Festival Slowind 2015 Vito Žuraj, artistic director Slowind Woodwind Quintet - founder of the festival Aleš Kacjan, flute Matej Šarc, oboe Jurij Jenko, clarinet Metod Tomac, horn Paolo Calligaris, bassoon (guest ensembles for the 2015 festival will be announced soon) Slowind is made up of soloists from the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra. As well as performing the standard repertoire for wind quintet both in Slovenia and abroad, the ensemble also dedicates itself to a diverse range of chamber music, collaborating with internationally renowned performers such as Heinz Holliger, Robert Aitken, Alexander Lonquich, Arvid Engegård, Ursula Oppens, Christiane Iven, Garth Knox, Marisol Montalvo, Matthias Pintscher and many others. It is particularly active in the area of new music, and is a regular guest at the most important contemporary music festivals (Ars Musica Brussels, Biennale Bern, Klangspuren Innsbruck, New Music Concerts Series Toronto, Zeitklänge Feldkirch, Contempuls Prague). Amongst the numerous composers who have written new works for Slowind are Vinko Globokar, Elliott Carter, Lojze Lebič, Jürg Wyttenbach, Nina Šenk and Martin Smolka. For the last fifteen years, the quintet has promoted international modern and contemporary chamber repertoire at its own concert cycle, the Slowind Festival, which provides an opportunity to systematically present important composers of international modernism, such as Giacinto Scelsi, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Vinko Globokar and, not least, Elliott Carter, to whom the entire Slowind Festival was dedicated in 2011. At this festival, Slowind gave the Slovenian premieres of 25 of Carter’s solo, chamber an orchestral compositions, and it was for this very festival that Elliott Carter dedicated one of his last compositions – Trije glasbeniki (2011). Slowind appears on several CDs and DVDs with works by Leoš Janáček, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, Paul Hindemith, Vinko Globokar, Arnold Schönberg, Gustav Mahler and many other composers. The American record company Bridge Records recently released a CD with Elliott Carter’s Nine by Five performed by the Slowind Wind Quintet. For its achievements, Slowind received the Župančič Prize of the City of Ljubljana in 1999, and the Prešeren Fund Prize, a prestigious Slovenian state award in the field of culture, in 2003. More about Slowind on: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sndicne6i9thp87/Slowind.pdf