The Ensemble for New Music Construction Site was founded by a pianist Neda Hofman in the end of 2011. The idea for its establishment has arisen from a desire to gather together a troupe of musicians who share the same enthusiasm and affinity for the contemporary music, as well as from the necessity for the contemporary music to be performed in our country in continuation by the chamber ensemble on constant basis. The Construction Site consists of twenty members, all of them reputable performers with a great experience in contemporary repertoire interpretation. They perform in various structures (from duo to big chamber orchestra structure) and play solo pieces, as well.

The Ensemble for New Music Construction Site deals with performing and recording compositions of domestic and foreign authors. The repertoire of the Construction Site consists of the pieces of art created during 20th and 21st century, which represent the contemporary music development, but are insufficiently present in the concert life of Belgrade and Serbia. In addition, a minimum of 50 percent of the Ensemble’s performances is related to domestic music. The Construction Site orders compositions of selected domestic and foreign authors and thus premieres their pieces of art.
Nada Hofman is the Arts manager and the President of the Construction Site and Goran Marinkovic is the Vice President. The Managing Board of the Ensemble consists of Nada Hofman, Ana Radovanovic, Vladimir Dinic, Srdjan Sretenovic and Goran Marinkovic.  

Pierrot Lunaire/ Lenz
Four Pierrots:
Schoenberg, Giraud, Buchner and Lenz

Listening to Schoenberg’s and Giraud’s poems, I could not help asking myself who Pierrot is and why he is a lunaire. What do I know about that unadjusted young being who identifies himself with Christ and who feels as being crucified by mankind? Who is the woman he is in love with, a dark muse resembling Lilith and what makes her so special? Why is Pierrot so panicky afraid of the gallows and the silver hangman’s sword? Where is the one he loves and he is jealous of so much that he dreams about slashing the alive rival’s skull, taking vengeance with unseen cruelty on great sufferings his heart has been bearing. And where is his homeland he comes back to, completely broken in the last poem, is it in this world at all?

The young man, shaped by the poet and the composer as well, has been intriguing, scaring and upsetting me more and more. He is a victim and a hangman. He is the one who suffers and who is persecuted, but also the one who is insane, unadjusted and upsetting, the one out of society. I have tried to reconstruct the man who inspired Schoenberg and Giraud as well and in whom they both recognized themselves. Of course, the poet Giraud put a mask of on the main character’s face, the mask of one of the typed characters of Del arte comedy, a dreamer Pierrot, an unhappy lover Pierrot, an abandoned Pierrot, a poet Pierrot… Who is beneath that mask which has been obsessively put by the artists since the beginning of 19th century? Who hides I Schoenberg’s piece of art? Is it a jealous and abandoned Arnold Schoenberg, whose wife left him and ran away with their close friend? Is it understood Schoenberg, a mocked and persecuted artist, whose concerts are dropped in by the police as to calm the audience in their mockery and comments which interrupt the program. Or it is a Jew Schoenberg, confined to a corner, who leaves Austria in 1934 and goes to the USA, demonstratively changing his surname? 

Searching for the parallel for a stage answer to these questions, Georg Buchner and his novella Lenz were constantly in my minds. Just like Arnold Schoenberg (like each Pierrot), Buchner is also an obsessive fighter for the new live art and the new better world, he is an unadjusted and upsetting creator, he is a persecuted prophet with the complex and turbulent emotional life. In his novella, which is here organically attached to Pierrot Lunaire, Georg Buchner follows the climax of insanity of the young poet Jacob Lenz (the fourth Pierrot). The writer uses some documentary material from the diary of the Pastor Oberlin, who received the deranged poet into his house, collages it with his own reconstructions of Lenz’s progressive insanity and pangs of conscience, creating the series of chamber music scenes full of restlessness, silence and anticipation, intimate and voyeuristic moments, screams and whispers, but first of all with the poet’s obsessive creating.

Lenz goes through the same losses and breakdowns that Buchner, Giraud and Schoenberg are going to experience. Those are sufferings, “black crosses” all Pierrots are crucified on, all artists who are, by nature of their Christ like and prophetic craft/ passion/ destiny, doomed to suffering. Instead of one abstract Pierrot, connecting the Schoenberg and Buchner’s pieces of art, connecting expression and narration, we create the complete picture of a cursed artist, taking the rare opportunity to observe in parallel his life and experiences, as well as his art that arises from his life and experience. Four Pierrots- Schoenberg, Giraud, Buchner and Lenz- like crystals reflect and refract the light on each other, allowing the viewer/ listener to see all innumerable shades that one crystal wouldn’t manage to refract. 

