Milan Stibilj
The Nightingale and the Rose
Symphony

... In the withered concert programmes of our orchestras, Stibilj`s Nightingale appeared in a lucky order of compositions as a contribution not to be questioned. It leads us into unknown. The composer is not shouting, making racked, he is convincing us with special musical logics. The music is not merely on the level of a graduation work, a handfullll of academic knowledge - it is an achievement by Stibilj, as distinguished achievement in the Slovenian symphonic music of the abundent sixties ...

Marjan Gabrijelcic, DELO, Ljubljana, November 1985

... Especially when the same programming somme timeshits the right thing this happened with the opening composition by Milan Stibilj. Maybe the only final part - which is absolutely the highlight of this through and through persuasive composition - was set up with not quite thorough effectiveness. As for the entire performance, I can say that Stibilj deserved the luck, that the young conductor didn`t read his score as a "graduation work", that is in the unintentional approach of understanding it as a studious confrontation with exsamples (where the result is supposed to surpass them). Martin Fischer-Dieskau rather clearly divided the scene of compositional events into two "actors", the light and the dark one, the announcer of the intimate willpower and the counterplay of persistent stylistic violence, neoclassicistic motorics of tempo, that endangers that intimacy and simultaneously gives it buoyancy for genuine poetical tension. Fischer undoubtlessly showed how the very ambiguous stylistic character of the partitions of The Nightingale and the Rose are the extraordinary feature of the composition, that rank it among the very valuable and originally conceived achievents of our syphonic creativity.

Peter Kusar, DNEVNIK, Ljubljana, November 1985