Concert and presentation of the CD “Arrhythmia” – Neda Hofman-Sretenović

Piano compositions by contemporary Serbian authors performed by pianist Neda Hofman-Sretenović. Participants: Ivana Miladinović Prica, musicologist, Ivana Petković Lozo, musicologist, Ivan Brkljačić, composer and Neda Hofman Sretenović, piano

According to the safety guidelines regarding the current situation of the pandemic, this fall the Cultural Centre of Belgrade will start traditional concert season Concerts in Gallery under special conditions. Programs will be held every Monday at 20:00 in the Artget Gallery.
Because of the health and safety guidelines for suppression of the epidemic, the number of attendees in the Artget Gallery is reduced to 20, so it is important to book your seat by e-mail lidija.maric@kcb.rs or by phone 011 2622 058 till noon at the day of the concert.
We remind you that it is necessary to wear safety masks and to keep 1.5 meters apart from each other during your stay in the Cultural Centre of Belgrade.

Concert part:
Premieres
Milana Stojadinović-Milić
Arrhythmia (2019)

Svetlana Maksimović
Fragments of a Prayer for Peace (2019)

Branka Popović
From Rayleigh to Mie (2019)

Ivan Brkljačić
Nineteen… Ninety-One (2019)
Serenity
Tragic Round Dance

CD info:
Publisher: Construction Site Contemporary Music Ensemble / Editor: Ivana Miladinović Prica / Sound engineer and Producer: Zoran Marinković / Translation into English: Žarko Cvejić

About CD:
Performers of new music are these rare and bold contemporaries of ours who are able to discern, in our complex present, the light of musical creativity issuing precisely from their time, as something that directly concerns and addresses them. Focused on that now, that moment of performance whereby a new work acquires currency and aesthetic presence in the world, they find their working space along the edges of contemporaneity, striving to be both in and with their time. And nowhere does contemporaneity pulsate so strongly as in the act of performing a newly written piece for the first time. A unique place among artists who examine recent musical creativity and inscribe it into the present is occupied by the pianist Neda Hofman-Sretenović, the spiritus movens of the Construction Site Contemporary Music Ensemble, and one of our most accomplished performers and producers of contemporary music. In her well-developed performing (solo and chamber) practice, greatly contributing to the area and experience of our contemporary artistic context, her album Aritmija (Arrhythmia) occupies a special place, as the first release featuring pieces for solo piano composed in the last five years. The listener is thus presented with a collection of seven works by seven Serbian composers of different generations, whose oeuvres are well-known to Hofman-Sretenović, as she has often collaborated with most of them. Apart from the four of them who teach at the Composition Department of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade (Milana Stojadinović-Milić, Tatjana Milošević, Ivan Brkljačić, and Branka Popović), there is also a young author among them, Ana Kazimić, and two composers (Svetlana Maksimović and Marko Nikodijević) who have chosen to leave their home culture, but have retained dynamic relations with Hofman-Sretenović, which are present in this collaboration as well. This collaborative endeavour achieves an almost transcendental degree of compliance on a single recording, showing a peculiar kind of intimacy between the pianist and the works she recorded. Not only did Hofman-Sretenović participate in their completion, i.e. the final stage of shaping the score in time, not only did she live through them by interpreting and lending them the energy required for their birth and long (trans-media) life, but she also initiated the making of four of those seven pieces.
Ivana Miladinović Prica

Biography:
Neda Hofman-Sretenović (Belgrade, 1977) studied piano with Prof. Arbo Valdma, DHC, at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, where she graduated in 1999, and at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, where she graduated in 2002 as a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) fellow. She earned her master’s degree in 2004 at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, under Prof. Rita Kinka. In 2015, she completed a degree in chamber music at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, where she was supervised by Prof. Zorica Ćetković; the title of her thesis was Issues in the Interpretation and Technical Rendering of Electro-acoustic Works. Hofman-Sretenović focuses on contemporary music performance. In 2011, she founded the Construction Site Contemporary Music Ensemble, with whom she has performed in over 30 concerts in Serbia and abroad (Lithuania, Montenegro, Croatia, Israel). In 2017, Hofman-Sretenović and the She has premiered newly composed pieces of a number of major contemporary composers as well as representatives of the youngest composers’ generation Construction Site Ensemble initiated the founding of ReConstruction, a new festival of contemporary music. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, North Macedonia, South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. Hofman-Sretenović has been a regular contributor at Belgrade’s International Review of Composers festival., She has premiered newly composed pieces of a number of major contemporary composers as well as representatives of the youngest composers’ generation. Also, she has performed at the festivals Kompozitori u prvom licu (Composers in First Person Singular, Belgrade, 2004), KOMA, and Lasciar vibrare. She has performed with the Symphony Orchestra of the Serbian Broadcasting Corporation, St. George strings chamber orchestra, Dušan Skovran String Orchestra, Camerata Academica string orchestra, as well as Collegium Musicum women’s academic choir. She has participated in recordings with Radio Belgrade Symphony Orchestra, as well as in recordings made for the CD production of the Music Information Centre, the Construction Site Ensemble’s production, and the production of the Serbian Musicological Society. Hofman-Sretenović teaches as a senior arts fellow at the String Instruments Department of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade.