70th Anniversary: Dubrovnik Summer Festival in Zagreb

The Dubrovnik Summer Festival, whose seventy-years-long tradition makes it one of the longest-running festivals in Europe, will contribute to the September events in Zagreb with theatre, music and other types of entertainment. The contribution of the festival of high artistic value is the result of the cooperation of the two cities and their cultural institutions and actors.

The Dubrovnik Summer Festival is one of the trademarks of summer cultural events in Dubrovnik and the entire Croatia as it draws spectators with attractive music and theatre program every summer.

The festival performances in Zagreb will start on 6 September at the Croatian Music Institute, where a concert entitled Music of Dubrovnik Summer Villas will be held at 21. The Dubrovnik audience enjoyed it this summer in the Rector’s Palace atrium and awarded the performance of five symphonies by Sorkočević, Händel’s and Vivaldi’s pieces and modern premiere of Concerto favori by Ivan Jarnović with a long applause and standing ovation. In addition to the high quality of the music pieces, the excellent violin rendition of the soloists Bojan Čičić and Dmitry Sinkovsky and the harpsichord rendition of Tomislav Fačini and other superb musicians are responsible for the success of the concert.

On Sunday, 8 September at 11 and 18, a children’s play accompanied by music based on The Little Prince by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry will be put on in the Zagreb Puppet Theatre. It had its first, very successful performance at this year’s Dubrovnik Festival.

The play Under the Balconies, based on themes of the eponymous collection of short stories by Ranko Marinković, will be put on in the Zagreb Youth Theatre on 13 September. This piece, written in the mid-twentieth century, contains a sharp criticism of society making the text astonishingly modern and similar to the current situation in politics, society and economics. The excellent performance of the Festival Drama Ensemble was awarded with a standing ovation by the Dubrovnik audience so it is certain to provide a brilliant artistic experience to the Zagreb audience as well.

Exactly a month after it was opened in Dubrovnik, the exhibition Festival Backstage will be opened on 17 September in Zagreb’s Cultural Information Center. The author of the photographs is Marko Ercegović, one of the Festival’s official photographers, who has documented cultural events in Dubrovnik with his camera for years. This year, his camera captured the process of plays being created backstage and the effort of numerous persons behind the scenes to whom this exhibition is dedicated.

The last show of this interesting cooperation with Zagreb is an excellent jazz program of the world-famous Avishai Cohen Trio. The concert will take place on 25 September at 20 in the Blagoje Bersa Concert Hall of the Music Academy in Zagreb. These widely acclaimed musicians thrilled the Dubrovnik audience this summer so their performance in Zagreb will certainly be a rewarding music experience.