From the Chief Conductor’s Perspective: A Preface to the Concert Season “Titans”
Dear Audience,
It is my great pleasure to present to you the new concert season of the Vojvodina Symphony Orchestra, shaped under the motto “Titans. Classical Power in a Contemporary Expression”. This year’s season is dedicated to Atlas, while in the years to come, this mythical saga will unfold new chapters of the titanic epic in which myth intertwines with music. Prometheus, the bearer of fire and knowledge, Oceanus, the boundless source of motion, and Hyperion, the one who grants light and vision to the world, will also step onto the stage.
This motto does not only point to the strength of art, but also to its ability to endure and preserve meaning despite the challenges of the modern age. The season is conceived as a space of encounter, inspiration, and togetherness – a place of dialogue between audience and performers, where questions and answers are spoken through tones. It brings a fusion of the monumental and the intimate, the familiar and the newly discovered.
The Titans are not merely gigantic beings from ancient myths – they are archetypal guardians of strength, resilience, and creative sources. Among them, Atlas holds a special place: he carries the heavens, the boundary between worlds, between past and future, divine and human. Like him, the composers whose monumental creations will fill this season bear the burden and radiant weight of art – from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, through Scriabin’s Second Symphony, Brahms’s Fourth, and Beethoven’s Seventh, to Mahler’s First Symphony, subtitled Titan. Through eleven concerts, our artistic motto embodies the balance between responsibility toward tradition and freedom of expression, between the heritage of symphonic art and today’s musical language. Like Atlas, artists stand at the boundary: guarding what has been, while opening space with their vision and creativity for what is yet to come.
Atlas can also be understood as a symbol of the creative force that “carries” the world – a symbol of the greatness of all giants of science, art, and the human spirit in general, without whom there would be no progress. What would happen if they were to vanish, if Atlas were to “shrug” the world off his shoulders, as in Ayn Rand’s brilliant novel Atlas Shrugged? Banality, emptiness, vulgarity, and stagnation would prevail.
This concert season celebrates music as support, as challenge, and as responsibility – but also as a sensual experience. I invite you to become part of it, and thereby part of the creative, primordial energy that shapes the future, a future worthy of our journey toward it.
Aleksandar Marković
Welcome to the concerts of the Vojvodina Symphony Orchestra in the new 2025/2026. concert season
