FREE SPIRITS

The Serbian school of string playing, characterised by its startling originality, developed out of the Balkan nation’s chequered history and unique place in Europe in the 20th century, finds Jacqueline Vanasse

Students from the Škola za Muzičke Talente perform at Kolarac Concert Hall, Belgrade

DRAGANA SELAKOVIĆ

The exact origins of the Serbian string school are difficult to determine, but what is clear is that in recent years there have been an increasing number of Serbian soloists and orchestral musicians occupying leading positions around the world I was interested to find out about what was happening musically in Serbia after meeting concert violist Saša Mirković. With his wife, cellist Tatjana Jovanović Mirković, he founded Belgrade-based string group Ensemble Metamorphosis and is their current leader. Mirković is a flamboyant personality with an overflowing sense of creativity –a refreshingly honest free-thinker. Investigating a little further, I discovered that the music world is populated by many more Serbian musicians just like him. ‘Throughout the 20th century, every generation of Serbs had their war, and that might have contributed to making us good artists,’ says Mirković. ‘We have all these difficulties in our lives and we make music out of it.’ Jovanović Mirković adds: ‘I think that our temperament and our individuality are the main reasons we exist now as people as well as artists.’

Apart from this attitude and a certain open-mindedness, there are two other reasons that might explain the making of so many good Serbian string players. First, as neither part of the East nor part of the West during the 20th century, the country was free to pick and choose what was best musically. Second, the music system in general in Serbia, and in particular one music boarding school in the small town of Ćuprija, has played an important role in nurturing Serbian talent. Serbs share a similar outlook with other Balkan nations, but having been under Ottoman rule until the middle of the 19th century, they come from a very different place, culturally.

‘The difference between being part of the Ottoman or the Austrian empire is enormous, and because of that, we were very much behind in all aspects of Western cultural life,’ says Gordan Nikolić, former leader of the London Symphony Orchestra and musical director of the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra since 2004. ‘Speaking purely from the point of view of classical music culture, after the First World War and the creation of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (which eventually led to Yugoslavia), Croatia and Slovenia continued to develop along the same lines as before. But for Serbia, it was a different story: classical music was a big novelty, a blank page in terms of mentality, culture, institutions, etc. We had to start from scratch.’

Classical music only properly arrived in Serbia just before the Second World War. ‘At first, it was difficult to absorb the European tradition,’ says Goran Kostić, principal double bass of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and former university professor of chamber music in Serbia.

‘The rest of Europe had developed its own 500 years of uninterrupted music history and tradition, with the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods. We just grabbed the end of the Romantic period and transferred it to the 20th century.’

However, not everyone has the luxury of a fresh start. ‘The potential problem with tradition is that it leads to the unification of standards, which in turn can easily lead to generalisations,’ says Nikolić. ‘As soon as you have any generalisation, you are automatically oriented towards a form that you have to achieve, because the requirements get specific, precise; if you know too precisely what you need to do to meet requirements, you forget why you are making music in the first place – you lose touch with the substance.’ He continues: ‘A hundred years ago, classical music was not part of Serbia’s main culture. Over time, it was fed with different influences – people took from these what they thought was right for them, and today there is this beautiful combination of freshness and competency.’

Another element that encouraged this free-spiritedness is the fact that in the 1960s Yugoslavia was a non-allied country. Officially, it was Communist, but it broke its relationship with the Soviet Union and did not fully follow the Eastern bloc.

‘Yugoslavia didn’t want to go with the West but didn’t want to go with the Soviets either, and we formed our own league of undecided nations,’ says Stanko Madić, concertmaster of the Munich Radio Orchestra. (He refers here to the Non-Aligned Movement, established in 1961.) ‘It was always a question of finding a balance, of not going too far in one direction or the other. Everything we have today has been influenced by that balance: technology, the military and, of course, arts and culture. That’s what happens when you don’t have a master and you can decide for yourself what you do.’

‘This neutrality brought the best of both the East and the West to our country. Most of the great Russian musicians as well as the very best Western musicians came to perform or teach in Serbia,’ says Kostić. ‘People were free to choose and had great intuition for what was good,’ adds Nikolić. ‘I remember that when I was young [he was born in 1968], violinists around me were open to any greatness that could come their way:

Szeryng, Oistrakh, Kremer, Ritchie, Suk, Ferras. That was not the case in other places, where musicians were not that welcome because of their different approaches.’

