58th BEMUS opens tonight at Kolarac, program to October 30
A gala concert with the RTS Choir opens the festival at 8 p.m., followed by Volodos, Lozakovic, the Sofia Philharmonic and four world premieres by Serbian composers.
Tonight at 8 p.m., at the Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, the RTS Symphony Orchestra and the RTS Choir, conducted by Dusan Vilic, perform excerpts from operas by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, and the 58th BEMUS begins. The festival, founded in 1969 and organized by the Belgrade Festival Center (CEBEF), runs through October 30, and the opening concert is staged in cooperation with RTS Music Production.
Who performs at the opening?
Vilic has been conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre stage in Vladivostok since 2023, and he regularly conducts ballet performances on the theatre’s main stage in St. Petersburg. He put the program together himself and, according to the newspaper Novosti, put particular emphasis on Tchaikovsky’s last masterpiece, the opera “Iolanta.”
The soloists are soprano Tatjana Pavlovskaja, a People’s Artist of Russia who has sung at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala and the Bavarian State Opera, mezzo-soprano Jekaterina Lukas, tenor Igor Morozov, and baritones Vjaceslav Vasiljev and Sergej Kajdalov. The sources disagree about the last name: the BEMUS press release says the sixth soloist is bass Gevorg Grigorjan, while Novosti names bass Ilija Kazakov, a soloist of the Vienna State Opera. Which of the two takes the stage will become clear tonight.
What follows through October 30?
All concerts at Kolarac start at 8 p.m.:
- October 18: Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra
- October 19: violinist Daniel Lozakovic and pianist David Fray
- October 20: Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra from Budapest
- October 21: Korda Piano Trio
- October 24: Sofia Philharmonic, led by Nayden Todorov, with violinist Sergei Krylov
- October 26: Nis Symphony Orchestra with violinist Stefan Milenkovic, conducted by Dejan Savic
- October 28: recital by pianist Arcadi Volodos
- October 29: golden jubilee of the Academic Choir “Collegium Musicum,” led by Dragana Jovanovic
- October 30: Belgrade Philharmonic, conductor Uros Lajovic, soloist pianist Lukas Vondracek
Vondracek won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and is performing in Belgrade for the first time. The “Collegium Musicum” choir celebrates 50 years of work this year. A concert of young Serbian artists, featuring finalists of the RTS audition for the 2026 Eurovision Young Musicians competition, and a performance by the National Theatre Opera are listed in the festival announcement, but the material available to us gives no dates for them.
Domestic premieres and ticket prices
Alongside the European repertoire, the festival brings world premieres of works by four Serbian composers: Aleksandar Sedlar, Marko Nikodijevic, Drasko Adzic and Jug Markovic. The titles have not been announced, so it is not known on which evenings each piece will be heard for the first time.
Tickets cost from 1,000 dinars, for the Korda Piano Trio and the “Collegium Musicum” choir, up to 3,000 dinars for tonight’s opening and Arcadi Volodos’s recital. The Belgrade Philharmonic concert starts at 2,000 dinars. Sales are handled by Ticket Vision outlets and the website tickets.rs, and anyone buying ten or more tickets for any BEMUS concert at Kolarac gets a 10 percent discount on the total.
