The music of composer Milica Djordjević, born in Belgrade in 1984, is based on an exuberant and imaginative use of sound. She has full command of the entire arsenal of contemporary sound and performance techniques, which never cease to surprise. She began her composition studies in her native city of Belgrade, where she was already working with electronic music, then went on to Strasbourg and IRCAM in Paris before completing her studies from 2011-2013 in Berlin with Hanspeter Kyburz at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. Her already extensive oeuvre, which is performed by leading international soloists and ensembles, includes pieces for solo instruments, chamber music works in a wide variety of formations, vocal works, and large-scale orchestral compositions. The diversity of her work highlights her versatility and technical virtuosity. Djordjević has received numerous prestigious prizes and awards for her compositions, including the Belmont Prize for Contemporary Music (2015), the Composition Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2016) and the Claudio Abbado Composition Prize of the Berlin Philharmonic (2020).
In Milica Djordjević's short orchestral work Mali svitac, žestoko ozaren i prestravljen nesnošljivom lepotom (Little firefly, brightly lit and shocked by unbearable beauty), commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2023, the composer is concerned with "the immense energy it takes to make things glow". Her orchestral work Quicksilver was commissioned by musica viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk and premiered on December 16, 2016 by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Rundel in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz. It is precisely the strict limitation of the melodic movement to very few, narrow interval steps that makes it "all the richer and more colourful on the inside". Čvor (Knot) for winds, piano and percussion, a work commissioned for the Donaueschingen Music Festival, briefly but very intensively describes a knot that squeezes and twists and finally bursts. The fourth work on this BR-KLASSIK CD - Mit o ptici (Myth of the Bird) for choir and orchestra - was commissioned by musica viva in 2020 and premiered on October 28, 2022 with the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Johannes Kalitzke. The four parts of Djordjević's first choral work are based on motifs from a 1979 verse epic by the Yugoslav poet Miroslav Antić (1932-1986). The narrative and dialogues are sung in alternating voices, sometimes separately, and intermingled in the third part. The music is the main carrier of the plot, conveying what is to be said without the need to understand the text.
The BR-KLASSIK CD features recordings of the world premieres of Quicksilver and Mit o ptici from 2016 and 2022 respectively. Mali svitac... and Čvor were recorded at a recent musica viva concert on February 23, 2024 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz.
