Peace and joy to all on earth… we do not know of a nicer message and invitation that we could send you at the end of another fraught year, to which we will say goodbye impatiently and soon.

We play only happy notes and sing about happy loves… in the exciting finale of the concert calendar, which we always close with the traditional Lisinski Hall birthday celebration.

 

An earthquake prevented us from doing so last year, as it occurred exactly on Lisinski Hall Day. However, this year we will not give up marking one of the most beautiful days in Croatian culture, the grand opening of Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall on 29 December 1973!

Parlami d'amore Mariù, Chitarra Romana, Smile, Over the Rainbow, Croatian Christmas songs… a magical musical cube of gaiety will be presented to you by Tomislav Mužek & Trio and the Zagreb Saxophone Quartet.

 

Tomislav Mužek is one of the most famous and distinguished tenors of the European and global opera scene today. He is sought after as both a sophisticated concert singer and a charismatic interpreter of Lied, who performs on world-famous stages and at the most reputable music festivals in Europe. His brilliant vocal technique and natural, God-given beautiful voice soon opened the door to the world's greatest opera stages and his dazzling performances of famous tenor roles in classic operas earned him star status among fans and opera connoisseurs, as well as accolades from music critics around the world.

 

The Mužek & Trio ensemble was formed in 2017. Tomislav Mužek gathered top musicians from the Croatian jazz and pop-rock scene, (multi-)instrumentalists, true music masters, and he said that he did it to fulfil his desire to sing the songs he liked to listen to, but never had the opportunity to sing professionally. Miroslav Lesić is a guitarist, composer, producer, arranger and sound engineer, Tomislav Modrić is a pianist, piano teacher, producer, composer and arranger, and Mladen Kosovec is an accordionist and clarinetist and a member of the famous crossover ensemble Tango Appassionato. Excellent double bassist Ivan Gazibara will join the trio as a guest at the concert.

 

The Zagreb Saxophone Quartet, founded in 1989, is a critically acclaimed and multiple awards winning ensemble. Its members are Dragan Sremec, Goran Merčep, Saša Nestorović and Matjaž Drevenšek, three professors from the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb, and one from the Academy of Music, University of Ljubljana.

In addition to most of the classical repertoire, the Quartet performs and arranges pieces from other genres, such as jazz standards by I. Berlin, D. Ellington, G. Gershwin, D. Gillespie and others, and has premiered more than 50 works of Croatian, Slovenian and other composers.

The Quartet has received a dozen Porin Croatian Music Awards and numerous other awards and recognitions in Croatia for its performances and recordings.