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    darjastisu

    🎭 Awarded performing Arts Photographer | 🌊 Scuba Diving Addict | 📸 Canon EOS R Ambassador| 🎙️ Voice over Talent | double bassist |Check my work 👇

    An entire village spends an evening arguing about An entire village spends an evening arguing about a girl’s voice. Almost nobody asks her about it.

That is the engine of Gorenjski slavček. Franjo comes home; a travelling entertainer hears Minka sing and wants to take her away to have her voice trained; her family is about to lose the house to creditors; the village closes ranks against the outsider. For a long time this was played as a cheerful, slightly naive comedy with good tunes. Vito Taufer’s staging, which the house keeps bringing back, reads it differently — it lets you notice that Minka is the one thing everyone on stage is negotiating over.

Photographing opera is a strange trade: the whole subject is sound, and sound is the one thing that does not survive the shutter. What you can get is the second before a phrase, when the ribcage has already decided and the face has not caught up.

She is the nightingale of the title. Worth counting how long it takes before anyone asks her a question.

Režija: Vito Taufer
Obnovitev režije: Matej Prevc
Scenografija: Samo Lapajne
Kostumografija: Barbara Podlogar
Oblikovanje luči: Pascal Mérat
Koreografija: Sanja Nešković Peršin
Dirigent: Jakob Barbo
Dramaturgija: Tatjana Ažman
Zborovodkinja: Željka Ulčnik Remic
Orkester, solisti in zbor SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana

#dstphotography #antonfoerster #operaballetljubljana #vitotaufer #slovenianopera
    So prostori v katere so ujeta tisočletja. Ta je b So prostori v katere so ujeta tisočletja.

Ta je bil zgrajen leta 1268 kot minoritska cerkev sv. Frančiška Asiškega v Kopru: enoladijska gotska dvorana beraških redov, postavljena okrog glasu, ki mora brez pomoči nesti do zadnje vrste. Za cerkvene namene so jo opustili leta 1809. V letih 1968 in 1969 so jo predelali v telovadnico koprske gimnazije in to je ostala do leta 1990, ko so jo zaprli in pustili pri miru. V okviru celovite obnove tega očem dolgo skritega kulturnega bisera je občina Koper leta 2008 začela s sanacijo stropa z baročnimi poslikavami, prav tako so bile pravilno obdelane in predstavljene tudi stenske poslikave, ki krasijo glavno korno kapelo. Obnove je bil deležen tudi obstoječi notranji venec.

Čudež življenja išče izjemne prostore in izjemne glasbenike. Prejšnje izvedbe so bile v Postojnski jami, v Predjamskem gradu, v Noordungovem centru v Vitanju. Tokrat je bila zgodba morje in Koper je bil logična izbira za 100 poslušalcev Radia 1.

Žan Serčič je pričaral čaroben večer. Pred koncertom je povedal, da se vedno znova vrača k opažanju majhnih trenutkov, v eni svojih pesmi jim pravi čudeži. Skromna trditev za koncert, ki se po čudežu imenuje, in ravno prave velikosti za tole dvorano. 

In če vas ni bilo v živo, si v nedeljo lahko cel koncert ogledate na Radio1 Tv. 

#dstphotography #cudezzivljenja #zansercic #ildivji #koper
    Music is the only art that cannot wait for you. A Music is the only art that cannot wait for you.

A painting hangs there until you come back to it. A photograph will be the same photograph tomorrow. Music exists only while someone is making it — pressure moving through air, gone the instant the playing stops. Every performance is the entire work and the end of it at once.

Maybe that is why players look the way they do. They are not showing you something finished. They are keeping something in the air, and it lasts exactly as long as they do.

The art that disappears fastest is the one people keep the longest.

#dstphotography #musicphotography #chambermusic #liveperformance #musicians
    In 1689 the cello had almost nothing to play on it In 1689 the cello had almost nothing to play on its own.

That year, in Bologna, Domenico Gabrielli wrote seven ricercari for unaccompanied cello - among the earliest surviving music for the instrument alone. He had about a year left to live, and the instrument he was writing for was, in a sense, still being invented.

