For years one of the most active orchestras in Europe, the Glenn Miller Orchestra will perform on 18th January 2012 at the Sava Center, as part of tour “In the Miller Mood”. This tour will be an upgrade of their last tour “Evergreens in Swing,” which has achieved great success and fi lled venues in 17 countries across Europe with an incredible 260 appearances.
The main focus of the music program, of course, remains on Miller’s compositions and his unique sound that is created and that it is positioned as an idol of his time, while the newspaper as a tribute tour is refl ected in the other band leaders like Woody Herman, Count Basie and Harry James, and Ella Fitzgerald reminder of the swing as the best singer of all time.
Thus, compositions like ‘’In the Mood’’, ‘’Moonlight Serenade’’, ‘’String of Pearls’’, ‘’Little Brown Jug’’, ‘’Stairway to the Star’’ and ‘’Somewhere Over the Rainbow ‘’bring a touch of the thirties and forties of the last century.
Glenn Miller Orchestra conductor is Will Salden since 1990. When it was on Broadway in New York, president of Glenn Miller Productions Inc., Mr. David Mackay, Jr.. appointed as leader of the Glenn Miller Orchestra for Europe. Since then, orchestra’s tour had sold-out halls across Europe and as many as 200 concerts a year, which puts them in one of the most active orchestras in the world.
Will Salden is a perfectionist who demands the same perfection from every member of his orchestra. His orchestra was carefully groomed and for a number of tours and television and radio appearances, one of the most popular orchestras
in the world.

• Conductor: Will Salden
• Trumpets: Erik Veldkamp, Reijs Marcel, Pascal Haverkate, Roeland Cleijne
• Trombone: Uli Plettendorff, Hansjörg Fink, André Fri, Jenko de Vries
• Saxophone - Clarinet: Benjamin Steil, Malta Dürrschnabel, Peter Peuker, Frank Jacobi, Frank Meuwissen
• Bass: Ingo Senst Percussion: Klaas Balijon or Haye Jellema and Anton Burger
• Piano: Wil Salden
• Vocals: Roos Jonker and Ellen Bliek or Miette Molnar and Mariska Hekkenberg.

Belgrade arena, 21 December @ 20.00
One of the most popular young singers from Greece, Hatzigiannis Mihalis, will perform in Belgrade Arena on 21st of December. During the last ten years Hatzigiannis won over 30 awards for his music, which makes him one of the most successful artists of Greece in the past decade. Hits like “xeria Psila”, “Ola and type”, “Pio Poly”, “Mono Sta Oniro” are very popular in Serbia as well.

Belgrade arena 25 December @ 14.00
This traditional children’s music festival, for the sixth consecutive year is being held as a music competition for children of all ages. The final competition involves kids who were chosen by the authors as the most suitable to present their works. This festival contributes primarily to motivate authors and composers in the creation of children’s individual music in Serbia.

Sava Center, 17 December @ 20.00
Traditional New Year Concert of this respected jazz orchestra will this December again perform in Sava Center. Belgrade Dixiland Orchestra will also celebrates its eleventh birthday with numerous guests joining them on the stage. The Dixie Dance
Show, accompanying dance troupe, will this yearr too add to the richness of the whole performance.

Sava Center, 15 December @ 20.00
This year’s American Gospel Choir European tour, named after the Michael Jackson song “Heal the World” has a humanitarian character. Members of the choir will donate half of their revenue from sold cds to local charity in Belgrade.

Sava Center, 12 December @ 20.00
One of the most well known Russian army ensembles, the famous Choir, Ballet and Orchestra from St. Petersburg will perform in Belgrade on 12th December during their European tour.

The first edition of the anthology ‘Ten Centuries of Serbian Literature’, which encompasses the most significant works of Serbian literature (from medieval to the twentieth century) and which is published by Matica Srpska, was presented in Belgrade in December. This is the first publication in 40 years which collects in a single location, all the greatest achievements of Serbian literature. The last edition which represented Serbian literature in its entirety was ‘Serbian Literature in One Hundred Books’ which was published in the 1960’s. This year’s edition includes the literary works of Saint Sava, national literature, poetry from Dubrovnik and Boka Kotorska, the works of Dositej Obradović, Jovan Sterija Popović, Njegoš, Bora Stanković, Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski and ‘the Anthology of Serbian Poetry’ by Miodrag Pavlović. This anthology involved the efforts of some of the greatest authorities from the area of literature.

