Belgrade Philharmonic Plays 26 Times in September
While the official Fortissimo season doesn't start until October, the Belgrade Philharmonic runs 26 concerts in September, from the Mokranjac Days in Negotin to baby concerts already sold out.
The Belgrade Philharmonic’s official season, named Fortissimo, doesn’t open until October 9 at Kolarac, but the orchestra isn’t waiting around until then. September, a month that by the calendar ought to be quiet, carries as many as 26 concerts, and one series, according to the philharmonic’s own announcement, sold out long ago, to an audience that is still learning to sit still.
Baby Concerts: Three Days, Every Seat Taken
From September 7 to 9, the philharmonic’s concert hall hosts concerts designed for babies up to two years old. Each of the three days brings two performances, at 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., and all of them, the announcement says, are already sold out. The half hour program is built entirely around Mozart: the overture to “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” and a Divertimento. The philharmonic explains the idea briefly in its announcement: “the philharmonic continues its tradition of developing audiences from the earliest age and bringing classical music closer to children through specially designed repertoires.”
The program for the youngest listeners doesn’t stop there. Concerts for preschool age children run on weekdays from September 22 to October 2, and September’s lineup also includes Saint-Saens’s “The Carnival of the Animals,” this time with the Voodoo Piano Duo joining the orchestra as guests.
Flag Day and a Trip to Negotin
The next date on September’s calendar is the 15th, when the philharmonic marks Serbian Flag Day. Ilija Frolov conducts a program made up of works by domestic composers: Ivan Jevtic, Stevan Hristic, Milan Ristic, Svetislav Bozic, Petar Konjovic, and Petar Krstic, a lineup that ties the September program firmly to Serbian music before the orchestra hits the road.
Three days later, on September 18, the Belgrade Philharmonic performs in Negotin as part of the Mokranjac Days, conducted by Vuk Volkov-Popovic. In the town where Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac was born, the orchestra performs his Rukoveti (garlands of folk melodies) in a symphonic arrangement by Milorad Marinkovic, a piece that normally lives in choral form taking on the full weight of an orchestra here.
Who Opens the Season at Kolarac?
Once September is over, the Fortissimo season officially opens at Kolarac on October 9. Josep Vicent, as the Belgrade Philharmonic itself lists him on its website, conducts, with violist Sara Fernandez as soloist.
It’s worth pausing here on a small detail that shows how unforgiving foreign names can be to carry over. Telegraf renders the same conductor’s name as Dzosep Vinsent, writing “under the baton of Dzosepa Vinsenta,” while the philharmonic’s official website uses the form Josep Vicent. By all appearances this is the same person, and the mismatch is a familiar transliteration problem that follows any name reaching Serbian through English instead of coming straight from its language of origin, Catalan in this case.
Fortissimo 26/27, the season the philharmonic opens with that concert, runs to a total of 25 concerts from October 2026 through June 2027, and two names beyond the regular concert calendar are already on the bill: a Lang Lang gala on December 13 at Sava Centar, and a Zubin Mehta performance on October 23 at Kolarac. Two names audiences recognize without the orchestra needing to introduce them, in a season that, judging by the September running ahead of it, looks built to open at a run rather than a walk.
Unlike those two guest appearances, whose tickets have been announced without a sale date yet, the September program shows that the philharmonic, at least where babies are concerned, has already finished its part of the job. Whether the same will hold for Mehta and Lang Lang will only be clear on the day their tickets actually go on sale.
