Biography

Vito ZURAJ

© Ras Rotter

“The premiere of the evening deserves to be included as repertoire in a canon of the immediate present yet to be written: Vito Žuraj's ‘Automatones’ is entertaining and yet incredibly complex, well constructed and irritating in the best sense of the word – contemporary orchestral music at its finest.” Münchner Merkur, 16.10.2023

Vito Žuraj's works are both powerful and meticulously crafted compositions that often incorporate scenic elements and spatial sound concepts. His works have quickly established themselves in the concert hall and have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ensemble Modern and the RIAS Kammerchor, among others.

Following the success of his opera Blühen, the 2024/25 season will focus on the work , performed by the Helsinki Chamber Choir and Ensemble Recherche at the Musica Nova festival in Helsinki. The current season will also see the North American premiere of Anemoi. The work, premiered with great success by the Berliner Philharmoniker under François-Xavier Roth in May 2024, draws its inspiration from the octagonal Tower of the Winds on the Roman Agora in Athens with its depiction of the Greek wind gods and will be performed by the Esprit Orchestra in Toronto in March 2025.

In 2014 he was a fellow of the Akademie der Künste, the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Villa Massimo in Rome, whose jury he was a member of from 2019 to 2021. In 2020/21 he was a fellow of the International House of Artists Villa Concordia in Bamberg and in 2003 of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Vito Žuraj studied composition with Marko Mihevc, Lothar Voigtländer and Wolfgang Rihm. Since 2015, he has been Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Ljubljana, where he is responsible for setting up a studio for electronic music.

Numerous ensembles and orchestras regularly include works by Vito Žuraj in their programmes, including the Ensemble Modern and WDR Symphony Orchestra for many years. Vito Žuraj has been awarded the Composition Prize of the City of Stuttgart. In 2016, he received the Claudio Abbado Composition Prize of the Karajan Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Recordings of Vito Žuraj's works have been released on the Neos label, among others.

Season 2024/25

Work(s)

" Unveiled "

Concerto for cello and orchestra

Ed. DSS

2022 SELECTION

" Unveiled "

Concerto for Cello and orchestra

Ed. DSS

SÉLECTION 2022

Sélectionné pour : Le Prix de Composition Musicale 2024

 

2*.2.2*.2*/2.2.1.0/timp/3perc/arp/gtr/12.10.8.6.4

25’

Co-commission : Konzerthaus Berlin, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra et Festival Ljubljana.

Création : 24/01/2021 - Jean-Guihen Queyras, violoncelle, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, dir. Kerem Hasan.

Recording : Jean-Guihen Queyras, violoncelle, Gürzenich Orchestra,

Dir. François-Xavier Roth : https://youtu.be/d7vuzTK-FeQ

A photon in the dark – like an atom of sound in silence. In the novel "Of Human Bondage" by British author William Somerset Maugham, the protagonist Philip Carey feels deep affection for Mildred Rogers, his femme fatale, but she does not reciprocate his emotions. The resulting apparent love affair completely destroys Philip emotionally. I happened to meet “my” Mildred Rogers. It seemed to me that all my thoughts revolved only around the Inaccessible. Better a painful ending than endless pain – I had to say goodbye. Then I wandered aimlessly through the woods, searching for sounds, for I heard no music within me, only silence in the darkness. During this seemingly endless journey, my first flash of sound hit me: a short, sweet, high frequency that rang in rhythm with my heartbeat. I noted this pulse of sound as a dull beat on a bass drum, joined by a short bow on rattlesnakes, and used this sound for the very beginning of my cello concerto.

 

Thus, the composition has autobiographical characteristics, including the fact that I myself played the cello when I was younger. As one of the recurring motifs in the composition, I captured the sound image of church bells in the German city of Bamberg, where I was artist in residence at Villa Concordia at the time of writing. Are bells a metaphor for salvation? Among the percussion instruments, I included two church bells, like those used by Hector Berlioz in his Symphonie Fantastique. Another recurring motif is the melancholy reminiscence of the main theme of my song from William Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 128, which I dedicated to the Inaccessible. The cello concerto is thus a metaphor for the unveiling of my personal universe.

 

Vito Zuraj

 

" Automatones "

For symphony orchestra

Ed. DSS

2024 SELECTION

The Automatones were animated metal statues of animals, humans, and monsters crafted by the divine blacksmith Hephaestus and the Athenian craftsman Daedalus. The boldest of these self-acting creatures—including Caucasian eagles, golden mermaids, and bronze bulls—should be able to think and feel like humans. In one myth, when Herakles was visiting Daedalus' workshop, he smashed one of the statues, mistakenly believing he had been attacked by a real person. So a veteran of artificial intelligence, a topic that is now shaping the world like never before. Behind the AI is extremely delicate "self-learning" computer programming and this stimulated me to research sound about illusions of the seemingly endlessly lasting ascending tone sequences or rhythmic accelerations, as well as to use different types of motor skills in general. But should artificial intelligence also be able to "feel" - or is it just a matter of time?*

*No AI was used in the compositional process of Automatones.

Notice of the work by Vito Žuraj - GB