The National Library of Serbia will present three exhibitions at the International Book Fair in Leipzig in 2011, where Serbia will be the guest of honour. The first exhibition displays comics which have been created in the last 15 years, where the stories take place in Serbia or Belgrade, or their protagonists are characters from Serbian history and culture. The second exhibition is a sort of analysis of the alternative comic scene during the 1990s in Serbia. The ‘Two Radoslavs, Two Times’ exhibition, created in 2004, represents two parallel stories which describe two eras of history in Serbia. All three exhibitions will be set up under the cupolas of Leipzig Fair in a hall entirely dedicated to comics. Serbia, as the guest of honour of the fair, is preparing a range of literary promotions, lectures, workshops, meetings of authors with readers and other programmes which will present contemporary Serbian culture and Serbian heritage to fair attendees.

The fourth Festival of Science was held on December 3rd- 5th in Belgrade, under the slogan of ‘Face to Face with Science’. The festival was opened by Catherine Brechignac, the French Ambassador for Science, Technology and Innovation, and also present at the opening was Božidar Djelić, Serbian Minister for Science and Technological Development and Deputy Prime Minister. The Festival of Science was held at the Students’ Cultural Centre, at DS ‘Kluz’ in Masarikova Street, and at the gallery of the National Bank of Serbia. It offered interactive exhibitions and presentations in mini-laboratories, exhibitions, children’s workshops, films and lectures. The French Cultural Centre in Belgrade dedicated its entire December programme to science. Catherine Brechignac visited the Institute of Economic Sciences where, at a lecture she gave together with Božidar Djelić, she spoke about scientific research in Europe, and in particular about French-Serbian cooperation in the field of science. The festival also included an exhibition of photographs by Stefan Kerves titled ‘Chemical Gardens’, and at the French Cultural Centre an exhibition dedicated to the International Year of Biodiversity, organised by the Parisian scientific centre ‘La Villette’, was held.

The Russian government has donated two million dollars to UNESCO for the renewal of the Serbian monasteries of Dečani, Gračanica, Peć Patriarchy and the Church of Ljeviš Virgin, in Kosovo and Metohija. The agreement for the donation was signed in Paris by the General Director of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, and the permanent delegate of Russia to the UN agency, Eleonora Mitrofanova. The agreement stipulates that the assets, worth $2 million, are used for the restoration of the monasteries in accordance with the project which is an essential part of the contract. The monasteries of Gračanica, Peć Patriarchy, as well as the Church of Ljeviš Virgin in Prizren were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2006, under the reference of ‘Medieval Monuments in Kosovo’. Dečani monastery was individually added to the list in 2004. The medieval monuments in Kosovo have also been on the World Heritage List’s - Endangered sites since 2006.

The works of Serbian writers Srđan Valjarević, Vida Ognjenović and Vladislav Bajac, have found themselves in the wider selection for one of the most important global literary awards – the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This is the first time in the history of world literature that three Serbian authors have found themselves simultaneously in the wider selection for one of the five most important world literary prizes. The Serbian novels ‘Lake Como’ by Srđan Valjarević, ‘Adulterers’ by Vida Ognjenović and ‘Hamam Balkania’ by Vladislav Bajac, the English translations of which were done by ‘Geopoetika’, a publishing house from Belgrade, are competing for the award. Among the 162 books which are in the competition for the award this year are works from famous authors from around the world including Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Dan Brown, Orhan Pamuk, William Trevor and Carlos Ruiz Safon. Only 42 books by authors who are not from an English-speaking country are in the selection. The books by the three Serbian authors were put forward by the Belgrade City Library and Herceg Novi City Library. The IMPAC Dublin Literary Award will be presented in June 2011 in Dublin, Ireland.

The Serbian cultural society ‘Prosvjeta’ held the ‘Days of Serbian Culture’ in Zagreb during December. In the cinema ‘Europe’ a retrospective of Marko Babac’s films, the Croatian premier of the ‘Belgrade Phantom’, and the prizewinning movies of the students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts from Belgrade were shown. The ITD Theatre showed the movie ‘Hypertension’; directed and written by Svetislav Basara, and starring Predrag Ejdus and Branislav Trifunović. ‘Days of Serbian Culture’ has been held since 2006, and represents a platform for cultural exchange and cooperation between the Serbian and Croatian cultural environments, mindful of the traditional bonds between these two cultures, and their significant complementary and firm mutual affinities.

