Belgrade SAXperience Opens Tonight at Parobrod
The 13th Belgrade SAXperience opens tonight at UK Parobrod with a performance by Baptiste Herbin and Aleksandar Grujic, with free admission to all five concerts through December 8.
When the main lights go down at UK Parobrod and only a spotlight remains over the stage, the venue that normally hosts crowds of several hundred contracts into something far more intimate: a hundred, maybe two hundred listeners gathered around two instruments. Tonight at 8pm, French jazz saxophonist Baptiste Herbin and Belgrade pianist Aleksandar Grujic take that stage, and their duet opens the 13th edition of the Belgrade SAXperience festival, running through December 8.
This year’s festival counts five concerts spread across three venues, the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), the Belgrade Cultural Centre and UK Parobrod, and the program reaches well beyond what people usually picture when they hear the word saxophone. Alongside the concerts comes an educational strand, master classes for young saxophonists led by the visiting artists, so the festival doesn’t close after one night but stretches across the whole autumn as a series of small stops. Admission to all five concerts is free, no small thing in a city where a ticket to a chamber concert can easily cost as much as a movie ticket.
Herbin is among the saxophonists who today most seriously represent the French jazz scene, and tonight’s performance is built as a chamber piece, its repertoire chosen specifically for the Parobrod space rather than imported from some bigger stage. Grujic joins him as a partner, not as accompaniment, a distinction the festival program spells out directly and one that, in chamber jazz, often decides whether an evening sounds like a conversation or like a solo turn with backing.
What makes the festival interesting isn’t just the list of names but the way it links institutions that rarely share a bill. On October 1 at the SANU Gallery, Belgian classical saxophonist and composer Alain Crepin, professor emeritus at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, performs alongside guest Milan Savic, a lecturer at the Faculty of Music. That concert isn’t only an evening program, it also marks the opening of the first classical saxophone department at that faculty, a moment that gives the festival weight beyond a single season and writes it into the institution for the longer term. The concert is supported by the Embassy of Belgium in Belgrade, an unusual form of partnership for a festival this size. On October 8 at Parobrod comes the Italian project GrandessoCera by Damiano Grandes, which pairs saxophone with electronics, a genre that classically trained performers in Serbia less often choose for a public concert.
The domestic side of the program belongs to Duo Vibrance. On November 26, also at Parobrod, saxophonist Milan Savic and mezzo-soprano Ana Savic perform a repertoire they have spent years commissioning from Serbian composers, and that evening also brings the premiere of a piece by Milos Branisavljevic, set to verses by Desanka Maksimovic. Pairing voice and saxophone over Serbian poetry is a move the festival saves for the middle of the season, once audiences have grown used to the instrument in its foreign guises and it returns to them through their own language. The festival closes on December 8 at the Belgrade Cultural Centre with a performance by Spanish saxophonist Irene Fernandez Mena, whose program Ancestral Sounds pairs solo saxophone with electronics and lighting, a recital built as a multisensory experience, with sound and light sharing the same frame.
What a lineup like this actually shows is that an instrument still seen as something of an outsider (the saxophone has no fixed seat in the traditional symphony orchestra) has spent the past few years building its own network of people in Belgrade who push it beyond being a single solo spot on a program. A new department at the Faculty of Music, free admission that removes the financial barrier, and Serbian composers writing new works for the instrument instead of leaning on imported repertoire add up to something closer to a small institutional infrastructure than to a festival that simply comes and goes. Whether that infrastructure holds up for another season will depend on how many people actually show up tonight and in the months ahead, because free admission gets people through the door, but only what they hear inside keeps the hall full.
