Premil Petrović is the initiator and artistic director of the No Borders Orchestra. He studied conducting at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin, where he was awarded the Heinrich Böll scholarship as well as the prestigious Musik Theater Heute scholarship of the Akademie der Deutschen Bank. In 1996, he founded the music theatre Cinema REX, one of Belgrade’s most important and politically engaged venues during the 1990s. He currently lives in Berlin, conducts orchestras worldwide and appears at international festivals. Premil Petrović’s repertoire includes historical interpretations of Classical and Romantic works, as well as early and contemporary music, spanning both the operatic and symphonic repertoires. He has been awarded the Hanns-Eisler-Award in Berlin for his achievements in the field of contemporary music. He frequently conducts experimental musical theatre projects and for Bruce LeBruce’s film Pierrot Lunaire, which won a Teddy award at the 2014 Berlinale, he recorded a new performance of Schoenberg’s milestone work.
Premil Petrović enjoys a particularly successful collaboration with Isidora Žebeljan, one of the leading composers in Serbia, and conducted the premiere of her opera at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, at Settimana musicale in Italy and at the Zagreb Music Biennale. With director Brett Baily, he took part in a new post-colonial production of Verdi’s opera Macbeth in an arrangement by Fabrizio Cassoli in Cape Town, South Africa. The production subsequently received several critically acclaimed performances at some of Europe’s leading festivals, including Wiener Festwochen, Festival d´Automne in Paris, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Operadagen in Rotterdam, Theaterformen in Braunschweig and at the Barbican in London, with additional performances in Hamburg, Lisbon, Strasbourg and Toulouse.
In addition to conducting numerous orchestras in Europe, Premil Petrović has led the philharmonic orchestras of Cape Town and Auckland, opera productions in Vancouver and Philadelphia, and the Philharmonic Orchestra at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, among other ensembles. His first recording with the No Borders Orchestra was released in 2015 on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