The first professional music school in Serbia was the Mokranjac Music School, which was founded in 1899 in Belgrade. After that, countless others opened around the country. Because of its neutral status, Yugoslavia had to invent its own traditions. Thus, the University of Arts in Belgrade’s music faculty (established in 1937) decided to take the models of the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey (one of the first music boarding schools, where students at different levels would exchange knowledge with each other) and the Central School of Music in Moscow (where students were expected to take challenging exams several times a year, and ensemble playing came as a consequence of spending time together), combine them and implement them in Yugoslavian culture to create a school in 1973 in Ćuprija, central Serbia – 100 miles south-east of Belgrade. The location, Gordan Trajković (concertmaster of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, and a former Ćuprija student) tells me, was chosen by one of the music faculty principals, who was inspired ‘to isolate students aged 6–18 in order to create another world – something utopian, in a sense. Usually, boarding schools are elitist, based in a good neighbourhood, a beautiful building, surrounded by silence and tranquillity – but this was not the case here. We grew up together surrounded by the smell of animals and the sound of someone practising Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Ćuprija was a place of rare combinations.’

Early Serb strings: 1823 illustration of a man singing and playing the gusle

Saša Mirković

Generations of Serbian string players have attended the Ćuprija boarding school (Škola za Muzičke Talente, or School for Musical Talents), and many say they owe nearly everything to the place. ‘There we had the opportunity to dedicate ourselves to the arts as much as is possible,’ says Pavle Popović, cellist in the Belgrade Philharmonic. ‘Much of what makes Serbian string players unique – their quality of tone, their technique, their ability to lead – comes from the time they spent in Ćuprija. When one is at liberty to build this kind of character and style at such an early age in such an environment, it is a big deal.’

‘Because we were spending 24 hours together, we had to learn how to play and live together, how to listen to each other,’ adds Mirković. ‘Ćuprija taught us from a very young age that the most important thing is not becoming a soloist, but knowing how to make music together.’ Nikolić agrees: ‘In Ćuprija, it was not about performing this or that piece; the priority was to remain faithful to this love we all have for music, this motivation that keeps you going for the rest of your life.’

The teachers in Serbia transmit this love of music through mutual respect. ‘It is a question of faith in the teacher,’ says concert violinist Robert Lakatos. ‘As students, we always felt great respect and trust for our teachers. They gave us everything, and the first thing was a love for what we were doing.’ Teachers in Serbia also emphasise the development of interpretation and creativity as well as encouraging individuality among their students. ‘Most important for the teachers in Serbia is quality of sound and also for the student to have ideas, some kind of personality,’ says Kata Stojanović, concertmaster of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic youth orchestra.

Ageneration of musicians remember violin teacher Dejan Mihailović (1932– 2016), who taught at the University of Arts in Belgrade and at the Academy of Arts, Novi Sad, as well as teaching some of the young students who attended Ćuprija.

Dejan Mihailo vić

SAŠA MIRKOVIĆ PHOTO JELENAJOVANOVIĆ

Having studied with David Oistrakh, Mihailović had a very large class where young and old played together and helped each other. ‘His incredible quality was to connect all the students in his class,’ says concert violinist Nemanja Radulović. ‘We all played and lived together.’ Many remember him not only as a teacher, but also as a mentor and like a grandfather. ‘He was everything to us, all his students were like family,’ says Madić.

While everyone in his class might have been given the same piece, each student had different fingerings, bowings and phrasings. ‘Mihailović taught us to respect the academic framework of a piece, to respect what the composer wrote, but within those parameters we had a lot of freedom – we could create our own expression,’ continues Madić. ‘Over the years,’ adds Ensemble Metamorphosis violinist Vojin Aleksić, ‘Mihailović produced musicians who are all different: he found specific things that could be developed within each personality, and that is what is most evident in Serbian string playing today.’

To develop the personality and creativity of his students, Mihailović kept them focused on essentials: the music had to tell a story and had to be presented to an audience. Radulović recalls some of his strategies, which resembled ‘games’ that became increasingly challenging: ‘We would receive the score of a short, three-minute piece, and we had to learn it by heart without touching the instrument. An hour later we would play it in front of an audience. When you’re young, that’s a lot of pressure, but it was very good for the brain and the memory.

The rural setting of the Škola za Muzičke Talente, Ćuprija

Serbia’s first music school was named after composer and educator Stevan Mokranjac

ĆUPRIJA PHOTO DRAGANA SELAKOVIĆ

After that, we were given more complicated pieces that we had to learn in an hour, this time with the instrument, then play in public. The final step consisted of being provided with a four-bar theme on which we had to improvise our own five-minute piece.’

‘I am surprised that Mihailović is not better known,’ says Lakatos. ‘Every time you played for him, he would say exactly what you needed to hear – and not what you didn’t. His approach was not only about violin playing; he would also put you in the perfect spot psychologically, so that you would feel very motivated and self-controlled on the stage because of all those little talks you had with him, and that made you play well and with love. It was special; he was a very special person.’

