Milica Pap

Biography

She is a Balkan pianist and music teacher, who has recently started to build a global reputation, coming from a strong musical background.

Her father Ljudevit Pap (or Lajos Papp to use the Magyar (Hungarian) spelling) was a well-known violinist and professor of music at the University of Belgrade. He was a founder member of the Association of Serbian Musicians as well as being first violinist and leader of the Belgrade Symphony Orchestra and the Sarajevo Radio Orchestra. He is also credited with forming the first professional string quartet in Sarajevo. Unfortunately, he died when Pap was only 14.

Her mother is the Serbian-Montenegran pianist Angelina Bojovic, who still teaches at the Music Academy in Sarajevo. Her many talented pupils from around the world include the pianists M. Karacic (USA), B. Hrovat (Canada), M. Olenjuk (Germany)and S. Kulenovic (Slovenia). Her uncle is a violinist and conductor in Luxembourg and her cousin the Serbian percussionist A. Radulovic.

By the age of 10 Pap could play works by nearly all the leading composers and gave her first public recital when she was just 14. The Boznian-Herzgovinian authorities awarded her a scholarship to the faculty of music at Belgrade University in 1991, when she came first in the entrance exams that year at the age of 17. While there, she won numerous prizes and competitions, notably the Olga Mihajlovic Prize for best pianist in the university and the Radmila Djordjevic Prize for best piano accompanist. She also won several competitions and prizes during this time, of which the Petar Konjovic Prize pleased her most.

Pap was fortunate to study under a series of leading pianists and teachers, including A.Valdma, N. LJ. Starkman, S. Bogino, V. Ogarkov, S. Dorensky, L. Istvan, I. Khudolei, Y. Kot, I. Alekseyhuk, R. Kehrer, D. Anderson, P. Scheyder, L. Pogorelich and D. Protopopescu. This led to her being given a teaching post at the university at the age of 21, and in 1997 she became a professor of music there, specialising in piano, chamber music and accompaniment. By 2000 she also held a professorship at the Sarajevo Music Academy.

The major Russian piano composers feature strongly in her performing repertoire, especially Mussorgsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. Indeed, in 2003 at the meeting of the EPTA (European piano teachers association) she was invited to play Rachmaninov's second concerto with the Belgrade Symphony Orchestra. This led to a scholarship offer at the Luxembourg Conservatoire for one year which she took up and during which she was awarded the " Victor Fenigstein " prize for outstanding talent. She graduated there with a Diplôme Supérieur de Piano studying under professor S. Bausch and gained first prize for harmony, counterpoint, fugue and composition under professor A. Mullenbach.

By this time Pap Pap was playing in several European countries, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, Hungary, Luxembourg and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In most of these she was in great demand at music festivals. But her musical talents did not stop with the piano. Her mastery of accompaniment led her to be invited to join the Sarajevo Opera as a voice and lyric coach, in which role she helped in productions of Der Fledermaus, Rigoletto,and La Bohème as well as some Slavonic operas.

As her reputation grew, Pap served as head of the piano department at the Sarajevo Music Academy (2005/06) and was given a visiting professorship at Sarajevo University in 2006. She accepted in 2007 to be in charge of European reform of education in her university (Bologna Process).

Since September 2008 she has lived in France sharing her time between Nantes and Paris . In the former city she has already built a reputation as a teacher and vocal accompanist while also giving recitals. In Paris her work has centred round her ambition to study the work and set up of the world famous Paris Conservatoire with the hope of one day establishing a similar institution in Sarajevo. French musicians and musicologists have received her enthusiastically and admire her plans.

However, like so many Yugoslavians born before the Balkan conflicts of the last decade, her career has been hampered and her life scarred by the misfortunes of war. For four years when she was in Belgrade she never set eyes on her mother and was basically a stateless person with no passport who could not travel anywhere. These were the years when most young virtuosi would be making their mark on the world stage. In addition this experience made her very sympathetic to ethnic minorities suffering from persecution as her own family came from several different ethnic groups. In 1998 she even tried, with help from UNESCO, to start a project called "Music without Frontiers" to unite the Balkan peoples, but so far it has proved politically impractical. However it is still an ambition she wants to fulfill someday.

Pap's extensive repertoire, superb technique and deep knowledge of music have at last brought her to the attention of a much wider audience, and it is to be hoped that she will soon take her rightful place in the modern world of classical music as one of the greatest pianists of her generation. The recent uploading on YouTube of her recital of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition has caused many music critics to start asking who she is and where such a talent has been hiding for so long.