Spano opened with a recent work, Jennifer Higdon's "blue cathedral," and continued with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 - with the fine Pedja Muzijevic as soloist - and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra..... The Mozart concerto held attention for different reasons. Muzijevic acknowledged Classical tradition by playing blissfully along with the orchestra even when the piano part didn't require it. As soloist, he shaped lines with chipper energy and added all sorts of tasteful decorations, even in the extended phrases of the slow movement. Muzijevic offered a first-movement cadenza, by Mozart contemporary Philipp Karl Hoffmann, whose elaborations might have intrigued the composer. The pianist's liveliness sometimes spilled over into rambunctiousness in the finale, but his music-making was so vital that it kept all ears glued to the sublime discussions. Spano's collaboration was alert and balanced, with superb winds placed in fine relief to silken strings. Donald Rosenberg, The Plain Dealer, Clevelend What we heard was artistry worthy of such a resume. Muzijevic is a virtuoso with a big, bronze tone, imagination and technique to spare, and a multifaceted expressiveness. With the first notes of Chopin's Polonaise-fantasie, it was evident that we were hearing an artist with personality.....Muzijevic's Schumann is more imaginative than neurotic, and this approach works better with Carnaval than with some of the composer's other works....To play this well, one must have steel in the hands, love and affection in the heart, and more than a little craziness. Muzijevic was more than equal to the demands, and his performance was among the best I've heard of this popular work. Ken Keaton, The Daily News, Palm Beach The pianist performed with real elegance and lyricism and a dose of formality that added just the right amount of spine to his flawless lines. Richard Sheinin, The Mercury News, San Jose, CA Listening to the almost peerless musicianship of pianist Pedja Muzijevic left the music lover in speechless wonder, grappling for apt superlatives. William Thomas Walker, Classical Voice of North Carolina Muzijevic accomplished something rare in the first half of the program; he held the audience spellbound, playing three Liszt pieces without the interruption of applause or even rattling paper. Moving from two late works written in the composer's experimental, almost atonal style, to Liszt's bravura transcription and reworking of Isoldes Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, Muzijevic's sensitive and nuanced interpretation was arresting. Charles Freeman, The Daily News, Palm Beach Muzijevic shaped a well-founded interpretation from seriousness of the first movement, through the fine shading of the Largo, to a rhythmically taut Rondo with conviction and maximum concentration. He maintained a dialogue of equals with the orchestra in an extraordinary lively performance on the difficult playing field of a Beethoven Concerto “everybody knows everything there is to know”. Maja Stanetti, Vecernji List, Zagreb Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in C Major, op. 15 was in the center of the attention. Pedja Muzijevic brilliantly interpreted this virtuosic and spirited work, with an interesting combination of composer’s first movement cadenzas. He played an inspired rendition of the Rondo in a lively tempo that did not take away the ease and elegance from the performance. His free rubato phrasing had a solid base in a precise rhythm. Maestro Uros Lajovic expertly controlled and lead the Zagreb Philharmonic in a fine dialogue with the pianist. Visnja Pozgaj, Vjesnik, Zagreb Which brings us to Hans Werner Henze’s “Tristan”, performed Friday night by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and pianist Pedja Muzijevic, led by Andreas Delfs......A measure of relief also lies in the extended piano solos. The melodic contours here, too, are as spiky as a deathbed EKG. But Muzijevic played them with such gorgeous legato and phrased them so compellingly as to round off the sharper points. He made the solos ruminative, in the way that jazz pianists sound ruminative as they explore chords and warm their way into a song. The piano’s introspection made a nice contrast with the explosive, let-it-all-hang-out orchestral music. Tom Strini, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The unexpected discovery was Pedja Muzijevic, whom (I would suspect) no one in the audience had heard of before; I certainly hadn’t. Few experiences are more exciting for a critic than suddenly being made aware of a heretofore unknown first-rate musician, and when the musician has the startling originality of this Bosnian-born pianist the experience is heady indeed. Fortunately Aleskie’s programming allowed us to hear the pianist in solo pieces as well as in the several chamber combinations, so that we could get a very clear idea of his musical personality. Everyone plays these pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs and Debussy’s two sets of Images, and a whole series of great pianists have played them exquisitely. I would not have supposed they could sound as utterly new as Muzijevic made them. Ordinarily, pianists emphasize the sensual and pictorial qualities of this music: the rippling of the water in the goldfish pond, the misty atmosphere out of which the sounds of the distant church bells emerge, the fiery espagnolism of the jester’s morning song. Muzijevic, in contrast, underlined their musical structure, the shapes of their motifs, the ways their phrases and sections are put together. To this end he pedalled with extraordinary delicacy, so that instead of merging in an impressionistic haze, all the sounds (above all, the harmonies) remained completely distinct. The resultwas to focus the listener’s attention on how this music differs from Romanticism, to enable us to perceive the crispness and lucidity of the piano writing, and to make us