New symphony orchestra in Serbia as of late January

BELGRADE - The Serbian music scene will get a new symphony orchestra that will stage its inaugural concert in the Ilija Kolarac Endowment on Saturday, January 31, with Predrag Goste as conductor.

The audition for the new orchestra was organised by the New Belgrade Opera in October and November 2014. The orchestra gathers mainly young musicians who have shown greatest potentials and talent for performance on their favourite instruments.

The repertoire of the newly-formed orchestra will include opera and symphony pieces and the orchestra will stage concerts once a month on average, Gosta said. The Belgrade-born conductor who attended music studies in Great Britain and the U.S. said that he is exceptionally pleased with the forming of the orchestra, and added that he will invest all his powers in order to realise his wish to turn the orchestra into an influential and respectable music institution in this part of Europe and the wider region.

Gosta was a conductor in famous world orchestras like National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in Washington, Russian National Choir in Moscow, Armitage Orchestra and State Capella Choir Glinka in Sankt Petersburg as well as the London Symphony Orchestra with which he also recorded an album.

During its first concert, the new symphony orchestra will perform pieces by famous musicians of Russian and European Romanticism including Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Sibelius, Grieg and Bartok. The programme also features pieces by Greek-American composer Andreas Makris which will be performed in Serbia for the first time.

With the special price of tickets totalling as few as RSD 300, the New Belgrade Opera will join the trend recently introduced by similar institutions of culture like the Yugoslav Drama...