The “Senza basso” concert at the 8th Early Music Days in Rijeka brings a rare encounter between the Baroque violin and the traverso
At the Sugar Palace of the City Museum of Rijeka on Sunday, May 3, 2026, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., the concert “Senza basso” will be held, one of the programs of the 8th Early Music Days in Rijeka. At the center of the evening will be Slovenian Baroque violinist of international career Mojca Jerman and flautist Metod Sironić, who will perform in a chamber formation without the usual support of basso continuo. Such a choice is not only a programmatic particularity, but also an interpretative challenge: two treble instruments, the Baroque violin and the traverso, take full responsibility for the melodic, rhetorical and dramaturgical flow of the concert, without a harpsichord, cello or viola da gamba as a harmonic support.
The concert takes place in the Art Quarter “Benčić”, in the space of the Sugar Palace, one of Rijeka’s most recognizable restored cultural points. For visitors coming to the concert or planning a cultural stay in the city,
accommodation offers in Rijeka are also relevant, especially because of the location of the Sugar Palace within the wider city cultural complex, which in recent years has increasingly strongly connected museum, concert and public content. Admission to the concert is free, and the organizer is the Corona laurea Lovran Association, with the support of the City of Rijeka and Primorje-Gorski Kotar County.
A program without basso continuo as a different view of Baroque chamber music
The title “Senza basso” directly points to what makes this concert different from usual Baroque chamber evenings. In the music of the 17th and 18th centuries, basso continuo was most often the foundation of the ensemble: the line performed by bass instruments and a harmonic instrument such as the harpsichord gave compositions structure, pulse and harmonic security. In the program brought by Mojca Jerman and Metod Sironić, such a foundation is intentionally omitted, so the sound space narrows to the dialogue of two high-register instruments. This shifts the emphasis to line, phrase, breath, articulation and the performers’ ability to build a convincing musical architecture from two-part writing.
The program announcement emphasizes that original sonatas and solo fantasies by Georg Philipp Telemann will be performed, a composer whose oeuvre is especially important for understanding Baroque music beyond the great, often repeated canonical titles. Telemann wrote with an exceptional feeling for instrumental character, and his fantasies and sonatas require from performers not only technical readiness but also knowledge of the stylistic idioms of the time. In such a repertoire, ornamentation is not a decoration added from the outside, but part of musical speech; rhythm is not a mechanical measure, but a rhetorical tool; and the phrase is shaped similarly to a sentence in speech.
The French part of the program brings a sonata in E minor from opus 51 by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier. He was a French Baroque composer who in his time was known for a broad and varied oeuvre, including chamber music and stage works. In the context of the “Senza basso” concert, Boismortier’s music opens a space for a different kind of elegance: one that relies on clarity, gracefulness and refined communication among the performers. In the same French block of the program there will also be arrangements of well-known melodies of that time by Michel Blavet, a flute virtuoso connected with the musical life of the court of Louis XV. Thus the program does not remain closed in an academic reconstruction of the repertoire, but reminds us that many Baroque compositions lived in a dynamic relationship with the audience, fashion, dance and the popular melodies of their era.
The evening will end with the Duo in E minor by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a composer who stands at the transition between late Baroque and early Classicism. His music is often described through expressiveness, sudden changes of mood, sensitivity of phrasing and rhetorical tension that demands high concentration from performers. In the finale of the program, such a choice has a clear dramaturgical function: after Telemann’s inventiveness, French elegance and Blavet’s virtuosic tradition, C. P. E. Bach brings a musical language in which Baroque discipline opens toward the new, more sensitive expression of the 18th century.
Mojca Jerman again at the Rijeka festival
Mojca Jerman has already presented herself to the Rijeka festival audience at the 7th Early Music Days, when she performed as a guest with the Corrente trio. This year’s return brings her a different role: instead of performing with an ensemble with continuo, she appears in a more intimate and stripped-down format in which the Baroque violin must carry both the melodic line and part of the dramaturgical tension of the program. Such a performance particularly suits musicians who deal with historically informed performance, because it requires reliance on stylistic knowledge, but also on the ability to shape the musical sentence spontaneously.
According to available biographical data, Mojca Jerman graduated in modern violin from the Academy of Music in Ljubljana, and continued her specialization in Baroque violin at the G. B. Martini Conservatory in Bologna, in the class of Enrico Gatti, where she graduated with honors. In 2021 she won the Premio Nazionale delle Arti in the early music category, a competition that includes Italian conservatories. After that recognition she also appeared on Italian television RAI 1 and held solo recitals, including a performance at the Biblioteca Manfrediana in Faenza.
