Vesna Pisarović at Trsat Castle in Rijeka on August 28 - the pop star who walked away at the top and came back as a jazz singer

Vesna Pisarović performs on August 28 in Nugent Park, part of Trsat Castle in Rijeka, in the summer programme „Ljeto na gradini”. The concert starts at 21:45, doors from 20:45, and the advance ticket costs 20 euros, around 1,230 denars.

Pisarović is one of those pop stars who left the circuit exactly when they were at the top. In 2002 she won Dora with the song „Sasvim sigurna” and represented Croatia at Eurovision in Tallinn, where the English version „Everything I Want” took eleventh place. The decision to sing in English was made by the audience, not by her - she herself was closer to the Croatian version, and parts of the Eurovision audience still claim that with the original she would have made the top five.

What followed is more interesting than Eurovision itself. After a run of hits and a successful start to a singer-songwriter career, Pisarović turned to jazz. She was absent from Croatia for a whole decade, until 2017, when an album of reworked old Yugoslav hits drew attention again. It is rare for someone to leave the pop scene deliberately, let ten years pass, and then come back without having to explain why.

Trsat Castle is a medieval fortress above Rijeka, and Nugent Park is its open-air section with a view over the Kvarner gulf. Tickets are via entrio.hr, and the following evening, on August 29, Bux Cassidy plays the same location.