Project BALKAN AFFAIRS as part of the Sommer in Stuttgart festival presented to the German audience
After a successful premiere at the 32nd edition of the Music Biennale Zagreb festival, the BALKAN AFFAIRS project had its German premiere at the end of July as part of the Sommer in Stuttgart festival. This biennial project was created in co-production with the Musik der Jahrhunderte association and the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart ensemble.
The Sommer in Stuttgart Festival took place from July 20 to 23, with six concerts taking place at several venues over four days. One of them was the extremely well-attended BALKAN AFFAIRS, which was held on July 22 in the Theaterhaus Stuttgart hall where six members of the Neue Vocalsolisten ensemble performed compositions by six composers from six former Yugoslav states.
In their very different and mostly performative works, they reveal the grotesque, ironic and even conciliatory scenarios related to the consequences of the war in the 'Balkans' which continues to shape the societies of their home countries to this day. In her work, Hanan Hadžajlić portrays the collision of different prayer practices. Jug Marković bases his work on excessive inflation in deteriorating Yugoslavia, as well as on the smells and sounds of his childhood. Ana Pandevska parodies the experimental setting of the future happiness of the Balkans under the auspices of the European Union. Nina Perović and Petra Strahovnik in their compositions impressively document the feeling of physical and psychological violence, and Helena Skljarov 'wrote' a hopeless allegory about domination and differentiation.
The Balkan Affairs project is conceived as an open space for the meeting of regional composers and encourages the exchange of ideas and mutual understanding of their own cultural similarities and differences, offering an alternative to a lost common cultural space. Five young female composers and one male composer made works inspired by their own memories for the world-renowned ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart for the 32nd edition of MBZ. As a festival that continuously encourages the creativity of contemporary composers, Music Biennale Zagreb, through the BALKAN AFFAIRS project, sought to provide equal working conditions for all six composers and encourage the reconnection of the region through a more contemporary, inclusive perspective.