A program of works selected from Wilson’s career to date as one of Ireland’s most prolific and acclaimed composers, presented in his sixtieth birthday year. This concert is a part of the 12th Belgrade Irish Festival.
Anime String Quartet
Branislava Podrumac, soprano
Nemanja Egerić, piano
Program:
Línte, String quartet No. 17 (2016) SERBIAN PREMIERE
Anime String Quartet
Dušica Mladenović, violin
Mina Mladenović, violin
Tamara Marinković Tomić, viola
Teodora Nikolić, cello
Lim for piano solo (1998) SERBIAN PREMIERE
Nemanja Egerić, piano
Bewitched for soprano and string quartet (2010) SERBIAN PREMIERE
Branislava Podrumac, soprano
Anime String Quartet
Biography:
Ian Wilson was born in Belfast in 1964 and began composing while at university. He has since written over 200 works, including operas, concertos, 20 string quartets, a range of orchestral and chamber music and multi-media pieces. His compositions have been performed and broadcast on six continents and presented at festivals including the BBC Proms, Venice Biennale and Frankfurt Bookfair and at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Royal Albert and Wigmore Halls, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw, Vienna’s Musikverein and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. Wilson has in recent years also worked with jazz musicians, Asian tabla and Chinese pipa players and traditional Irish singers; he has also collaborated with choreographers, theatre directors and electroacoustic and computer music composers.
In 1991 Ian’s first orchestral work, Running, Thinking, Finding, received the composition prize at the Ultima festival in Oslo and in 1992 he received the Macaulay Fellowship administered by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 1998 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland’s State-funded body of creative artists and in recent years he has been AHRB Research Fellow at the University of Ulster, An Foras Feasa post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Dundalk Institute of Technology and Associate Composer with both the Camerata Pacifica ensemble and the Ulster Orchestra. He was director of the Sligo New Music Festival from 2003 to 2011. Ian received a Major Individual Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2016.
There are commercially-available recordings of nearly fifty of Ian’s works on labels including Diatribe, Riverrun, Black Box, Timbre, Guild, Meridian and Chandos. His music is published by G. Ricordi & Co. and Universal Edition Ltd.
Branislava Podrumac is a multitalented artist with tremendous power of transformation, who dominates the stage equally effortlessly in operas, operettas, musicals and even drama plays. Branislava graduated from the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, where she studied solo singing with Prof. Radmila Smiljanić. She attended master classes in Belgrade, Vienna and The Hague with Olivera Miljakovic, Katarina Jovanovic, Sona Ghazarian, James McCray, Rita Susovsky, Marjana Lipovšek and Olga Makarina. She made her debut on the opera stage in 2003 as a member of the Opera Studio of the National Theatre in Belgrade, singing the leading role in Puccini’s Sister Angelica. She caught the attention of the wider audience by singing the leading female role (I) in the hit musical Rebecca by Sylvester Levay, for which she won the Association of the Music Artists of Serbia’s Best Young Artist Award in 2012. This role marked the beginning of a very successful cooperation with the Madlenianum Opera & Theatre, where she has played the roles of Cathy in the musical The Last Five Years, Hanna Glawari in the operetta The Merry Widow, Nedda in the opera Pagliacci, Éponine in the musical Les Miserables, Franzi in the operetta Viennese Blood by Johann Strauss the Younger, Papagena in the version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for children, Ore in the opera Suton (The Dusk) by Stevan Hristić, as well as the dramatic character of Vida in the theatrical play Little Secrets, directed by Goran Marković. Branislava has given a large number of concerts, recitals, as well as public and TV appearances. Highlights of her numerous performances include Benstein’s Kaddish, with the RTS Choir and Symphony Orchestra (2003), and the New Year’s concert of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra (2011). A special place in her career is dedicated to traditional and spiritual music, as well as to performances of contemporary classics. She was acclaimed for her performances of Elisabeth in the dance opera Les Enfants Terribles by Phillip Glass (2009) and the Nymphe in the chamber opera Narcissus and Echo by Anja Djordjević (2003). As part of the chamber music series at the Belgrade Philharmonic Hall she took the role of the narrator in Serbian premiers of William Walton’s Façade in 2017. In addition to musical skills, she showcased her remarkable acting adroitness, in this very interesting piece written in declamatory form to provocative and sophisticated poems by Edith Sitwell. Branislava Podrumac is a member of several ensembles, with which she regularly appears in concerts, festivals and thematic cultural events. These include Libercuatro, which specializes in the performance of tango music, as well as Trio Casablanca and No Boundaries duo, with repertoires of film and popular classical music. In 2020 Branislava joined the Shira U’tfila, a multi-ethnic, multi-faith ensemble that draws its inspiration from the diversity and richness of Judeo-Spanish, Ottoman-Turkish, Arabic and Balkan musical traditions. Besides singing, she also teaches and is committed to children’s musical education. Branislava also starred in a documentary by Goran Paskaljević – Belgrade: Stolen Youth (2002), produced by the German-French TV station Arte. Here life and works from the early days are also portrayed in the two TV documentaries by Vladimir Perović : Gift from God (1997) and What color is a soul (2019). Branislava Podrumac is a member of the Association of the Music Artists of Serbia, with the status of a freelance artist.
