Ivo Maček (24 March 1914–26 May 2002) was a prominent Croatian pianist, composer, teacher, editor and academician.
He inherited his love for music from his parents, Dr Pavao (1880–1932) and Marija Maček née Heffler (1892–1978).
Amalgamating the best features of both schools, German precision, speed and huge sound, and French expressiveness and fine shading, Maček developed into a pianist who avoided any endeavour to find favour with the public via superficial virtuosity.
He gave concerts in many cities of Croatia and the former Yugoslavia as well as in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland.
In the context of the school's own performances from 1928 to 1933, the talented young pianist in his earliest chamber outings showed both musicality and a brilliant ability to accommodate his playing to the soloist.
They drew favourable comments from the public in a concert at the Croatian Music Institute on 16 May 1938, playing for the first time Maček's Piano Trio.
In association with cellist Antonio Janigro (1939 to 1941; 1944 to 1949) and Ludwig Hoelscher (1942), with Enrico Mainardi (1949 to 1950, 1953) and Mirko Dorner (from 1952 to 1953), Maček stood out as an excellent, reliable and valuable accompanist.
The most successful of all these associations was with Mirko Dorner, in a duo with whom he won the first prize at the 3rd international music competition in Vercelli (1952).
He also worked with vocal artists, such as the soprano Irma Turković, the alto Marijana Radev, the tenor Mario Djuranec, the baritone Ivo Lhotka-Kalinski and the bass Tomislav Neralić.
He studied composition at the Music Academy in Zagreb with Franjo Dugan Sr (1874–1948), who, employing Romantic expressive resources in his oeuvre, also used elements of Baroque polyphony as a support on which to hang firmly rounded forms.
Thanks to a French government scholarship from 1939 to 1940, he went on with his studies with Jean Jules Aimable Roger-Ducasse (1873–1954), who, as a composer, was uncompromising in rejecting the sentimental outpourings of late Romanticism and its conservative patterns and developed his style on elements of what was then up-to-date French music.
The music of this Austrian composer breathed the spirit of French Impressionism and successfully conjoined the beauty of a lush melody with harmonic refinement.
The two choral compositions are in fact motets in the classical polyphonic style: Gressus meos, for a four-part mixed choir, and Confortamini for a five-part mixed choir, composed during his composition studies at the Music Academy in Zagreb (in 1934).
Unlike the Romantic saturation of the piano texture of his earlier compositions (Intermezzo, 1935; Improvisation, 1937; Theme and Variations, 1939), the later compositions (Sonatina, 1977; Sonata, 1985; Prelude and Toccata, 1987 and Concertino for piano and chamber orchestra, 1991) had a lighter and more transparent facture, dominated by thematically more profiled ideas.
His work in education started when he was a teacher of piano at the Lisinski Private Music School in Zagreb (1936–1939).
Working as a rehearsal pianist in the National Theatre in Zagreb in 1940, Maček took over the duty of trainee music teacher in the Third Boys' Real High School.
As well as all this, Ivo Maček found time to carry out the duties of a delegate of the Council for Education at the final examinations of secondary music schools.