Her artistic activity extends through a series of ensembles and projects. She has collaborated with ensembles and orchestras such as Insula Orchestra, Anima Eterna, Frau Musika and Musica Cubicularis, and in chamber formations she has performed throughout Europe and in Latin America. The Nocturnalia ensemble is especially important, a group in which she performs on historical violin and which is included in international platforms dedicated to young early-music ensembles. According to data from the EEEmerging+ program, Nocturnalia was selected for the European scheme for 2026 and 2027, which confirms the ensemble’s international development and its visibility in the field of historically informed performance.
In an interpretative sense, Jerman belongs to a generation of musicians that does not view early music as a museum artifact, but as a living repertoire. This is especially important in the “Senza basso” program, where the two instrumental lines are exposed without the safety net of a larger ensemble. The audience will be able to hear how the Baroque violin, in dialogue with the traverso, can at the same time be singing, rhythmically precise, rhetorically clear and sonically adaptable.
Metod Sironić as performer, pedagogue and one of the initiators of the festival
Metod Sironić is one of the key figures of the Early Music Days in Rijeka, not only as a performer but also as one of the initiators of the festival. He graduated in the class of the French flautist and pedagogue Pierre-Yves Artaud in 2002, and then continued postgraduate flute studies at the École Normale de Musique in Paris and chamber music in the class of Nina Patarčec. In Paris he perfected his skills as a scholarship holder of the French Government and the Zaleski Stichting and Albert Roussel foundations, after which he developed activity that connects the concert, pedagogical and publishing fields.
As a flute professor he works at the Ivan Matetić Ronjgov Music School in Rijeka, holds seminars abroad and participates in jury work at international competitions. He has performed in important concert spaces and at festivals, among which the Lisinski halls, the Croatian Music Institute, theaters in Rijeka, Split and Zagreb, the Osor Musical Evenings, Concerts in the Euphrasian Basilica and Varaždin Baroque Evenings stand out. In the period from 2015 to 2018 he also collaborated with the Opera Orchestra of the Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc as an external associate in the position of first solo flute.
In recent years, Sironić has strongly profiled himself in the field of the traverso, the Baroque transverse flute, for which he perfected his skills with Marten Root, Benedek Csalog, Marcello Gatti and Marc Hantaï. Since 2018 he has been a member of the Croatian Baroque Ensemble in the position of second transverse flute, where he collaborates with prominent musicians from the field of early music. His work also includes the founding of the Trio Corrente and RiBaSol – the Rijeka Baroque Soloists, an ensemble connected with the Early Music Days festival in Rijeka.
Sironić’s role in the “Senza basso” concert is especially interesting because the traverso is not only a historical version of the modern flute. Its sound, articulation and dynamic range are shaped differently, with greater emphasis on color, breath and the finesse of transitions among registers. In combination with the Baroque violin, such an instrument can create an exceptionally subtle sonic relationship, but it also requires constant attention in intonation and phrasing. Precisely for this reason, a program without basso continuo is not merely a curiosity, but a serious test of chamber communication.
Early Music Days as a festival that develops Rijeka’s scene of historically informed performance
The Early Music Days in Rijeka were launched in 2018, and are connected with the work of the Corona laurea Lovran Association and the artistic initiative of Jelena Tihomirović and Metod Sironić. Over the years the festival has developed through different spaces and formats, from church settings to museum halls, and its emphasis is on the repertoire of the Renaissance, Baroque and early Classicism, performed on historical instruments or in the spirit of historically informed interpretation. Such an approach does not imply a mechanical imitation of the past, but an exploration of the way in which the music of that period can be convincingly conveyed to today’s audience.
According to earlier statements by the organizers and festival announcements, the Early Music Days in Rijeka in previous editions gathered artists from Croatia and abroad and brought programs of various formations, from trios and smaller ensembles to expanded festival projects. At the 8th edition, the concert “Apollo’s Lyre” by Ensemble Hyacinthus, performed in the Sugar Palace, has already stood out, showing the festival’s ambition to present projects of international reach and more complex stage concepts to the local scene. In that sequence, “Senza basso” acts as a chamber counterpoint: a smaller format, but high interpretative demands.