                                                              Aleksandar Nikolic

return to drama Pierrot lunaire/ Lenz

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: PIERROT LUNAIRE

The Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg, one of the greatest music artists of 20th Century, has composed his cult piece of art, Pierrot Lunaire, by the poems of a Belgian poet Albert Giraud, translated into German. The piece was created in 1912, as a melodrama performed by a speaker reciter accompanied by a specific chamber ensemble, atypical for that time. Even the sole part of the reciter (spreshgesang- speaking singing) is the problem for performing and can be sorted out in two ways, which means that interpreters either recite or sing! The hardest thing to achieve is the unity of recitative- parlando. 

The piece arises from the heritage of the Late German Romanticism, marked with Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Melodic lines are chromatized and the harmony is atonal, so it speaks about the frontal part from the pre-dodecaphonic period of authors, indicating the evolution of the music language from the Late Romanticism, full with chromatics, over atonality to a new dodecaphonic system, conceptualized in the 20-es of the last century.

Abstract, atonal, shrilly, mystical, dark, surreal- these are the epithets the piece has received from the expert critics and musicology. 

A young team, led by director Aleksandar Nikolic, has taken for their basis the Schoenberg’s music from the piece of work Pierrot Lunaire and upgraded it with unusual prose insertions of the German writer Georg Buchner about the poet Lenz and his phantasmagorical and nightmare visions, between reality and fantasy.

Thus we have obtained the piece of work that belongs to postmodern theatre, which is called a musical-drama grotesque.

Schoenberg's music is, among reciters, written for the ensemble of chamber musicians, soloists. It is performed with the flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, which does not belong to any classical or even orchestral ensemble. 

We appealed to one of the most ambitious young troupe in our city, the Ensemble for New Music Construction Site, the great soloists on their instruments, to perform the demanding score. 

Dr. Branka Radovic

return to the drama Pierrot lunaire/ Lenz

Frida Kahlo  (1907-1954) has been a world icon for decades already: as a woman, as a painter, as a revolutionary and as a steadfast personality, who immured unhappy pages of her life into a myth of herself. Frida was healthy only by the age of six, and after traffic accident and numerous operations, she was often bedridden. Her life was filled with adoration of her husband Diego Rivera and succumbing to her own art in which she built in her dreams, her inspirations, but also her nightmares and all disappointment. Despite being an invalid, Frida Kahlo had a relentless and unshakable spirit, permanently occupied by a revolutionary zest and devotion for her people. She made friends with the greatest personalities of her times, with artists, but also with revolutionaries, among whom was the most famous expatriate emigrant Leon Trotsky. She died on 13th July 1954, from lung embolism according to official information, though some doubts remained that she committed a suicide. Right after her death, Frida Kahlo became a legend, first in her homeland, but also very soon in the whole America and Europe, even in our country, where she became a symbol of a woman and a painter. After publishing of her diaries (In Serbian, Clio Publishing House, Belgrade) and appearance of the film Frida with Salma Hayek, the glory of this Mexican painter becomes really incomparable. Therefore, the whole world is preparing to celebrate in 2007 a centenary of her birthday.

return to the drama Frida Kahlo

return to opera The magic flute

Since this year we have also launched the children’s program that befits every big opera house in the world. 

We wanted our youngest audience, school and preschool children, to be offered the program that would open them the opera and opera house’s door and enable them the first steps to meet, accompanied by teachers or parents, to watch and listen to for the first time one great and real music performance. That is why we have shortened Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, which originally lasts very long, to about an hour duration, leaving thus the most important tunes and parts, while omitting many other parts.

In that way Mozart’s Magic Flute is adapted for children and children’s age, so it takes the central part of our new program. We have done this performance solely with young authors and singers and most of them are on the stage for the first time.

As Mozart’s music is liked and listened to by everybody, both younger and older ones, our performance singles out nobody, but involves viewers of all generations who are keen on opera. Therefore, everybody is welcome. 

To be able to get to remote parts of our country and to perform The Magic Flute even there where there are no opera houses and halls, no conditions for the whole orchestra to be set, we have decided to present the setting just with the piano, although the original score is, as any other opera, planned and conceived to be with the entire orchestra.

It is known from various scientific studies that in a specific way the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can affect children’s psyche, improve their intelligence development, reduce aggression and hyperactivity, bring a peaceful sleep and develop an abstract thinking dimension with children! Not to mention about the fact how much the music of this genius author makes children be acquainted with the highest quality part of human spirit since the very existence, educate them and it might generally help the development of music and art move towards better, more human directions in future, if being created by the artists who have been growing up with Mozart! Listening to Mozart’s music, since the time it occurred, is simply planetary important and undoubtedly listening to his music is becoming more and more important in the newest age which abounds with the expansion of values, diametrically opposed to the refinement of Mozart’s work.  Today’s children are lucky to have Mozart and his genius work as the counterweight to plenty of content offered to children with dominating aggression and (or) the kitsch and trash. But, Mozart should be consumed and it is up to adults to offer him to children, as the soul vitamin. Adults should as well be responsible for children’s future, directing them towards real values.

