Dear audience,
In its hundred years of life our orchestra has experienced everything that a century can hold. Undoubtedly the most valuable thing in those hundred years has been its audience, because of which the Belgrade Philharmonic endures and because of which it has lived to be a hundred. Every Friday, in your presence, the musicians of the Belgrade Philharmonic write new pages of history with the aim of leaving a cultural legacy for generations to come. But will we succeed?
Just as we share our artistic achievements with you, we feel obliged to share what is with each passing day increasingly distancing us from the secure future of this orchestra.
More than two years after our last director Mr Ivan Tasovac passed away, the Belgrade
Philharmonic still has only an acting director, celebrating its centenary while having the lowest musician salaries in the region, with a shamefully small budget year after year, without any advertising, without new concert uniforms for the past ten years and without firm assurances that our new concert hall will be built.
Carrying the name of our city and country worldwide, we are constantly faced with the fact that, despite being so highly educated, we are so poorly valued in this city and country of ours. We are more than aware that we play so frequently and so well, yet we are paid so little and the dream of having our new Philharmonic Hall in our capital is fading more and more every day, while audiences in Skopje, Podgorica and Tirana enjoy theatres befitting capital cities. Last October a warning strike took place, and we presented all the above-mentioned facts to the Board of Directors of the Belgrade Philharmonic.
We are saddened that in our country we are like a decoration that exists, but does not need to exist. Not many people know that the education of a professional musician averages sixteen years and is one of the most expensive because it is individual; that the competition at the auditions of the Belgrade Philharmonic is fierce and top musicians sometimes fail to get hired several times because there is an even better candidate; that this job requires daily improvement and practice, regardless of how many years you have been doing it; that each member of the Belgrade Philharmonic could do many other jobs with some additional training, but unless someone has gone through the thorny path of very specific artistic development, they cannot become a Philharmonic musician.
And despite all this, those who decide about us are asking, "What makes you so special?"
Being a Philharmonic musician is the same as being any national team member. The
Philharmonic Orchestra is a cultural national team that has repeatedly and honourably served its country for years and this country should be proud of it and honour it.
Existentially, our lives with these salaries are extremely modest. Artistically, our lives are very rich. We Philharmonic musicians live for applause but unfortunately we cannot live on applause. That is why we are demanding that the state increases the salaries of the Belgrade Philharmonic musicians, as well as the budget necessary to achieve our further goals, and
builds a new building that will enable the Belgrade Philharmonic and its musicians to create a more vibrant and visible institution for the next hundred years.
Investing in culture and arts is the only truly valid investment for the future, because the fruit of such investments is a healthy society that stands on the strong pillars of humanity.
Dear audience, we thank you for listening to us, for seeing us and recognizing our value in a city and country that seem to have forgotten us and everything we have represented to this society for a full hundred years.
Finally, if you wish to help us further, we invite you to write a few words to the Ministry of Culture about what the Belgrade Philharmonic means to you. That would be your way of supporting our demands and helping us to be heard and appreciated.
16 окт 2024
