Within a decade after the death of the long time president Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) nationalistic tensions inside this multi-ethnic and multi-cultural state grew enormously and, in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia broke apart with an outburst of violence, a bitter war in Bosnia and ethnic cleansing.
The NBO unites around fifty musicians from almost all music centers in the former Yugoslavia, from Belgrade, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Skopje, Priština and Novi Sad.
Two days later, the orchestra inaugurated the Belgrade Music Festival with the same program, just adding Beethovens Fifth Piano Concerto with Hinrich Alpers as soloist.
Public and critics were stunned, the brand-new orchestra performed as if it had been in existence for decades: "On a specially arranged stage, in a whirlpool of electricity, in the audience vibrating with different generations and sensibilities, gathered for the event as if from an unknown planet and deeply immerged in expecting miracles of sounds, we finally met the No Borders Orchestra," wrote Zorica Kojić of the daily newspaper, Danas.
[2] The orchestra's 2013 season started on March 16 at the Novi Sad Synagogue with Žebeljans The Horses of Saint Mark, followed by an orchestral version of Albéniz' Iberia with soloist Edin Karamazov (guitar) and, again, Kodály.
Stanko Madic, the first violin player of the orchestra, noted of their performance in Trebinje: In October the same year, the ensemble played Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and again Kodály's Dances of Galánta at the Cathedral of Saint Mother Teresa in Pristina.
[5] The tour went on to Montpellier, the German Festival Theaterformen in Braunschweig, the Barbican Centre in London, Lisbon, Catalan Gerona, as well as to the French cities of Tarbes, Toulouse and Strasbourg.