Bogdan Gagić

condition (records/cover): NM / VG+ (minimal sticker removal residue and light ring wear on front)

Bogdan Gagić (1931-2019) belongs to the generation of Croatian composers who, like Detoni and others in the Yugoslav avant-garde, came of age at the intersection of the Darmstadt network and a local tradition that remained distinct from it. Born in Karlovac, he studied in Zagreb, Siena, and Darmstadt, and after 1963 taught at the Zagreb Academy of Theatre, Film, and Television - an institutional home that already signals something about his range of reference. His catalogue concentrated on orchestral and instrumental forms, and critics who have described his language have reached for the term "post-Webernesque" - a phrase that locates him in a recognizable lineage without doing full justice to the particular local inflections his music carries.

This LP - issued in 1978 as part of Jugoton's series of Contemporary Croatian Composers - gathers works that span the core of his mature output: the Piano Concerto No. 2 (1970), the Symphony, and several Piano Sonatas (Nos. 1, 3, and 4), performed by pianist Vladimir Krpan with the Zagreb Symphony Orchestra under Krešimir Šipus. The range across a single disc is itself telling: a composer equally at home in the grand orchestral form and in the intimate demands of solo piano writing, the two scales of address informing each other without collapsing into a single register.

This LP remains one of the most inaccessible documents in the Jugoton contemporary composers series - almost entirely absent from Western archives, with a want list that has consistently exceeded its have. A genuine discovery from a catalog that still has more to give. Original 1978 pressing.