The abridged version of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute”, created as a fairytale adapted to children, could certainly offer them a modern and funny way of listening to Mozart and watching the theatre play. It is well known that using music to the greatest possible measure is a justifiable endeavor in children’s plays creation, since it approaches the heart even when a child does not understand the textual part of the play and the story content. Nevertheless, “The Magic Flute” is undoubtedly the music masterpiece the heart must be pursued and the children, who have never before been to the Opera, will gently accept that art through the music genius of Mozart. The Opera audience consists of a very small percentage of nowadays mankind… 

return to opera The magic flute

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti, (1797 – 1848) is one of the early romantics, a composer who built bel canto style with his 70 operas and whose authot’s productivity, even at that time when creativity was fast and prolific, presented a real rarity. Today, so to speak, every opera house in the world has at least one operetta by this great maestro. Born in Bergamo, Donizetti studied with the famous pedagogue Pedro Matei in Bologna and after the first successful operas, he worked for the theatres in Naples, Milan and Rome, when Gioacchino Rossini, his great predecessor and paragon, took him to Paris.

Opera Anna Bolena is an outstanding work that belongs to his primary creative period, while La Favorita (A Great Love) and Daughter of the Regiment are performed in Paris. A great success is realized nowadays by a rarely performed work Linda from Samonia, while three of his achievements overcame time and spatial barriers. They are Lucia of Lammermoor, a lyrical drama, composed after the novel by, at least at that time, very popular Walter Scott, and which is one of the operas with the most demanding lead role for a coloratura soprano in the whole opera literature, as well as two comic operas, The Elixir of Love and Don Pasquale. The two great arias from The Elixir of Love, a romance Una furtiva lacrima (One Furtive Tear) and cavatina Quant’ e bella quant’ e cara are a part of repertoire of the greatest tenors of the world.

GORAN KRNETA, BASS
He has graduated from solo singing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in the class of Professor Olivera Grujic- Slavic. He has been engaged in the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad in a series of operas: Madam Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Catherine Ismailova, Don Giovanni, Lucia of Lammermoor, Norma, Rigoletto, A Masked Ball, Nabucco, Troubadour, etc.

In the Opera and Theatre Madlenianum, he has made a number of roles in the operas such as The Wise, Everyone Does So, Tales of Hoffmann, La Traviata, Madame Butterfly, as well as in the National Theatre in Belgrade in Salome, Tosca and The Magic Flute. He is also engaged in concert singing. He has made numerous recordings for the RTS. 

IVICA KLEMENC, DIRECTOR
He was born in Novi Sad, but lives in Zemun. He graduated from the Acting Department at FDA in Belgrade, in the class of Ognjenka Milicevic. He deals with theatre, film and television art from different aspects. He has been performing pantomime on all large stages of former Yugoslavia and in about ten European countries as well and has been awarded many times. 

He has been engaged in acting and directing, signed more than thirty directions at theatre stages of Belgrade, Tuzla, Kragujevac and Novi Sad. As an associate for stage movement, he has achieved more than three hundred premiere and was awarded a lot of times.
He has played on the movie of L. Zafranovic, “Occupation in 26 pictures” and besides that in 28 other films. He has achieved over five hundred shows on television, in drama, musical and children’s redaction.
He has lectured at many academies, as a full professor, but also as a guest one in Budapest, Pert, Sidney. He works at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, teaching stage movement, fencing and comedy Del arte.
He is the selector of the Festival of Pantomime, Monodrama and the artistic manager of Gardos Festival in Zemun, since its establishment.

MILAN T. ILIC, AUTHOR OF THE MUSIC AND CONDUCTOR
He graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. His working with the choir has been crowned by numerous awards that he won as a conductor, especially in Novi Pazar at the Festival of Youth Choirs, where declared to be the best conductor and he was given the same recognition to be “the best conductor” at the International Competition in Italy in 1997. He is the winner of the October Award of the City of Smederevo, Gold Badge of the Cultural and Educational Association of Serbia and other recognitions. He is the founder of the choir and its conductor and artistic manager since establishment.  

Choir “KIR STEFAN SERB” SMEDEREVO
The choir was founded in 1993 in Smederevo and was named after the precentor, a domestic at Djurd Brankovic’s court. He left behind some of the oldest records of Serbian church music, “Ninja Sili (Now the Powers)”. The choir consists of girls, average age from 12- 21 years old and most of them are secondary school students. The choir has given a lot of concerts and has been awarded in the country and abroad, in Novi Pazar, Studenica, Nis, Belgrade, as well as in Czech Republic, Germany, the USA, Great Britain, Italy, Hungary, France and it proved itself to be one of the best Women’s Chamber Choir in our country. Plenty of first and special awards won at the outstanding world’s competitions decorate their biography. Their repertoire consists of secular and spiritual, traditional and contemporary music. They have taken part in a lot of church manifestations, but they promote new works of art of domestic composers, as well.