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Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim | Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific.
Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-425-5.167-183
© 2025 Niall O’Loughlin

Recent Slovene Music and its Interpreters

Niall O’Loughlin
Loughborough University
Univerza v Loughboroughu

“All the signs suggest that there is a renewed surge of enthusiasm for ensuring
1
that a serious music culture is reinvigorated and grows.” I made this state-
ment in the year 2000 and waited to see whether the Slovene musical cul-
ture that had been developing in the years since independence had expand-
ed and flourished. I need not have worried. That it blossomed in the next
two decades has been shown emphatically in the large number of outstand-
ing works that have been composed that this expansion has taken place.
Why it has happened is clear: it is because of the determination and enthu-
siasm of the composers, the attention and participation of the audiences
and, above all, the high-level skills and application of the performers. This
last point is probably the most important of all. It did not occur sudden-
ly, but had been gradually nurtured over many years, especially since the
1960s. It has been the work of the ‘interpreters’, the performers, that have
helped to make this happen.

1960–2000
Three important examples from many will illustrate the model for the pe-
riod from 1960 until 1991, the year of independence. The first and one of
the leaders in this activity was the violinist Igor Ozim (1931–2024) whose
2
1 Niall O’Loughlin, Novejša glasba v Sloveniji (Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 2000), 327.
2 Igor Ozim died on 23 March 2024 in Salzburg. A tribute was published in The Strad
(25 March 2024). See: Anon., “Obituary: Igor Ozim,” The Strad, March 25, 2024,

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