Fifty years later a Frenchman was making the trip in the other direction. Jean-Baptiste Barriere left Paris for Italy in 1736 for one reason: to stand next to the Neapolitan cellist Francesco Alborea and learn how he did it. He went home and published sonatas that sound like a man translating.

That is what a programme called Sonatas from Four Lands actually is. Not four national styles set politely side by side, but one accent carried by hand across borders - Graun bringing Tartini back to Berlin, Geminiani eventually writing the book that taught Englishmen how to sound Italian.

The ensemble is called musica cubicularis, and the name means what it sounds like: music for a room. Three players, no conductor, an atrium that holds a few dozen people. Close enough that you hear rosin and breath along with the notes - which is the whole pleasure of it and, with a camera, the whole problem.

Inspiration does not travel in scores. Somebody has to go and stand next to it.

Ansambel: musica cubicularis - Nika Somborac (violoncelo), Domen Marincic (viola da gamba, violoncelo), Tomaz Sevsek (cembalo)
Program: Sonate iz stirih dezel - Domenico Gabrielli, Antonio Caldara, Johann Gottlieb Graun, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Francesco Geminiani
Cikel: Harmonia Concertans - Stara glasba na Novem trgu, 16. sezona
Atrij ZRC SAZU, Novi trg, Ljubljana

#dstphotography #harmoniaconcertans #musicacubicularis #baroquecello #earlymusic
    Mahler never heard a single bar of this symphony. Mahler never heard a single bar of this symphony.

He left the Tenth in 1911 as a continuous draft — some 166 pages, only part of it orchestrated, the rest written down in the shorthand a composer uses when he assumes he will have time to come back. He didn’t. For half a century the work sat as a torso. Deryck Cooke assembled a performing version from the draft; it reached the radio in 1960, the concert hall in 1964, and Cooke kept revising it for the rest of his life.

On the last page Mahler wrote, in the margin, für dich leben! für dich sterben! — to live for you, to die for you — and under it Almschi!, his name for his wife. So part of what fills the Gallus Hall is a private letter, scored for a hundred people.

The Slovenian Philharmonic opened its season with it, Kahi Solomnišvili conducting: one work, no interval, eighty minutes of orchestra and nothing to hide behind. From where I stand there is no good moment — the light is set for listening, not looking, and any sound I make belongs to me alone. You learn to breathe with the phrase and press between them.

We call the Tenth unfinished. The music was all there. What ran out was the time to write it down.

Dirigent: Kahi Solomnišvili
Orkester Slovenske filharmonije
Program: Gustav Mahler, Simfonija št. 10 v Fis-duru (izvedbena različica Derycka Cooka)
Cikel: Same mogočne skladbe, otvoritveni koncert sezone 2026/27
Gallusova dvorana, Cankarjev dom

#dstphotography #slovenskafilharmonija #mahler10 #kahisolomnisvili #orchestraphotography
    Opera has spent four centuries on people pretendin Opera has spent four centuries on people pretending to be someone they are not. The disguise used to be a cloak, or a letter, or a twin brother. Now it is a profile.

Klik za ljubezen is a comic opera about looking for love online: sixty minutes, no interval, five singers and four musicians. Iztok Kocen wrote the score and conducts it. The libretto is by Jakob Barbo, built on a comedy by Vinko Möderndorfer, who also directs. The characters arrive at their dates carrying what people actually carry — the past, the frustrations, the version of themselves they would rather you met first.

The cloak got smaller. The hiding is the same.

Glasba in dirigent: Iztok Kocen
Libreto: Jakob Barbo (po komediji Vinka Möderndorferja)
Režija: Vinko Möderndorfer
Scenografija: Jaro Ješe
Kostumografija: Tina Žen
Oblikovanje luči: Andrej Petrovčič
Oblikovanje zvoka: Gregor Troha
Nastopajo: Peter Grdadolnik (Gospod Marko), Ireneja Nejka Čuk (Gospodična Suzana), Lovro Korošec (Gospod Albert), Katja Konvalinka (Mama), Klemen Torkar (Smetar)

#dstphotography #klikzaljubezen #skgg #cankarjevdom #operaphotography
    The words to Slovenia’s best-loved opera were writ The words to Slovenia’s best-loved opera were written by a woman who had to learn Slovene as an adult.

