Višnja Korbar Zlatna Kolekcija

So far the best career retrospective of "Croatian Milva" this "Golden Collection" is divided between two CDs, one for each face of her music.

Nostalgic radio listeners would recognize CD1 as testament to her (now extremely rare) EP and single recordings from 1960s/early 1970s when velvety-voiced Višnja Korbar graced many pop festivals stages. Its a joy to hear many of these old songs now remastered and still sounding good, because she truly was one of the best voices around, even though like so many other singers at the time her repertoire heavily relied on international covers - when in 1968 she finally got her own originals ("Subotnje veče") it was a glowing bossa nova that pointed what a sophisticated singer Korbar could be with the right material. However, maybe Korbar's resistance to face commercial aspects of music business dwarfed her visibility on pop scene (as Siniša Škarica's informative liner notes point, its a Sisyphean task to avoid mainstream in this industry) and though she might have cautious and selective with her choice of right music, this approach never paid off as at the end of the day she was "pop schlager" singer without a hit.

Some other factors also contributed - the most impressive moment in her discography ("Zbog jedne davne melodije") was not included on "Opatija 70" album (or any single), planned TV shows were cancelled, technical difficulties botched up her first (and only) LP album, international job offers were refused and her involvement in Croatian version of "Les Miserables" was aborted when show was taken off the program (and a year later became huge hit on London's West End).

When in 1966. Korbar was invited on regional festival "Krapina" that promoted music with strong local village flavor (therefore, interesting only for locals) it was just a nice offer from her birthplace - in her wildest dreams Korbar couldn't possibly imagine this will be her home for the rest of career. Here, far from big national festivals and on a fringes of business, she thrived trough waltzes, polkas and what is best described as Croatian "country" - CD 2 presents her "other life" on stages of regional festivals where local dialect naturally limited visibility of this kind of music. Seems that Korbar found far more pleasure in happy ditties like "Šala bila,šala bu" than anything she had done earlier in her Gershwin covers - here finally she had found her true home and seems that she accepted this kind of music as her destiny. It is not by any stretch bad, only somehow a bit letdown to hear this magnificent voice languishing so far from a limelights.