THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE

VINYL COLLECTORS CORNER

Format: Long Play

Code: 119521

EAN: 3838898119521

ZKP RTV Slovenia, in cooperation with Radio Slovenia - Ars Programme, is releasing a vinyl record of Milko Lazar's The Man with the Knife, performed by the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Davorin Mori. Lazar wrote the composition for the ballet of the same name, choreographed by Matjaž Farič, which premiered on 8 November 2018 at the SNG Opera and Ballet Ljubljana. „During the process of creating the ballet The Man with the Knife, inspired by the sketches by Rihard Jakopič, I intentionally wandered down some side roads or even dead ends, where I had to find the way forward step by step, beat by beat. It is an interesting question whether these were really side roads or sometimes dead ends. And that is why the challenge was especially powerful. What emerged was music that had actually been in my dreams for a long time, but it obviously needed a trigger in the form of an image of the man with the knife. In the digital edition, the symphonic ballet is presented in its original form, but in the vinyl edition, it is as if I had borrowed the knife from the man and used it to cut up the recording due to the time constraints of a vinyl record, shuffling certain parts and abandoning others. Only the beginning and the end remained the same as in the original. An almost new, shorter composition was created. Perhaps better than the original, perhaps not. In this day and age, we have the possibility of numerous forms of perception. In art, this is reflected as a game between various possible final solutions, truths, roads, side roads and dead ends,“ says Lazar and Farič adds: „Synaesthesia is the phenomenon of a sensory short circuit when one sensory impression is spontaneously transferred to another. In its most elementary form, it can be experienced by anyone when, for example, the smell of a particular scent evokes a Proustian association of not only the image of the fragrant thing but also a whole set of images connected to it. In a more elaborate and rare form, synaesthesia involves direct, almost miraculous leaps from one register to another, when, for example, looking at a certain colour, one hears a sound associated with it in a Nabokovian way. In its best form, synaesthesia is a complex technique of artistic creation that recreates such sensory short circuits. Milko Lazar’s The Man with the Knife, a “symphonic ballet in three parts” based on Jakopič’s sketches, thus offers us a synaesthetic experience that combines three sensory as well as artistic registers of music, dance and painting. Jakopič’s sketches, as examples of the minimalist art of painting, a “restrained gesture” – more of an idea or concept, less of a complete painting – leap into the musical register of the “restrained sound” of Lazar’s compositions, which allow the equally “Dionysian art” of dance to move us. Literally. These three compositions that belong to the sketches can thus function on a synaesthetic level of evocation of both the sketches and the dance within their original ballet text, and twice as beautiful also here outside any context, where “the man with the knife” can simultaneously be diagnosis, threat, promise, vision, prophecy, redemption.“

Milko Lazar

Milko Lazar is a Slovenian composer, pianist, and harpsichordist who works in the fields of contemporary, classical, and jazz music. He studied classical piano, jazz piano, and saxophone at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, as well as harpsichord and Baroque music at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His body of work includes a wide range of orchestral compositions, operas, and chamber music, along with music for film, vocal pieces, jazz, and works for contemporary choreography. Since 2008, he has collaborated with choreographer Edward Clug. Together, they have staged 24 ballet choreographies, including Faust – The Ballet (2018) with the Zurich Ballet, Patterns in ¾ and Source with the Stuttgart Ballet, Master and Margarita (2021) at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and Coppélia (2023) at Theater Basel. New allevening ballet from Clug-Lazar, A Midsummer Nights Dream, was premiered on 21. of February 2025 in Deutsche Oper Berlin. As a pianist, he regularly performs in a piano duo with Bojan Gorišek. Milko Lazar has received numerous awards in Slovenia, including the Prešeren Award in 2005, a prestigious arts prize; the Župančič Art Award in 2010, presented by the City of Ljubljana for his orchestral and chamber music; and the Ksenija Hribar Award in 2021 for his work in the field of contemporary dance.