The album Dora Pejačević: Complete Symphonic Works has been selected as one of “5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now” by The New York Times. This is a great recognition for the music of Dora Pejačević and for all the artists involved in this project – pianist Martina Filjak, soprano Annika Schlicht, Staatskapelle Weimar with maestro Ivan Repušić, and the team at Audite.
„You may not have heard of the composer Dora Pejačević (1885–1923), but she cuts an imposing figure in Croatian music. An ambassador of late-Romantic style, she brought the orchestral song into her country’s repertoire and wrote its first modern symphony and concerto. These works, alongside the entirety of Pejačević’s orchestral output, appear on this compelling album.
An admirer of metaphysical poetry, Pejačević longed to escape into a creative world in which the spirit would transcend the bodily. She never could. World War I, whose violence she witnessed firsthand as a nurse, brought the physical roaring back into her music, while her own life was cut short in childbirth.
Pejačević’s Piano Concerto is full of aching ascending figures and elegant melodic eddies, but the pianist Martina Filjak brings out the percussive intensity that grounds the work. In “Liebeslied,” whose lush but limpid harmonies recall Gustav Mahler, Pejačević sets a text by Rainer Maria Rilke about lovers resonating as one string, unable to escape the pull of the body even as their souls long for freedom. As sung with rapturous intensity by Annika Schlicht, this piece is a perfect introduction the tensions between earth and spirit that define Pejačević’s music.“ – Gabrielle Ferrari, The New York Times, May 7, 2026