On the occasion of the premier of her new piece commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker to be performed live for the first time in the Music Chamber Hall this Saturday, 17.10.2015 at 20.00h, Isidora Žebeljan joined and enjoyed a promotional evening organised by the Serbian Embassy in Berlin. A handful of guests were able to hear three pieces she composed for and recorded with The Brodsky Quartet and to hear about her inspiration and her communication with the world and the history of music by incorporating Serbian traditional pieces into the universal language.
There is this very special kind of people that I really really enjoy being surrounded with: I call the them the Bound-Breakers. They just follow their inner power and thrive independent of circumstances. They defy physical and mental borders, and believe in themselves. They change their lives and destinies, and create their own universes – cocoons with no place and time coordinates. They accept no rules and boundaries except the respect towards the others, themselves and the nature. Most important, and that is how one can easily recognise them, there were they were coming from, people thought they were crazy. That they will never make it. That they will fail. But while everyone else was telling them to hold to what they already have and fit in, they were already somewhere else, within. Isidora Žebeljan is one of them, and I am happy she sprinkled her magic over me.
Serbia, a poor land forgotten at the borders of Europe, did not manage to delegate an Ambassador to Berlin for several years now, but there is this really cool guy who does not take himself too seriously Boro Šuput, serving as a Deputy of a never-elected Ambassador. He likes to throw a party and to smoke a ciggy with us – the younger ones. He claims he was smoking before Alain Delon did it on film, and I believe him. And then, so it happened, there was his birthday and there was Isidora in the room. And she jumped to the old piano, not tuned since 1983 (official information, top secret) and there we were: all singing happy birthday and chaining the white Italian wine. “Why not Serbian?” I asked Šuput later in the evening. “Eeeeeee…..” he said “if you would only know who hides behind the label Italian….” and he laughed, šeretsko-šuputski ;-).
