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Ljerka Ocic prominent Croatian organist and proponent of organ playing
President of "Franjo Dugan Organ Music Promotion Society"
Ljerka Očić, professor of organ and chamber music at the Academy of Music in Zagreb, has perfomed all over the world.
Ljerka Očić, one of the most eminent Croatian music artists, was born in Croatia's capital Zagreb, and graduated organ from the Music Academy in Ljubljana, in the class of professor Hubert Bergant. She continued her studies with Prof Gaston Litaize (Paris), Prof Michael Schneider (Köln) and Prof Luigi Celeghin (Rome). She has achieved an outstanding international career, giving concerts all over the world. She has played in almost all European countries, the United States, Japan, Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Siberia, and Malaysia. She gives concerts with famous orchestras and soloists, and has been performing with the Slovene trumpeter Stanko Arnold for years.
Ljerka Očić and Stanko Arnold
Since 1992 she has been teaching organ and chamber music at the Academy of Music in Zagreb. She is a jury member at the international organ contests and she gives master courses in interpretation. She has received a number of prestigious awards both in Croatia and abroad, among others the American Biographic Institute award for the contribution to the art of music, and in 1993 the Croatian “Milka Trnina” award for the best concert of that year.
She has recorded many of her concerts for both radio and TV, for domestic and foreign record houses, and has released more than 20 CDs. In 2000 she won two Porin Awards (Croatian music awards) - for the album of the year and for the best solo performance of the Bach-Vivaldi Organ Concerts.
She publishes expert articles about organ, and she worked on numerous organ-music collections, including the entire opus of Franjo Dugan. She is the author of the book “The Organ Interpretation in the Period from the 16th to the 19th Century”, and in 2004 her book of essays “The Organ Art” was published by Matica hrvatska. In 2006, for the purposes of her pedagogical work, she wrote the book ”Organ... the Energy of Spirit”, the new approach to learning and playing, published by Music Play.
She is the president of the “Franjo Dugan Organ Music Promotion Society”. In her interdisciplinary attitude toward music and organ, she is also the author of several exhibitions, uniting her artistic expression with the phenomenon of the organ sound.
Ljerka Očić is the author of Organ Tales of Long Ago, the cycle of five 30-minute documentaries filmed in co-operation with Mira Wolf, director, and Željko Kliment, screenwriter, for the purposes of the Croatian Television Science and Education Department.
In an interesting way these part documentary-part dramatization films tell stories of historically valuable Croatian organs and their builders. Besides being shown on the Croatian National Television, the cycle was also presented in Italy, in the frame of the Ascoli Piceno Festival, and it is an interesting example of popularization of Croatian organ heritage.
Documentary about father Petar Nakić, humble organ builder (video, 30 min, in Italian). The documentary showing the life and work of one of the most famous Venetian organ builders, of Croatian descent, presenting the instruments he built in Croatia (Šibenik), and Italy (Venice, Codroipo).
REPERTOIRE of Ljerka Očić
Includes all stylistic periods, ranging from the music of early masters to renaissance, baroque, classicism and romanticism to contemporary music particulary focused on the Croatian musical heritage:
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