REVIEWS

Balkan Season Tour 2021

No Borders Orchestra in Lauba – Goodbye to Normality 

Author: Zoran Stajčić  
Source: www.ravnododna.com
  

During this year Balkan tour – ‘No Return to Normality’ – the No Borders Orchestra performed at Zagreb’s Lauba Gallery last night and brought a breath of classisistic avant-garde. 

The No Borders Orchestra is a symphony orchestra consisting of prominent professional musicians from all countries and most of the ethnic and religious groups of former Yugoslavia. It was founded by artistic director and conductor Premil Petrovic. NBO was created out of a desire to make a symphony orchestra of the former Yugoslavia that transcends regional borders, and sets the highest artistic criteria of quality, while seeking a new form of communication.

At its core, NBO is not only a fusion of the region’s best musicians, but also an NGO that supports the strengthening of civil rights through politically and socially engaged artistic and cultural projects. It serves as a platform for change and overcome of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and bloody legacy of the Western Balkans.

This year tour called “No Return to Normality”, started on August 23 in Rijeka, and two days later came to Zagreb. Premil Petrović explained a few days ago with the words: “With the title “No Return to Normality” we would like to send a message that the normality that we were living before the pandemic was actually not normal, and that we should not strive to return to such a world. We live in a time of ecological catastrophy, great social disparities, hyperproduction and hyperconsumerism and we need a change for the better. Therefore, all the compositions from our repertoire on this tour thematise the transformation of society and we send an invitation to everyone that we need to change“, at a press conference ahead of the performance in Export on the Delta in Rijeka. This is where the orchestra was to perform last year as part of Rijeka – European capital of culture, but the concert was canceled due to a coronavirus pandemic.

The author of these lines rarely writes about classical music, not because he doesn’t like classical music, but because he doesn’t like where classical music has gone thanks to commercialisation. In particular, large revue concerts and various tenors with a pop mindset inherit popular melodies and arias in a context of modern grandiose productions, which the musical experience mostly leads to a kitschy presentation of times long past. What is sorely lacking could be reduced to a slogan: old instruments and settings – new ideas. We should have more of such avant-garde transformations of ‘classics’ that artistically ‘deeply plow’ at present, because in the classics there is this kind of underground which is in the shadow of revue, easy-listening-music classical performances for the masses. In that sense, the No Borders Orchestra is a truly superb story – a story that is able to eclectically provoke the present, including this pandemic.

The selection of the work “Shaker Loops” by the American composer John Adams testified that the No Borders Orchestra hit where it should at the very beginning of last night’s concert. “Shaker Loops” is a minimalist work in which Adams ‘captured a couple of tones in the loop’ and where the main focus is on the dynamic game of quiet and loud. The orchestra led by maestro Premil Petrović ‘cooked up’ that gloomy atmosphere for the audience in which, as a listener, you constantly expect the work to open and the orchestra to ‘play’, but this does not happen, because after every indication that it could have happened, again things are annulled and the ‘infinite’ loop brings victory. Could the lockdown and Godo-like waiting of the civilization for the shout “back to normal” be stronger musically evoked? Hardly. “Shaker Loops” is exactly a work that seemed to be waiting in a time capsule for time and ambience to adapt to its understanding.

After Adams, hitting the mark again. Petrovic, with half of the orchestra, withdrew from the podium and left the leadership to Vladimir Kostov, violin virtuoso from Skopje, who then brought, for the audience of today – expected, show moment through the most famous work of its kind – Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. But of course, there was also a catch. Kostov performed with the orchestra “Vivaldi recomposed” by Max Richter, who decided to reshape and merge Vivaldi’s work nonlinearly, like a musical Burroughs. Kostov and the orchestra performed the mixed parts of “Spring” and “Winter” masterfully and musically gave a perfect commentary on today’s life in the conditions of disturbed seasons.

After the musical trailer “Rethink!” by Ivan Božičević, in the second part the main position went to Strauss’s “Metamorphosen”, a work that was created in the final period of the Second World War, from August 1944 to March 1945. Premil Petrovic was again in the position of conductor, and the novelty is that the entire orchestra performed this, on average half-hour work, standing up (of course, except for the cellists, which is understandable). And once again fantastic pointing out. The No Borders Orchestra performed “Metamorphoses” magically metamorphically. It was as if a multitude of waltzes spilled over each other. It was as if some had begun before the previous ones had ended. The perfection of harmony that is constant in an echo and that creates a feeling of dizziness and at times you think that everything is in a whirling cacophony because you constantly miss the sense of rhythm and you constantly ask yourself: “where is the first beat?”. As you are watching the waves bounce off the rock and create counter waves.

It’s like the Orchestra has tried to conjure up (and succeed, of course) the harmony of discord that is all around us – this search for meaning in nonsense and the attempt to derive the formula of incomprehensibility. And in fact, the whole of humanity is overturning as was overturning in the first part of 1940’s, musically portrayed by a great German composer, one of the last representatives of the Romantic era and one of the first modernists – a composer of a turning point between two ages, as we all are as well, like it or not, the audience of our historical turning point.

All we need to do is realize that our past ‘romanticism’ can only be seen in movies and series, because the ‘new modern’ is already there, as it was without a single spoken word during the evening, but only musically evoked by an orchestra who realized that putting borders of whichever kind is not good, especially when it comes to the mental sphere, and especially from us people from the Balkans. At least we should not be alien to the notion that there is no return to normality. We absolve it from generation to generation.

Balkan Season Tour 2018

 
No Borders Orchestra in Sarajevo – TV N1

No Borders Orchestra in Belgrade – TV PRVA

 

Opera “Macbeth” Tour

 

THE TELEGRAPH, London