Jelena Tomašević

Jelena Tomašević at the Beovizija 2008

Jelena Tomašević ( Serbian - Cyrillic Јелена Томашевић ; born November 1, 1983 in Negotin , Yugoslavia , now Serbia ) is a Serbian singer. She received numerous awards for her songs and represented Serbia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2008 in Belgrade with the song Oro .

Life

Jelena Tomašević graduated from high school in 2002 . In the same year she started studying at the Faculty of English Language at the University of Kragujevac .

Career as a singer

Childhood and youth

Jelena began to take part in the children's singing show Šarenijada in Kragujevac at the age of eight . This was her first public appearance, and even then she was able to cast a spell over people with her expressive voice. In 1994 she performed in front of a much larger audience at a children's festival .

Jelena Tomašević was a member of the Abrašević folklore club for many years and often gained experience at international events.

In 2002 she won the 3K Dur talent competition and that same year performed at the Sunflower Festival in Zrenjanin. From then on she took part in various international festivals in the Czech Republic , Belarus and Bulgaria .

She was a frequent guest on the RTS television program Leti, leti, pesmo moja mila , in which old Serbian folk songs are presented. Usually only well-known and respected artists interpreted the traditional songs there, but Jelena was invited when she was still little known.

Cooperation with Željko Joksimović

In 2004 she took part in the Beovizija singing competition for the first time , where she could finally introduce herself to a wider audience. She sang the vocal part in the piece Gde si bilo, jare moje for the ethno-pop group Biber . This is how Željko Joksimović became aware of them. He composed the song Jutro (morning hour) for Jelena, which she interpreted at the Serbian Eurovision preliminary decision Beovizija 2005. She was able to decide this for herself with ease. In the joint final with the Montenegrin interpreters, however, the group No Name, favored by Montenegro, finally won the preliminary decision.

She sang at the opening ceremony of the 2005 European Basketball Championship in Serbia. She also sang some of the titles for the soundtrack for the film Ivkova slava (2005).

Eurovision Song Contest 2008

In 2007 she signed a record deal with Minacord . In 2008 Željko Joksimović composed another song for her. With the song Oro she won Serbia's national preliminary decision for the Eurovision Song Contest 2008 in Belgrade, where she came in sixth place. On Tomašević's initiative, Oro was accompanied by Bora Dugić on the Frula .

The song Oro has also been recorded in other languages, including Spanish (Adios amor) , Greek (Έλα αγάπη (Ela agapi)) and Portuguese (Minha dor) . Versions in Russian , Hebrew and Finnish were also planned . The corresponding texts were organized by the local Eurovision fan club OGAE Serbia , which had already organized other language versions for the Serbian contribution Molitva from 2007. However, due to time constraints, these versions were not used. An English version was recorded but not published because, according to Tomašević, it sounds too "cool" and does not reflect the actual emotion of the original version.

Web links

Commons : Jelena Tomašević  - collection of images

• * Official website
• Portrait on the homepage of the Serbian radio and television station RTS, April 29, 2008 (Serbian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.