Nemanja Egerić attracted serious attention with integral interpretation of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, whose perfomance was the first among the Serbian pianists. That brought him several important national prizes such as: Award for the best concert of the season of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Award from the Fondation Ivan Jevtić, Award Nevena Popović for the most significant artistic achievement. In 2022 Nemanja was honored as the best artist of the year by the Association of Musical Artists of Serbia, which is one of the most prestigious award in Serbian musical culture. Besides artistic honors, he recevied many awards and Laureates within traditional and contemporary piano music competitions such as Reconstruction, ULJUS, Davorin Jenko, Klavitas, INSAM and many others. Nemanja performs regulary as a soloist and chamber musician from 2015, and so far he has made more than hundred perfomances. He appeared on many international festivals such as Lucern Piano Festival, Musica al Ponte, International Review of Composers, Piano City, NIMUS, CONVIVIUM MUSICUM, BLISS, BUNT, ect. Nemanja’s programs are mostly made from traditional and contemporary works, and his every concert has its own meta-musical concept. In 2022 he recorded an album with previously unrecorded works of avant-garde composer Joel Chadabe within the fondation Electronic Music Foundation in New York. Currently, he prepares an album with the works of Miloje Milojević and Claude Debussy. In his country, Nemanja made many premiers of modern and contemporary composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jonathan Harvey, Edison Denisov, Ivan Fedele, György Kurtág and many others, which distinguish him as one of the main perfomer of contemporary music in Serbia. He has two official ensembles – piano duo STEVAN NEMANJA with pianist Stevan Spalević, and duo Syrinx with the flutist Angelina Nikolić – with whom he has a very successful concert activity playing many capital works. Nemanja finished his Bachelor and Master studies in the class of Miša Dacić. Afterwards, he studied advanced piano courses in Italy with Bruno Canino and contemporary piano music with Emanuele Arciuli. He also completed doctoral academic degree (DMA) under mentorship of Maja Rajković and Miloš Zatkalik. His DMA thesis is about symbolic explications of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. Nemanja collaborates with esteemed pianists and professors such as Peter Hill, Momo Kodama and Pierre Sublet. He holds a Docent position on a piano department at the Faculty of Arts in Niš. Born in Trstenik in 1991, Nemanja encountered the piano atypically late at the age of twelve. He started exploring music through alternative genres, sound art and composing, while he fell in love with performing classical music only towards the end of his regular studies. He is most interested in newer musical trends, and his repertoire is often made up of traditional and contemporary composers – where through the clash of aesthetic differences one could seek several faces of one artistic truth.
The Anime String Quartet was formed in February 2013 and performs both classical and contemporary music. Anime has performed many full-evening concerts in Serbian cities, has made notable guest appearances on the show “Encounters”, performed at the FRONT festival and at the 45th birthday concert of Radio 202, which was broadcast live as part of the Dragstor show of classical music. Anime created the project “Belgrade Loves Classics”, in which concerts and lectures for children were held in the Čukarica Cultural Centre and the Student Town Cultural Centre with the help of the City Secretariat for Culture. This was followed by the project “Let’s Play the Classics” which aimed at education in the field of chamber music and decentralization of the cultural scene, in the framework of which they performed with pianist Tea Andrejić in Belgrade City Hall, ŠZMT in Ćuprija and Matice Srpske Gallery in Novi Sad. Anime participated in the Belgrade Cultural Centre project “1914: Hope and Hopelessness” and the “Crystal Night” concert in cooperation with the Museum of the City of Belgrade and the Cultural Element. The quartet has a successful ongoing collaboration with composer Ian Wilson, premiering his 16th quartet “Aus der Zauberküche” (From the Magic Kitchen), which the composer wrote and dedicated to them; the Irish national radio station “RTÉ Lyric fm” broadcast recordings from their concerts in the shows “Nova” and “Encore”. In recent years, members of the quartet have performed as a violin trio and in that form received the support of SOKOJ, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture for the realization of their “Reflection” project, which included the recording of an album, promotion in Serbian cities, a tour of Ireland and a performance in China.