Luiza Pesjak was born in Ljubljana in 1828 into a lawyer’s household, schooled in German, tutored for a while by France Prešeren. Her first writing was German; she did not speak Slovene at all. She took the language on in her thirties, after the constitutional reforms of 1860 — and in 1872 wrote the libretto for Gorenjski slavček. She went on to become the first woman to write a novel in Slovene.

Anton Foerster’s music did the rest. More than 150 years on, this is the opera people can hum without owning a recording of it, the one that opens seasons and fills matinees with children.

Photographing it is mostly a matter of waiting. The stage gives you one lit second in every thirty, and the rest of the time you stand still in the dark and try not to be a noise.

We speak of a mother tongue as if it were handed to us. Hers was picked up late, on purpose — and it is the one we still sing.

Režija: Vito Taufer
Obnovitev režije: Matej Prevc
Scenografija: Samo Lapajne
Kostumografija: Barbara Podlogar
Oblikovanje luči: Pascal Mérat
Koreografija: Sanja Nešković Peršin
Dirigent: Jakob Barbo
Dramaturgija: Tatjana Ažman
Zborovodkinja: Željka Ulčnik Remic
Orkester, solisti in zbor SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana

#dstphotography #gorenjskislavcek #luizapesjak #operaphotography #sngoperainbalet
    No music stands. That is the first thing you notic No music stands. That is the first thing you notice.

The Baltic Sea Philharmonic brings together young musicians from the countries around the Baltic Sea, and it is one of the very few orchestras that perform almost entirely from memory. With nothing between them, they have only each other: facial expressions, eyes, smiles, glances. Watching them communicate without a single word was remarkable – and so was watching the music carry them, felt perhaps even more intensely because no page stood in the way.

The evening opened with Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, a concerto for birds and orchestra, built on recordings of Arctic birdsong, and the musicians gradually walked onto the stage while it played. Slovenian violinist Lana Trotovšek then joined them for Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, and conductor Robert Trevino led them through Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony.

When you know the music by heart, perhaps you also play it from there.

#dstphotography #balticseaphilharmonic #lanatrotovsek #ljubljanafestival #orchestra
    Founded in 1548, the Staatskapelle Dresden is one Founded in 1548, the Staatskapelle Dresden is one of the oldest orchestras in the world. It came to Ljubljana with its chief conductor Daniele Gatti and Mahler’s Sixth.

The “Tragic” is a symphony of marches, cowbells and the famous hammer blows of fate – music that asks for virtuosity from every corner of the orchestra. Gatti led it boldly through all of it. From the very first bar, the notes seemed to be carried on wings, all the way to the silence into which they finally faded.

Another fantastic evening – and a reminder that silence belongs to the music, too.

#dstphotography #staatskapelledresden #danielegatti #mahler #ljubljanafestival
    Charismatic, dark-haired, magnetic Marilyn Monroe Charismatic, dark-haired, magnetic Marilyn Monroe of the piano.

But the glamour is only the surface. What Khatia Buniatishvili has with the piano looks more like a passionate love affair: every phrase lived through, not simply played.

Born in Batumi, Georgia, she took on Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the Berliner Symphoniker and conductor Gudni Emilsson – a piece that opens with some of the most famous chords ever written for the instrument. After the interval came Beethoven’s Seventh, which Wagner called the apotheosis of the dance.

Some pianists play music. A few seem to fall in love with it right in front of you.

#dstphotography #khatiabuniatishvili #berlinersymphoniker #ljubljanafestival #pianist
    Manifestus is Latin for clear, evident. Inside the Manifestus is Latin for clear, evident. Inside the word sits manus: hand.

Once you notice that, you cannot unnotice it. Everything we call manifest,  made plain, brought into the open, goes back to a hand. The thing we point with, open, offer, raise. We show before we speak.

Jacopo Jenna built the piece out of the dance languages that already know this. Tutting, popping and vogue are among the most hand-driven vocabularies there are: angular figures made and unmade at the wrists, often gone before you can name the shape. Three dancers keep producing them, and what the piece keeps doing is declaring one thing — I am here.

Before any of us had a word for it, we had a hand that said: here.

