Tomislav Špoljar

Session: Organizing brass events in countries of transition (Velika Gorica Brass Festival – Croatia) with André Bonnici

Tomislav Špoljar has started to play trumpet at age 6. He finished Music Academy of the University of Zagreb. During his studies he attended numerous masterclasses of eminent trumpet players (Steuart, Tarr, Dokshitzer, Groth, Nilsson, Touvron, Vizzutti, Thibaud, André, Tarkövi, Agnas, Hardenberger…), and after his studies he took private lessons with T.Plog, P.Thibaud, G.Geiger, D.Baldwin and T.Reiner. He is constantly seeking for broadening trumpet repertoire so he is cooperating with numerous composers and has initiated a lot of new compositions wich are dedicated to him (E.Ewazen, J.Stephenson, L.Saglie, S.Stojanović, A.Belovari, H.Wessman…). In 2008. He gave a New York premiere of E.Ewazen’s Trio for trumpet, cello and piano at Juilliard School of Music and in 2014. He premiered the same piece with the trombone instead of cello (with James Lebens on trombone and Eric Ewazen on piano on tour in Romania). He promotes trumpet and brass instruments in Croatia since brass instruments in his homeland are not so popular. He initiated five trumpet studios aprooved by the ministry of culture. He is most active as a pedagougue but also is giving concerts and workshops (Minnesota-USA, Albania, Israel, Romania). He is seeked member of juries for various competitions (Croatia, Slovenia, Israel, USA, Serbia). He started and was an artistic director of concert cycle Heavy Metal dedicated to brass instruments in 2017. He started and is runing a brass festival in the city of Velika Gorica as an artistic director since 2007. He is contributing ITG member since 1992.