The concert season of this year’s, 69th Dubrovnik Summer Festival will begin on July 19, with a performance at the Rector’s Palace Atrium by an award-winning Japanese cellist, 24-year-old Yuya Okamoto, accompanied on the piano by Robert Kulek.

Dubrovnik Summer Festival was founded in 1950 as an attempt to revive the renaissance and baroque tradition of Dubrovnik as one of intellectual and creative centres of Croatia. Many great names of Croatian theatre and literature lived and created precisely in this southern Dalmatian city.

The festival takes place every year between July 10 and August 25, and features classical music, theatre, opera, and dance performances at site-specific venues around the city, bringing to life the spirit of drama and music Dubrovnik is known for.

It is one of the most prestigious summer festivals of this kind in Croatia, and organisers have said that some 60,000 people are expected to visit the festival this year.

For Yuya Okamoto, winner of Second Prize (Eugène Ysaÿe Prize) in the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition 2017 in Belgium, this is a first visit to Croatia.

“I am very grateful that this award gave me the opportunity to perform all over the world, as well as at the 69th Dubrovnik Summer Festival. My goal is always the same: I just want to enjoy the music,” Okamoto said, adding he was looking forward to the concert.

Robert Kulek, a Latvian-born American, has performed with some of the most renowned classical performers such as Arabella Steinbacher, Daniel Mueller-Schott, and Augustin Hadelich.

The two will perform works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Sergei Prokofiev, Robert Schumann, and others, the press release from the organisers said.

Tickets for this event, as well as other festival performances, are available on the festival’s website.