Milko Kelemen: “Theme and Variations”
The Croatian composer Milko Kelemen, born in 1924, was a pupil of Olivier Messiaen and Wolfgang Fortner. For many years he worked at the renowned "Electronic Siemens Studio" in Munich. Then in 1959 he founded the famous "Zagreb Biennale," serving as its President during the early 1960s. Kelemen is still today the Honorary President of this institution.
During the 1970s Kelemen was Professor of Composition in Düsseldorf and he also taught at the Stuttgart Music Academy until 1989. He has always said that he wanted to make the complexity of new music more transparent through "complicated simplicity." An early, little-known work of Milko Kelemen is the Theme and Variations for Piano of 1949, which follows a traditional formal scheme. The Variations are not counted, but are connected with the theme to form a single, continuous movement.