An exhibition of selected works of Polish and Russian art from the time of communism, created in both the official and independent scene, was opened at the Museum of Yugoslav History (Museum 25th May) in December. The exhibition presents phenomena which are characteristic of the development of art from the second half of the twentieth century in the two biggest former communist European countries - Poland and the former USSR. The exhibition includes 200 works from private collections in Poland; most of which are from the collection of Pole Piotr Nowicki. The exhibition has been divided in to sections: ‘Triumph of Ideology’, ‘The Art of Opposition’, ‘II Avant-garde’, ‘15% of Abstraction’, ‘Symbols and Meaning’, ‘Figurations’ and ‘Transformations’. The exhibition was organised by the Polish Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Yugoslav History, under the sponsorship of the Serbian and Polish Ministries of Culture, with the financial assistance of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Polish Foundation for Contemporary Art. The exhibition will run until February 15th.

The partially restored Belgrade gallery - Petar Dobrović’s Legacy - after an absence of several years, has opened its doors again and is showing some of the most representative works from Petar Dobrović, one of the main protagonists of Serbian modernism. The exhibition ‘Petar Dobrović’s Masterpieces’, which will run until November 2011, encompasses 27 oil on canvas paintings from various periods throughout the artist’s stylistic development. The organiser of the exhibition is curator Žana Gvozdenović. Petar Dobrović (1890- 1942) was one of Serbia’s most significant modernist painters; an expressive colourist whose opus includes numerous portraits of intellectuals, women, friends, significant and ‘everyday’ people, as well as various still-life paintings and scenes of Dalmatia, Venice and Dubrovnik. The gallery of Petra Dobrović’s Legacy is located at 36/IV Kralja Petra Street, and is open on Fridays and on weekends from 10.00- 17.00. Entrance is free of charge.

Between the 15th and 25th of September, the Belgrade International Theatre festival (BITEF) presented its main programme consisting of 10 theatrical productions from Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Poland, Russia and Serbia.
The Festival opened at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre with ‘Isabella’s Room’, directed by Jan Lauwers, and performed by the Needcompany troupe from Brussels. In addition to this contemporary piece of theatre, the Belgian troupe also presented another play, ‘Two Deer’, inspired by the death of a war correspondent in Kosovo.

Interesting performances in this year’s programme included the Hungarian play ‘Frankenstein-Project’, directed by Cornell Mundruco; the Italian play of the Virgilio Sieni troupe from Firenze,‘Sad Tropics’; and the Slovenian plays ‘The Mask’ from the MGL Theatre of Ljubljana and ‘G2 Monument’, by authors Janez Janša and Dušan Jovanović. Domestic plays included the drama ‘Bacchae’ from the National Theatre of Belgrade, directed by a guest from Sweden, Staffan Waldemar Holm; and ‘Who Would like a Mum like Mine?’ by the author Dalija Aćin.

The play ‘Uncle Vanja’ by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by German Jurgen Gosch, marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian writer. This year’s BITEF panel ‘Chekhov in the 21st century’ was also dedicated to the famous playwright.

This year, BITEF renewed the ‘Showcase’ programme, within which contemporary domestic productions were presented, and traditional side programmes ‘BITEF on Film’ and ‘BITEF Polyphony’ were also held. Another part of the side programme was the exhibition of the famous Slovenian director Tomaž Pandur, as well as the promotion of a capital study on BITEF by Russian theatrologist, Natalia Vagapova.
The founder of BITEF, the Belgrade City Hall, singled out 29 million dinars from the yearly budget for this year’s staging of BITEF, and substantial material support was also provided by the Republic Ministry for Culture.

The National Theatre in Belgrade kicked off its 142nd season on September 14th with ‘Lucia of Lammermoor’, by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti, directed by John Ramster from England, and conducted by maestro Johannes Harneit. The leading role in the opera was entrusted to Snežana Savičić Sekulić.

Numerous new plays and co-productions, as well as the opening of the theatre museum in November, have been announced for the 142nd season of the National Theatre. Furthermore, four new awards which will be given to younger artists were announced. The newly-established awards will be given once a year to the best in the areas of set and costume design, opera art, ballet and the dramatic arts.

The ‘Days of Russian Spirituality’ were held in Belgrade from 14th to 20th September. This event included a series of contemporary Russian films screened in the Sava Centre, a performance of the ‘Relikt’ trio and the choir of the Moscow Patriarchy, as well as a gala-performance of leading soloists of Russian ballet.

