Having been crowned Olympic tennis champion last week in Paris, Novak Djokovic went to spend a few days of vacation in Croatia where Julian Rachlin gave a surprise recital in his honor. The opportunity for the great champion to improvise a little musical duet with the Austrian violinist.
When asked what instruments to compare the best tennis players in the world to, Novak Djokovic replied: “Roger is a violin, for Rafael it would be something energetic, say an electric guitar or drums, for me the saxophone“And yet it is indeed the violin that sticks most to the Serbian champion’s tennis shoes.
Already in June at the French Open, a month later at Wimbledon and then during the Olympic tournament at the Roland Garros stadium, which he won in the final against the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, Nole had mimed the gesture of a violinist with his racket, a nod to his daughter Tara, 6 years old, who studies the violin. We also remember the concert given by his friend and compatriot Nemanja Radulović at the opening of the charity tournament organized in Belgrade by the Serbian player in 2020.
Novak Djokovic accompanied Julian Rachlin in an excerpt from Carmen
Barely back home, with his gold medal in his pocket, Novak Djokovic and his family went to rest on the Croatian island of Vrnik, on the Adriatic coast. And it is in this little sunny paradise that the violinist Julian Rachlin and his partner the violist Sarah McElravy, engaged in a festival in Dubrovnik, decided to invite the Olympic champion to a concert, improvised in his honor in a church.
At the end of the recital, in front of the cameras, Novak Djokovic could not resist borrowing Sarah McElravy’s instrument, a 1785 viola by the Cremonese luthier Lorenzo Storioni, to play a duet with Julian Rachlin an excerpt from the habanera of the Carmen by Georges Bizet.
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In the video posted on Instagram, it seems obvious that the Serbian player is much more gifted with a racket in his hand. Just like his former best opponent Roger Federer, who we saw massacre the strings of a violin in a clip to promote the 75th anniversary of the Lucerne festival in 2013. Which does not prevent the former Swiss world number one from being the idol of Anne-Sophie Mutter with whom he has still not played a duet… neither in tennis nor on the violin.
Philippe Gault
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