One of the greatest avant-garde composers in the world and the most famous Croatian composer, Milko Kelemen, celebrates his 91st birthday on the 30th of March 2015. On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, numerous concerts were held in his honor. On the 19th of May 2015, the Croatian and German pianist star Diana Brekalo will organize a world premiere of the Sonata Oubliée of professor Milko Kelemen in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The concert will be held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square in central London, in a very acoustic church, well-known of its classical music events.

“Sonata Oubliée was created in 2012,” said professor Kelemen in the interview that I conducted with him in January 2015.

Milko Kelemen: “This is my last work. Sonata Oubliée or Forgotten Sonata is the title of a music work that sounds. Sonata has to sound and therefore this composition is a sonata, but not in the sense of the old sonata form, on the contrary it has a free-form.”

Milko Kelemen emphasized that it is his last work.
Milko Kelemen: “I started to compose when I was 11 years old. At that time I composed my first work. It was a composition – an imitation of Mozart. I have changed throughout life. Each composition represents another period of change.”

Since the beginning of the twenty first century Milko Kelemen has already composed 19 works. Seven of them are orchestral and all of them have been publicly performed.
Diana Brekalo has the works of Milko Kelemen regularly on her repertory. In 1999, Brekalo already participated as a student in the international music festival called Days of Milko Kelemen in Slatina, the birth town of Kelemen. On the 17th Days of Milko Kelemen, in October 2011, Diana Brekalo, as a most famous pianist, held an evening concert with works by Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt and three compositions by Milko Kelemen: Dessins Commentés (1964), Pillars Of The Sky (1986) and Sonata for piano (1954).

“It is a great honor to premiere Sonata Oubliée of Milko Kelemen and I am preparing myself with great pleasure for the concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields,” said Diana Brekalo. This year she has already performed a concert in London, in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was a charity concert, held on 22 January in Rosslyn Hill Chapel in London where she performed solo and with her international piano trio Solarek and mezzo-soprano Mae Heydorn. In April, Diana Brekalo will have a concert at the Beethovensaal in the Liederhalle in Stuttgart. In August she will have a China and Mongolia tour.