Asignificant number of renowned Serbian string players studied with Mihailović, yet there were other outstanding musical personalities in Serbia, almost all of them incredibly dedicated to young musicians. ‘My first teacher was like a sports coach,’ remembers concert cellist Maja Bogdanović. ‘She took us to competitions, she took us everywhere, even though the situation was very difficult in Serbia in the 1990s. Everything was closed, but we found a way to go out and play and meet other musicians of our age.

We learnt a lot that way. I saw my teacher five days a week: our classes lasted from a minimum of two hours to a whole day.

The rest of the time I would practise with other students at the music school and we would coach each other. Learning music was real teamwork.’

For children in Serbia, being surrounded by music and spending all afternoon and evening, sometimes days and nights, at your music school was considered normal. ‘I think it’s pretty unique,’ continues Bogdanović. ‘Maybe it comes from the Soviet example of learning and engaging in something from early childhood. I think it was the combination of all of that that gave us our competitive spirit. I realised later, talking with my friends in Paris, that not everyone had the opportunity to perform as often as we did. In other parts of the world, young musicians had a one-hour instrumental lesson a week and that was it, whereas we practically grew up on a stage.’

‘MIHAILOVIĆ WAS NOT ONLY ABOUT VIOLIN PL AYING; HE WOULD ALSO PUT YOU IN THE PERFECT SPOT PSYCHOLOGICA LLY’

Serbs seem to have an intuitive relationship with abstraction – in both art and music. ‘In the Western world,’ explains Trajković, ‘arts are primarily entertainment, because the West has such a great and long cultural history, while the East, sometimes lacking tradition and background, has turned arts into a life expression, accepting it organically, as there was no history of it. In Serbia, children learn and live music from a young age, so music becomes part of their thinking and emotions.’ Jovanović Mirković adds: ‘Children in Serbia take playing an instrument very seriously. You are not playing for flowers and rabbits. As a child, you immediately know what is at stake if you want to become a musician; you are very much aware of the importance of what you are doing.’ Rising concert cellist Irena Josifoska agrees: ‘Teachers in Serbia nurture natural talent and musicality in children, make them love music and take music seriously. That is the perfect combination. They pay a lot of attention to the personality of each child and work with them on their stage presence accordingly.’

Maja Bogdanović

Robert Lakatos

BOGDANOVIĆ PHOTO BERNARD MARTINEZ. LAKATOS PHOTO DARKO MILOSAVLJEVIĆ. RADULOVIĆ PHOTO LUKAS ROTTER/DG

‘WE ARE VERY PA SSIONATE PEOPLE. WE ARE CONFIDENT, BUT WITHOUT EVER FEELING ENTITLED. WE HAVE A LOT OF TEMPER AMENT, BUT ARE ALSO DISCIPLINED AND HA RD-WORKING’

Finally, if it is important for the professors that their students maintain a good relationship with the instrument, it is also essential that they have a good relationship with themselves. ‘They make you understand that everything you think and feel will be projected in your music,’ says Katarina Vasiljević, a violin student in Belgrade.

‘On stage, people hear what kind of person you are. You need to be a good person, a good friend to yourself, to play well.Music doesn’t come from your head; it comes from your soul, and to play powerful music you need to be a powerful human being.’

Serbs have great individuality, are strong supporters of independence and freedom and are resourceful and creative – characteristics forged by historical difficulties and obstacles.‘Economically, we’ve never been well off, and when your resources are limited, creativity jumps in,’ says Madić.‘I think that what the country and the people have endured builds character and pushes one to strive,’ adds concert violinist and pedagogue Stefan Milenkovich, who in the 2000s taught at the Juilliard School, New York, as Itzhak Perlman’s assistant. Jana Jakovljević, violin student at the Yehudi Menuhin School, agrees: ‘This temperament we have also means that we won’t settle for anything less than the best. We are raised with the mindset of going for the win, rather than finding our way through.’

Although Serbia is a young country in terms of classical music, these days it’s in a good position, culturally. ‘Contemporary arts are really here,’ says Mirković. ‘We have passed all the stages to get to something close to avant-garde today. There is real quality here and many outstanding musicians, but somehow we are still isolated from the rest of the world, which has not really heard of us yet.’

Nemanja Radulović

The Serbian school of string playing brings soul to music with a new generation of musicians who have grown in a nurturing environment where personality, openness and creativity exist before norms and conventions. Milenkovich concludes: ‘We are very passionate people. We are confident, but without ever feeling entitled. We have a lot of temperament, but are also disciplined and hard-working. I think individualism and expressiveness are our main trademarks – to connect with other human beings you need to be able to express yourself.’