into an entirely distinctive tradition that moves listeners all over the world.

At tonight’s evening at Križanke, audiences will be able to hear a varied selection of film music as well as classical and popular excerpts that have featured in some of the most popular animated and live-action films and franchises, as well as a piece by Lauri Porra, great-grandson of Jean Sibelius.

The works will be interpreted by Živa Ploj Peršuh, a stylistically versatile conductor, who will lead the Slovenian Youth Orchestra, of which she is founder and artistic director.

The orchestra has been active since 2019 and, through a range of projects, prepares young musicians aged 16 to 26 for a professional career.

The soloist will be Lauri Porra, a Finnish bassist and composer who has already appeared on more than 50 released albums. These range from heavy metal to contemporary classical, electronic, hip hop and pop music. Porra is artistic director of the Vantaa Pops orchestra, founder and artistic director of the Unelmien Heinola festival, and was artistic adviser to the Helsinki Festival (2015–2019).

Unexpectedly, and as quite a surprise that will pique the audience's curiosity, the concert will be presented by perhaps the best-known television presenter and writer, with a unique flair for debate and dialogue, Marcel Štefančič jr.

Marcel has recently received a great deal of publicity in connection with his work at TVS. He is the author of more than a hundred books on film, literature, music and socio-political affairs. His book on the complete literary oeuvre of Ivan Cankar met with a wide response.

Among the film music, we will open with melodies from the cartoons Tom in Jary by the American composer Scott Bradley.

Bradley is best remembered for scoring MGM's theatrical cartoons, including those starring Tom and Jerry (Hanna-Barbera 1940-1958, 113 of 114 episodes), Droopy (all 24 episodes), Barney Bear (all 26 episodes) and numerous one-off cartoons. In an autobiographical sketch, Bradley mentioned that he began his career performing with and later conducting a theatre orchestra in Houston, Texas. He studied organ and harmony with Horton Corbett, choirmaster of Houston's Christ Chruch Cathedral, but was “otherwise entirely self-taught in composition and orchestration.” Years later, when he was already established in Hollywood, he sought to improve his technique through private study with his MGM colleague Mario Castelnuvo-Tedesco. In 1926 Bradley moved to Los Angeles, California, to run programmes at Radio KHJ, an activity that led to his growing involvement in animation at the beginning of the talkie era. He was a musician for Walt Disney (1929) and the Ub Iwerks studio (1930-1934), and then became music director for Harman-Ising, where he was hired to produce short cartoons for MGM. After MGM set up its own animation studio in 1937, Bradley was taken on permanently and remained with the company for twenty years.

In the 1930s Bradley also composed music for the concert hall, including the song settings “The Valley of the White Poppies” (1931) and “The Headless Horseman” (1932) and the oratorio “Thanatopsis” (1934), based on the poem by William Cullen Bryant. His most significant success was “Cartoonia” (1938), a four-movement orchestral suite drawn from his work for MGM, premiered by Pierre Monteux with the San Francisco Symphony. It was an early expression of Bradley's conviction that cartoon music is an art form with great potential

Poletje v školjki

• film music was born shortly after the first film in 1895; these were silent films, and the musical accompaniment was usually provided by pianists, sometimes by a full orchestra
• some films are shot faster than their soundtrack is written; for the film Veliki Gatsby  the entire score took two years to create, whereas for television a one-hour series needs two to three weeks
• Lauri Porra is also known as the bass guitarist of the Finnish power metal band Stratovarius
• he has released five instrumental solo albums, including Entropia  (in collaboration with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra), released in January 2018
• Since its founding in 2019, the Slovenian Youth Orchestra under the baton of Živa Ploj Peršuh has been a regular guest at Ljubljana Festival events