Overture in D minor, Op. 49 Dora Pejačević performed by the Beethoven Orchester Bonn and their general music director Dirk Kaftan, opened the new season of the Freitagskonzert cycle of the Orchestra. The concert was held on Friday, August 11, 2023, in the Opernhaus Bonn and was entitled Drama, and in addition to the Overture, the program included Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor, KV 466 with soloist Olga Pashchenko, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, SZ 116.

“Drama right at the beginning of the season? Why, yes: the stage serves to live through a concert or theater performance in the spirit and heart what (hopefully) we will not have to live through in life. Therefore, the darkest pieces are the ones we sometimes love the most!”, the organizers of the concert pointed out in the announcement, adding that “each work blazes its own path through the darkness of this world: With Dora Pejačević, we dive into the devastated regions of the soul of the time after the First World War, her Overture in d-minor, composed in 1919, four years before her untimely death…”

Musicologist, publicist and music critic Bernhard Hartmann did not hide his satisfaction with the concert, who accompanied the performance with a review published on August 14, 2023 in the newspaper General-Anzeiger*.

Among other things, Hartmann wrote: “The Music Director of the city of Bonn, Dirk Kaftan, and the Beethoven Orchestra opened the new season with her (Dore Pejačević’s) Overture in D minor, composed a year after the First World War. In front of the well-attended Opera House in Bonn, this Friday, Kaftan tackled the passionate rapture that Pejačević imprinted in her late romantic score. The orchestra immediately plunged into a tumult of themes and motifs, in which sharp tutti-intrusions and narrow melodic lines of strings or brass bump into each other, breathlessly trying to dominate the space, until the music, after a short instrumental celebration, after just over five minutes does not reach its end. An impressive test of the talent of a once world-famous and equally successful composer. Maybe one day her extraordinary four-movement Symphony will be heard in this place.”

What can we say, but to hope for the fulfillment of Hartmann’s wish and for a new successful collaboration between musicians from Bonn and the Croatian Music Information Center.

Jelena Vuković / Ana Unkić