aware - something most performances leave obscure - of the modernity of Debussy and Ravel (yes, Ravel too). I don’t mean to imply that there was anything dry or pedantically analytical about Muzijevic’s playing. On the contrary, the sound spectrum in La vallee des cloches was ravishing in its palette of nuanced colors, Alborada del gracioso was intense and explosive in its rhytmic drive, and Hommage a Rameau (which really has nothing to do with Rameau) was unusually grand and noble in its deliberate, expansive pacing. By treating these works less as “impressions” and more as pure music, the pianist made them far more gripping that what one ordinarily hears in them. Jonathan Saville, San Diego Reader A luminous performance of the Fifth Piano Concerto, known as the “Emperor” with the Bosnian-born pianist Pedja Muzijevic followed. Rather that treating the work as a virtuosic vehicle, Muzijevic offered an interpretation of sustained poetry that reached deep. Instead of thundering bass power or brilliant treble flights, he dazzled with the subtlety of his thoughts, the sureness of his control, the quickness of his response, and the acuteness of his listening to the orchestra and , above all, to Beethoven. He made the audience feel as if he and they were hearing the work for the first time. Again and again he surprised with a slight hesitation in a line, or a sudden pulling back at the top of a phrase, or the warm shaping of a virtuosic passage. His tonal palette defied logic as he matched colors with the woodwinds or molded dynamics with the flexibility of a string player. The rare quality of his collaboration and his golden musicianship brought both audience cheers and the ultimate orchestra tribute of tapping stands and stamping feet. Joanne Sherry Hoover, Albuquerque Journal Pedja Muzijevic, the Croatian pianist performing the concerto (Beethoven #2) Saturday with guest conductor Gabriel Chmura and the Richmond Symphony, played it more for its Mozartian brilliance and clarity than for hints of the Olympian Beethoven to come. Crisp and straightforward in the fast outer movements, Muzijevic conjured a small miracle of timing in the solo cadenza of the first movement. He saved most musicianship for the central adagio, emphasizing its spare lyricism and at the end playing extraordinarily softly yet projecting throughout the hall. Clarke Bustard, Richmond Time-Dispatch Pedja Muzijevic, a Bosnian-born pianist, was stunning in the monstrously difficult piano part (Henze Tristan Preludes), coming accross as an actor, speaking eloquently in a foreign tongue, the language being atonality. The musicians of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra played in extremely concentrated, peak form. Rick Walters, Shepherd Express His playing was like a refined hunger, taking sharp, exaggeratedly emphatic bites which sounded right in Janacek. There is a powerfully persuasive personality at large here; and with recent scores by Knussen and Corigliano he turned his recital into an almost encyclopaedic demonstration of stylistic sympathies. I was impressed. Michael White, Independent on Sunday, London The choice of Sunday-afternoon pianist proved the adventurousness of Aldeburgh’s programme-planning. Pedja Muzijevic, a young Yugoslavian resident in America, is a virtuoso with formidable fingers and a musician with fiercely original ideas about the music he plays. Max Loppert, Financial Times, London For all its impetuosity and fire, the Mendelssohn concerto abounds in classical virtues of clarity and balance. Muzijevic dared to play it that way. He didn’t try to sell the piece, to wow the audience. He gave his performance - thoughtful, clearheaded, lyrical - and drew in his listeners, which is no small achievement given the chattiness of his Pops audience. In the agitated first movement, his rippling scales and fluid passagework were uncommonly handsome. He played with roominess but didn’t dawdle during the long-arched melodies of the Adagio. And with his supple wrist technique, he dashed through the buoyant, bouncy finale with delicacy, elegance and exuberance. Muzijevic played with varied and luminous tone colors; he voices chords and interviewing lines with attentiveness and clarity, and makes notey passagework sound thematic as well as coloristic. This was a striking debut. Anthony Tommasini, Boston Globe The greatest revelation, in fact, was the brilliance of pianist Pedja Muzijevic, who not only accompanied Baryshnikov, but played several musical interludes, as well. The Bosnian musician's playing was so clean and so finely articulated that it revealed all manner of musical lines that most performers would have left in a thicket of musical glop. David Lyman, Detroit Free Press Luckily concert pianist Pedja Muzijevic held everyone's interest by following it with "Intermission No. 1" by Morton Feldman, executed with such expression that he could have trumped an entire orchestra. Muzijevic has been one of the musical collaborators for the evening, and his own four solos showed inventive and beautiful programming. His selection of the lyrical "Serenade" from Richard Strauss and Leopold Godowsky sent us scrambling for programs to memorize the title. Harriet Howard Heithaus, Naples Daily News The series Great Pianists at the Teatro Municipal opened triumphantly with the virtuoso pianist Pedja Muzijevic....A separate paragraph is warranted for the interpretations of the pages of Franz Liszt; most notably those special, visionary ones, full of harmonic freedom, that were completed toward the end of the century. More popular works, such as Funereilles and the Valse oubliee No. 1, were played with strong dramatic contrasts and a fabulous touch of distinction and transparancy. In the piano version of Wagner’s Isolde’s Liebestod, Liszt reaches an ecstasy born of madness and Muzijevic knows how to communicate, with a magic empathy, the extreme degree of delirium. Federico Heinlein, El Mercurio, Santiago de Chile