Vasko Dukovski at St Sophia in Ohrid on August 21 - the Juilliard clarinettist returns to where he started 30 years ago

In 1996 a boy from the Ohrid music school played his first notes beneath the stone vault of St Sophia. Thirty years later, Vasko Dukovski returns to the same church as a clarinettist with an international career. The concert "Pearls, Frescoes, Filigree" is on August 21 at 20:00, and a ticket costs 1,000 denars.

The road between those two performances runs through Interlochen and Juilliard, where Dukovski took his bachelor's and master's degrees in the class of Charles Neidich and Ayako Oshima. Today he is professor of clarinet at the Nanjing University of the Arts and lives in Shanghai. He has premiered more than 300 new works and worked with composers of the order of John Adams, Helmut Lachenmann, Du Yun, Huang Ruo and John Corigliano. With the Grneta Ensemble he won first prize at the Arriaga chamber competition in 2010, and in 2015 he was among the recipients of the "40 under 40 successful Macedonians" recognition.

He does not come to Ohrid alone. On stage will be pianist Shunyin Wang and clarinettist Yi Yang Li as special guest. Dukovski also fronts the world music quartet Tavche Gravche, which explains why his programmes rarely stay locked inside one tradition. Balkan folk material and contemporary classical music share the same stage with him.

St Sophia has an acoustic that chooses what it will forgive. The clarinet is an instrument that architecture carries well, and that is exactly why the choice of space is not decorative. Tickets are available through karti.com.mk, and the church's capacity is small by nature, not by the organiser's decision.