Goran Bregovic in Preveza and Crete with his boisterous Wedding and Funeral Band
One of the most popular foreign musicians working in Greece, Goran Bregovic, will be giving two concerts over the next few days: The first is on Friday at the Municipal Garden Theater in Preveza, northwestern Greece, before heading for the Pancretan Stadium in Iraklion, Crete, on August 21. The musician will be appearing with his Wedding and Funeral Band, performing select pieces from his extensive repertoire of compositions for film scores and other recordings. The Preveza concert will open with the Greek Darnakes band, which was awarded third prize at the Ljubljana International Ethnic Music Festival. In Crete, Bregovic will be joined by one of the island’s most popular traditional musicians, Psarantonis, whose compositions for the lyre have brought the old-fashioned musical instrument renewed popularity among young Greeks. Bregovic was born in Sarajevo to a Serbian mother and Croat father. During his teenage years, he led a number of bands and later met filmmaker Emir Kusturica, at the time a nascent auteur and bassist in a rock group. Bregovic penned the scores to two of Kusturica’s greatest screen hits, «The Time of the Gypsies» and «Arizona Dream,» both of which were extremely popular in Greece.
