Krešimir Baranović

Krešimir Baranović (1894–1975) was a Croatian composer and conductor. From 1908 to 1912 Baranović was studying music in Zagreb. He took private lessons from Dragutin (Carlo) Kaiser and then in the school of the Serbian Music Institute where he studied horn with Fran Lhotka. After that, he went to the Music Academy in Vienna (1912-1914) and later that in Berlin (1921-1922). From 1915 to 1943 he was the conductor of the Croatian National Theatre Opera in Zagreb (and the director of it from 1929 to 1940); at that time it went through one of its finest periods. In the season 1927/28, he was also conductor for the Anna Pavlova ballet troupe on her European tour, and was long-term conductor of the Lisinski Choir. After leaving Zagreb in the first years of the war he was imprisoned in the Stara Gradiška camp, and then for some time was conductor of the Bratislava Radio Orchestra (1943) as well as being the director of the Bratislava Opera (1945-1946). From 1946 to 1964 he was teacher of conducting and orchestration at the Music Academy in Belgrade, and from 1951 to 1961 director and conductor of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1954, he was a fellow of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. Member of Serbian Academy of Science and Arts since 1968. In the spirit of a kind of Slavic expressionism, also seen in the works of Janáček and some of the 19th century Russian masters, Baranović was better than any other Serbian composer of his time in overcoming the discrepancy between the national and the universal to be seen in Serbian and Croatian interwar music. In his valuable works the ballet Gingerbread Heart (1924), the song cycle From My Hills (to verses of Fran Galović, 1927) and in the comic opera Sheared-Mown (1932) he drew the authenticity of his idiom from the folk music of Hrvatsko zagorje, the foundation of an artistic transformation of Stravinskyan dimensions.