BELEF from July 20: Free Concerts and Monodramas

There is a quiet irony in the fact that Belgrade’s oldest summer festival, in a year when many would happily pay to escape the city’s heat, is returning to enclosed spaces and free admission. Instead of a large open-air stage, the 33rd Belgrade Summer Festival opts for two interiors with a history: the concert hall of the Youth Center and the rooms of the Residence of Princess Ljubica, where, from July 20 to 26, music and the spoken word will take turns with no charge at the door.

This season BELEF has clearly decided that less can be more. There is no overstretched program trying to cover every genre at once, but a handful of carefully chosen evenings that lean on the chamber format. It is a choice that says a great deal about how the institution sees its audience, not as a crowd to be impressed by numbers, but as listeners willing to sit down and pay attention.

Why does an accordion open the festival, not an orchestra?

The answer lies in the character of this year’s edition. The opening on July 20 at 8 p.m. is carried by the virtuoso Moldovan ensemble “Concertino Accordion,” a group that returns the accordion to a serious concert setting, far from the folk label the instrument so often carries here. They are joined by mezzo-soprano Ljubica Vranes as a special guest, and the program brings together names rarely heard in the same evening: Bizet, Vivaldi, Grieg, Piazzolla and Saint-Saens.

That range is no accident. From the baroque austerity of Vivaldi to the tango melancholy of Piazzolla, the evening is conceived as a journey through different temperaments, with the accordion as the instrument that binds them into a single voice. Add the human voice of a mezzo-soprano, and the result is a program that demands no prior knowledge but rewards attention. In a city where summer culture is often reduced to background music over a drink, the idea of someone seriously listening to an accordion feels almost subversive.

The Residence of Princess Ljubica, meanwhile, takes on the theatrical part of the program. The 19th-century building, with its low ceilings and rooms that remember a different Belgrade, is a natural stage for the monodrama, a form that lives on the closeness between actor and audience. The space once inhabited by a princess becomes a place where a single actor holds the entire hall, with no set to hide behind.

What does the program reveal about the festival’s ambition?

The dramatic part begins on July 21 with the monodrama “Milos the Great, Prince of Serbia,” performed by Aleksandar Dunic, a piece that grapples with one of the most complex figures in Serbian history. To play Milos in rooms that belong to the same historical moment is to erase the line between stage and context, a move that shows the programming team is thinking about space, not just scheduling.

The festival closes on July 26 with the award-winning monodrama “Milunka” by Vesna Stankovic, dedicated to Milunka Savic, the most decorated woman in the history of warfare. That the edition opens with a Moldovan accordion and closes with the story of a Serbian warrior speaks to a dramaturgical arc the festival is consciously building, from foreign to domestic, from music to word, from virtuosity to testimony.

The lasting impression is that BELEF this year is not trying to be a spectacle. Free admission to the concerts is not merely a gesture toward the audience, but a statement about what a festival is for at a moment when culture is increasingly a matter of budget and less and less a matter of access. Seven evenings, two stages, not a single ticket for the musical part, a program that counts on curiosity rather than purchasing power.

And perhaps that is the real question for this summer: when the city offers you serious music and theatre with no ticket, will you show up, or will you wait for a spectacle that never comes?