The central part of the ‘Days of Russian Spiritual Culture’ was the series of Russian films shown in the Sava Centre, which was opened with a projection of Andrei Kravchuk’s ‘Admiral’, an epic work set in the historic period from 1916 to 1920. The offering also included films: Alexander Smirnov’s ‘Deathly Dance’; ‘Room and Salt, or Sentimental Journey to the Homeland’ by Andrei Jurjevich Hrzanovski; Vera Vitalievna Glagoljeva’s ‘There is only one War’; Vera Storozeva Mihajlovna’s ‘Spring is Coming Soon’; Vladimir Ivanovich Hotinenk’s ‘Priest’; and Pavel Semjonovich Lungin’s ‘Emperor’.

An exhibition of Argentinean and French artist, Antonio Segui, opened on September 14th at the ‘Chaos’ gallery and will run until October 15th.

Antonio Segui is thought to be one of the greatest Argentinean painters of his day, and his works are found in numerous prestigious collections and museums all over the world, one of them being Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Segui, whose opus is dominated by drawings and also by large-scale paintings, was born in Argentina in 1934, and has lived and worked in Paris since 1963. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, has had more than 300 individual presentations around the world, and is a laureate of many awards for his work.

The exhibition at ‘Chaos’ gallery was opened by the Minister for Culture Nebojša Bradić, the Argentinean Ambassador Mario Bossi de Ezcurra, French Ambassador Jean-François Terral, as well as Segui himself, for whom the ‘Chaos’ exhibition served as a reason to visit Serbia for the first time.

On September 9th in Negotin, Southern Serbia, the traditional music event ‘Mokranjac Days’ was opened by the Serbian Minister of Culture Nebojša Bradić. The annual event is dedicated to the memory of the famous Serbian composer and conductor Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (1956- 1914), famous for incorporating Serbian music heritage into artistic music. The festival has been held each September since 1966, in Mokranjac’s birth house.

The festival’s competitors’ programme this year includes choirs from Serbia and other regional countries, including ‘Stanko Dragojević’ from Montenegro, ‘Lola’ from Belgrade, ‘Musica Humana’ from Ada, ‘Josip Štolcer Slavenski’ from Croatia and ‘Stiv Naumov’ from Macedonia. Guests can also enjoy an exhibition of paintings by Vladimir Veličković in the gallery of the Cultural Centre in Negotin.

‘Mokranjac Days’ will be closed on October 14th with a performance by the State academic choir ‘Glinka’ from St. Petersburg.

On September 3rd the Ambassador of Spain to Belgrade, Ignacio de Palacio Espana, opened the ‘Divine Worlds’ exhibition of artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989), at the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia (Museum 25th May).

The exhibition, which runs until November 14th, presents for the first time in Serbia more than 200 graphic sheets from two of Dali’s most voluminous opuses ‘Biblia Sacra’ and ‘Divine Comedy’.‘Divine Comedy’ was created in 1964 and encompasses 100 graphic works, and ‘Biblia Sacra’, Dali’s vision of Biblical sayings, which was made in 1967 and includes 106 graphics, was also done using various techniques.

The works on show have, to date, only been seen by audiences in Slovenia (Bled and Maribor) and in New York, and have come to Belgrade thanks to exhibition organiser, the Slovenian gallery of ‘Deva Puri’.

The alternative historical novel by Goran Skrobonja ‘The Man who Killed Tesla’ was presented in the Museum of Nikola Tesla in Belgrade on August 6th. Parts of the presentation included experiments with remote controlling, transformers and induction engines.

Visitors to the promotion participated in these experiments, which signified the significance of Tesla’s inventions for modern civilisation. Footage of Belgrade from the 1920’s - the period when the novel ‘The Man who Killed Tesla’ is set - was shown in the background.

Petar Arbutina, the editor at ‘Laguna’ publishing house, said that Skrobonja had not only created a novel of alternative history, but also conjured up an ‘authentic history which did not happen to us (to Serbia)’, that he has created a ‘new authenticity’ based on literary lies which is ‘bound to be believed ’ by the reader. Arbutina deemed that Skrobonja had ‘returned fiction to literature’.

Skrobonja, who also works with translations and publishing, wrote the novels ‘Brood’ and ‘Korota, Novel by Soldiers’, as well as numerous stories summarised in three author’s collections -  the last one ‘Silent Cities’ was also published by ‘Laguna’.