I thought I was in hell; my cat almost died of fright.” For him, the students’ daily concerts have a clear message “We are playing, while you are bombing us. We are continuing with our lives, despite everything you are doing.”Sometimes, he says, he finds the energy to practise. “But sometimes I feel it’s nonsense, that for us in Yugoslavia it no longer has any point. My students are upset at what is happening, but they don’t realise how completely their country has already been destroyed. They don’t yet understand that there is no professional future for them here.” Faced with a possible universal call-up, he is planning to emigrate via Budapest, though with a sinking heart at the position he will leave behind.

Like the others quoted here, he avoids talking politics, but is horrified by what he sees as evil on both sides.Meanwhile, the music plays on. Rossini’s La Cenerentola is in repertory at the opera house; Monday’s concert at the Kolarac hall included a performance of a shockingly apposite work: Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, inspired by the bombing of Dresden by Allied forces during the Second World War, as well as by his own experience of the Leningrad siege in 1941. Next Friday, four new works composed by young Serbian women will be premiered by the Belgrade Philharmonic – Nato permitting, of course. Last week, leading lights of the Council of Europe gathered at the Barbican for a concert to celebrate their first 50 years How ironic. Let them consider these words from colleagues who were unable to attend..

SIOBHAN DAVIES COMPANY

OXFORD PLAYHOUSE
THINGS BEING relative, Siobhan Davies’s decision to create a full- evening work sounded momentous, where with other, brasher choreographers it would have seemed merely interesting. Had this quiet specialist of the 30-minute form, so subtle, so considered, so perfectionist in the way she sifts her material, suddenly and incredible gone wild? Of course not, even if that adjective formed half of the piece’s title.In fact, if my memory is correct, Wild Air is not the first long piece of her career, although it is the first for her decade-old company. Why did she want to make it? To meet the fresh challenge of sustaining her ideas and manipulating her momentum over a longer time-span. But as always her choreography meshes with the other stage components to produce a delicately calibrated, self-sufficient world, even if the interval arrives at an arbitrary moment (Henry Montes is just starting his solo) and by the second half I longed for some editing.Solos and ensembles form layers that often overlap, often fragment inside David Buckland’s futuristic setting of sliding corrugated panels.