Summer Concert David Štrbac: Devenir (album presentation)

David Štrbac

David Štrbac is a Serbian/Spanish guitarist, and was born on 4. May 1998 in Belgrade.

He began his musical training at the music school in Belgrade in 2007.

He is currently studying at the renowned University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna in the class of the famous guitarist and educator Alvaro Pierri.

David has been an active concert artist since he was very young and held his first solo concert in Belgrade, Serbia in 2010 at the age of 12.

Since then he has given solo concerts in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and England and received great reviews and reactions from the audience.

In 2018 he was awarded by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts for the most successful concert of the concert season 2017/2018.

He has won a number of international and Republican first prizes in competitions for young guitarists, including:

“Tremolo International Guitar Festival”, Skopje, Macedonia (2020)

Sinaia Guitar Festival, Sinaia, Romania (2015),

“Giovani Chitarristi”, Mottola, Italy (2013),

Guitar Art Festival, Belgrade, Serbia (2013)

“Vojvodina Classic Guitar Festival”, Novi Sad, Serbia (2012)

“Republic Competition of Serbia”, (I – 2012, 2014, 2016).

Devenir takes its name from a Spanish verb meaning “becoming,” but also suggesting a natural, unforced transformation. In this spirit, David Strbac presents a program shaped by the quiet evolution of his early adult years and by a lifelong pull toward the music of Spain.

His connection to this music began in his teens, long before he understood its roots. He listened to Spanish guitar obsessively, and by the time he moved from Belgrade to Vienna, this fascination had become so defining that his university professor jokingly called him “Mr. Spain.” Only later did he discover the deeper reason behind this attraction: his ancestors on his mother’s side were Spanish, a heritage that had been distant during his upbringing in Serbia. The music became a way of reaching toward something that had always been part of him, even if he did not yet know why.

Born in Belgrade and now based in Vienna, he left his hometown nearly a decade ago to begin a new life abroad. The years that followed were marked by study, travel, concerts, the formation of chamber projects, and the gradual shaping of the repertoire presented here. Beyond music, he navigated relationships through both joy and sorrow, forged enduring friendships, and embraced experiences he never anticipated. Each of these moments subtly reshaped his perspective.

This repertoire grew organically out of these experiences. Recorded intermittently throughout the past decade, each piece was captured whenever life allowed – often just after events that would later reveal themselves as pivotal.

Devenir reflects this period without dramatizing it; instead, it offers a clear and honest look at the process of growing into oneself. Featuring the fire and edge of flamenco-inspired works by Falla, Turina, and Rodrigo, alongside the lyrical gentleness of composers such as Eduardo de la Maza, these pieces serve as musical traces of the places, people, and turning points that shaped him.

In concert, the program invites the audience into this landscape of transformation – an intimate collection of moments that, taken together, reveal an artist unmistakably coming into his own.