Koncept, koreografija in režija: Jacopo Jenna
Sodelovanje pri koreografiji: Mattia Quintavalle SLY
Nastopajoči: Simone De Giovanni, Petra Audrey Mangoua Youaleu, Phex
Zvok: Alberto Ricca / Bienoise
Tehnično vodstvo in oblikovanje luči: Mattia Bagnoli
Produkcija: KLm
Festival Front@, Zavod Flota, Murska Sobota

#dstphotography #jacopojenna #streetdance #tutting #dancephotography
    There is a Japanese word for two things we usually There is a Japanese word for two things we usually keep apart. Kūkan means a space with clear, sharp outlines — and it also means the field that arises between things.

The second meaning is the harder one. It says space is not what is left over once the objects are in place; it is made by them. Move two bodies closer together and you have not reduced the space between them. You have made a different one.

Fabla come out of circus and physical theatre rather than dance alone, and for this they built their own object to work with — a construction that keeps redrawing where the two of them are allowed to be. Zhlehtet play the music live, so the sound is shaped in the same room, in the same minutes.

Emptiness is not the absence of things. It is the shape they leave.

Avtorja: Inan Sven Du Swami, Mojca Špik
Glasba: Zhlehtet (v živo)
Oblikovanje luči: Gregor Kuhar
Kostumografija: Iztok Hrga
Koprodukcija: Cankarjev dom, Hiša otrok in umetnosti
Festival Front@, Zavod Flota, Murska Sobota

#dstphotography #fablacollective #zhlehtet #physicaltheatre #murskasobota
    came with no expectations. I left having seen one came with no expectations. I left having seen one of the biggest spectacles this country is capable of putting on — and the thing that impressed me most was the people.

There were no security guards along the front of the stage. There were young women, enjoying themselves as much as anyone else in the hall, and still nobody pushed all the way forward. As a photographer, I was given room every time I needed it.

People have been saying for years that you cannot get good sound in Stožice. It is the largest hall in Slovenia and it has carried that reputation like a diagnosis, as if the acoustics were a fixed property of the building. Around 130 audio channels say otherwise: microphones, instruments, whole orchestras arriving at one desk and coming back out as something you can listen to for four hours without flinching. Bad acoustics are an alibi. It holds up right until somebody does the work.

And the work here was enormous. A stage more than 19 metres high and over 50 metres wide, some 500 square metres of it, with lifting platforms that raise up to fifty people at once and tunnels running underneath. More than a thousand lights. Ninety-nine items in the programme, a thousand performers, sixteen technical teams, around two hundred and fifty people to make it happen.

The motif holding all of it together is the bee — chosen, the band says, for its relationship to the environment, and for being an animal that lives and works for its community. The honeycomb on stage was built by a family carpentry workshop in Polhov Gradec that has been making things for this band for sixteen years. Behind the largest spectacle this hall has seen, a small workshop cutting wood.

The spectacle was in the scale. What stays with me is that nobody needed to be held back.

Noč Modrijanov, Dvorana Stožice — dva razprodana koncerta
Ansambel Modrijani
Oblikovanje luči: Blackout Lighting Design
Oder in sistem dvižnih ploščadi: Roman Plank z ekipo
Scenografija (satovje): družinska mizarska delavnica iz Polhovega Gradca

#dstphotography #nocmodrijanov #modrijani #blackoutlightingdesign #dvoranastozice
    I have heard Mahler’s Second Symphony quite a few I have heard Mahler’s Second Symphony quite a few times. None has touched me like this one.

The “Resurrection” takes its time – almost an hour and a half of questions about life, death and the meaning of existence. Deep into the finale, the choir enters almost in a whisper. With Sir Antonio Pappano, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Kaunas State Choir, soprano Maria Bengtsson and contralto Noa Beinart, the dynamics were extraordinary and the voices breathtakingly subtle.

For me, one of the most emotional concerts of the season.

Sometimes the quietest sound is the one that stays with you the longest.

#dstphotography #mahler #londonsymphonyorchestra #kaunasstatechoir #ljubljanafestival
    I waited quite a while for the first of these phot I waited quite a while for the first of these photographs.
The double bass player's arm had to be in exactly the right position, and the conductor had to lean forward just far enough. Then, for a moment, there was a frame.