For the development of such a festival, the accessibility of the program is also important. Free admission opens space for an audience that may not be regularly connected with early-music concerts, and the venue in the Sugar Palace additionally connects music with the cultural history of the city. In that sense, the concert is not an isolated event, but part of a broader process in which the Art Quarter “Benčić” is increasingly profiling itself as a cultural zone. Visitors who want to connect the concert with a tour of the city can consider
accommodation near the Sugar Palace, especially if they are planning several cultural contents during the same weekend.
The Sugar Palace as a stage of cultural memory
The Sugar Palace, today part of the City Museum of Rijeka, is not a neutral concert backdrop. It is a restored late-Baroque palace of the former Rijeka Sugar Refinery, a building that changed functions over the centuries and reflected important layers of Rijeka’s economic, industrial and urban history. According to data from the City Museum of Rijeka, the palace is connected with the history of the sugar refinery, the later tobacco factory and the complex that after the Second World War became known as the Rikard Benčić Motor Factory. Its restoration and conversion into a museum space are among the most visible cultural interventions in the former industrial complex.
Such an environment has special weight for early music. Baroque architecture and the music of the 18th century do not meet here as décor and sound, but as two different traces of historical memory. A concert of Telemann, Boismortier, Blavet and C. P. E. Bach in the space of the Sugar Palace can also be read as a dialogue between European musical heritage and local urban history. It is not a large stage spectacle, but a program that counts on concentrated listening and on closeness between performers and audience.
The Art Quarter “Benčić” has in recent years gained an important place in Rijeka’s cultural life, and the Sugar Palace within that complex functions as a space that connects the permanent museum display, the history of industrial heritage and contemporary cultural events. For that reason, the “Senza basso” concert has an additional dimension: the audience does not come only to a recital of two musicians, but enters a space in which cultural content is already inscribed in the architecture and memory of the place. For those who connect the concert with a weekend visit to the city, a practical choice may be
accommodation for visitors to the Early Music Days in Rijeka.
Why this kind of program is important for the audience
The “Senza basso” program provides an opportunity to hear early music outside the usual expectation of a sumptuous Baroque sound. When basso continuo is absent, the layer that often gives the audience a sense of harmonic fullness and stability disappears. Instead, the listener is directed toward details: how the violin answers the flute, how the flute takes over or comments on a motif, how tension is built in the silence between phrases and how the performers maintain the shape of the composition without a clear bass foundation. Such music asks for attention, but in return offers a more precise insight into the chamber intelligence of the Baroque repertoire.
Concerts like this are important also because they expand the idea of the Baroque. Instead of reducing that period to a few best-known composer names and always the same representative forms, the program introduces less common combinations and repertoire connections. Telemann, Boismortier, Blavet and C. P. E. Bach belong to different cultural environments and aesthetics, but in this program they are connected by sensitivity to instrumental speech. The Baroque violin and the traverso do not compete in sonic power, but build a space of nuances.
For the festival context, it is especially valuable that the concert relies on artists who are not only performers, but also researchers of historical practice. Mojca Jerman and Metod Sironić belong to musicians who approach the repertoire through the study of sources, instruments, styles and performance conventions, but the final result must be alive in concert. Therein lies the fundamental attraction of early music: it relies on the past, but exists only in the moment of performance. The “Senza basso” concert will therefore, on May 3 at the Sugar Palace, offer a dense, chamber and stylistically demanding evening in which historical instruments are not presented as museum objects, but as means of contemporary musical conversation.
Sources:- Torpedo Media – announcement and report from the 8th Early Music Days and announcement of the “Senza basso” concert in the Sugar Palace (link)- Torpedo Media – announcement of the program of the 8th Early Music Days in Rijeka and the Ensemble Hyacinthus concert at the City Museum of Rijeka (link)- Novi list – conversation and context about the Early Music Days in Rijeka, the Corona laurea Lovran Association and the development of festival ensembles (link)- Jasmina Črnčič / Phylomena – biographical data on Mojca Jerman, education, the Premio Nazionale delle Arti award and ensembles with which she collaborates (link)- EEEmerging+ – data on the Nocturnalia ensemble, the ensemble’s line-up and its inclusion in the European scheme for 2026 and 2027 (link)- City Museum of Rijeka – history of the Sugar Refinery Palace and its role in the complex of the former Sugar Refinery, Tobacco Factory and Rikard Benčić Motor Factory (link)- Visit Rijeka – data on the Sugar Palace, the permanent display of the City Museum of Rijeka and the cultural-historical context of the location (link)
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