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Music review: Goran Bregovic, Royal Festival Hall
Goran Bregovic’s Weddings and Funerals Orchestra produce a gloriously exuberant Balkans sound which is taking the world by storm

THE ORIGINS of Goran Bregovic’s music are in the Roma brass bands who combine the scales and melodic structures of their Rajasthani roots with the military brass traditions of the Ottoman Empire and the Slavic culture of the former Yugoslavia, taking in Jewish and Arabic influences along the way.

Unique and with universal appeal, it is a living, breathing testimony to the beauty of cultural interaction and evolution. And no one has done more to bring it to global attention than Mr Bregovic.

His latest project Three Letters from Sarajevo unpicks three specific elements that make up the city’s musical culture — Jewish, Islamic and Christian — and, through a focus on their different styles of violin playing, expands them out to their full glory, before recombining them in a glorious synthesis. Marxist musicology at its finest.

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