The London Symphony Orchestra. Sir Antonio Pappano on the podium. Bruckner’s monumental, unfinished Ninth waiting after the interval. And still, the evening belonged to the pianist.

Bruce Liu was born in Paris, grew up in Montreal and won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2021,  the only contestant the jury sent through every round unanimously. Spontaneity is often named as the secret of his playing. In Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, it was above all him who swept the audience away.

Great orchestras can carry a soloist. Every now and then, a soloist carries the whole room.

#dstphotography #bruceliu #londonsymphonyorchestra #antoniopappano #ljubljanafestival
    Bodyless is a strange title for the one art form t Bodyless is a strange title for the one art form that has nothing else to work with.

Dance cannot step outside the body to comment on it. Whatever a piece wants to say about absence, about disappearing, about leaving the flesh behind, it has to say with muscle, breath and weight. The claim and the instrument are the same thing.

Iza Teršek made this seven-minute piece at SVŠGUGL under the mentorship of Leon Marič, and it was shown in the Opus 1 selection of awarded miniatures.

We spend a growing part of our lives as text, voice and image — as everything except a body.

It is the one part of us that cannot be sent anywhere.

Avtorica: Iza Teršek (SVŠGUGL)
Mentor: Leon Marič
Program: OPUS 1 – nagrajene miniature mladih plesnih ustvarjalcev
Festival Front@, Zavod Flota, Murska Sobota

#dstphotography #opus1 #svsgugl #sodobniples #dancephotography
    Amparo is a Spanish word for shelter. It is also t Amparo is a Spanish word for shelter. It is also the name of the dancer’s grandmother.

That doubling is the whole piece. We talk about safety as a condition, something a place has, something a person is in. But nobody’s first experience of it was abstract. It had a name, a kitchen, a particular pair of hands, a voice audible from the next room.

Helena Alemany Ortiz dances and speaks Amparo herself, to music written for it by Liselot de Nooijer and Maia Steinberg. It was made as her graduation work at the Fontys academy in the Netherlands, and it circles fear and what stands on the other side of it.

Shelter is not a state. It is a person, and they have a name.

Koreografija, izvedba in besedilo: Helena Alemany Ortiz
Glasba: Liselot de Nooijer, Maia Steinberg
Festival Front@, Zavod Flota, Murska Sobota

#dstphotography #frontafestival #solodance #spokenword #dancephotography
    Some concerts you wait for all summer. For me, thi Some concerts you wait for all summer. For me, this was the one.

Yuja Wang doesn’t just walk onto a stage. She arrives. Changing outfits, impossibly high heels, elegance, beauty, and that iconic bow: quick, deep, almost folding in half.

Then she sits down at the piano and all that stage energy turns into sound. With the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and conductor Teddy Abrams – her partner on the Grammy-winning album The American Project – she played Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto and a jazz-tinged suite by Alexander Tsfasman. At moments her fingers slid across the keys so fast that the eye could barely follow them.

Elegance, it turns out, can move faster than sight.

#dstphotography #yujawang #mahlerchamberorchestra #ljubljanafestival #pianist
    I had been looking forward to this concert, and it I had been looking forward to this concert, and it gave me everything I went for. Everyone on stage sounded terrific. But the thing I keep returning to is less obvious than the playing: the sound itself. It was, at least to my ears, one of the best I have heard. It held right under the stage, and it still held at the back of the auditorium, where sound usually goes to die.

Open air is unkind that way. There is no ceiling to throw anything back at you, so a sound that leaves the stage generous tends to arrive at the last row thin and far away. Here it did not. The whole courtyard got the same concert.

The band takes its name from a Cuban car from the Batista era, a machine from the previous century that still runs. Soul, sung in Slovenian, by six people who very obviously like being on a stage together.

A concert is not only what gets played. It is how far it carries, and who is still inside it at the back.

Oblikovanje luči: @blackout_lighting_design

#dstphotography #batistacadillac #krizanke #concertphotography #livemusicphotography
    24.000 POSKOKOV / 24.000 JUMPS– Brina Miholič & An 24.000 POSKOKOV / 24.000 JUMPS– Brina Miholič & Ana Borovičanin, Plesni Epicenter; mentorica: Sabina Schwenner

#dstphotography #performingartsphotography #theatre #concertphotography #canonslovenija
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