Severina: Dora As Folklore Exhibition

As for the Gazette becoming Severina's press clippings service for the blogosphere, it turns out that she effectively already has one. And she's had much more to say to Grazia magazine about her staging:

'Unfortunately, I'm only allowed another five musicians on stage with me. But there'll be a ljerica player anyway - that's an autochthonous instrument, like the gusle, but it has two strings. It's played around Dubrovnik and Lika. Stjepan Večković plays the ljerica from the heart - it was a pleasure to record that. First he took out a gajda, then a mijeh, but I didn't like it, but I'd never heard a ljerica. In the song he plays dvojnice - a double wooden flute [frula].* And the Matić brothers, who otherwise sing at weddings and nobody apart from them could sing that.

'But in that song I've somehow joined Split and Zagora, thrown in some ojkavian singing from Drniš, rere from Sinj, which actually got its name from the Split-Sinj train, and is similar to ganga and šijavica from Čavoglave...'

Also via 1severina1: Moja štikla's composer Boris Novković, interviewed on HR2 today, confessed to nervousness at yesterday's rehearsal at how well his combination of 'this ojkavica, ganga, linđo and folklore' would come together. (Extremely well, apparently.)

Novković gave his reaction to the ongoing Moja-štikla-in-ekavian debate:

'There were nerves about those incorrect articles in the media, we were particularly insulted by the articles about ekavian when in fact the lyric is in ikavian. [Thought so!] [...] Some people laughed at what was written in the papers about ekavian because they saw that in fact it was real CROATIAN FOLKLORE.'

Novković's involvement with Moja štikla is almost more interesting than Severina's, or even Bregović's. Unlike Seve and Brega, Novković has never been known for performing anything resembling newly-composed folk music - except for his 2005 song Vukovi umiru sami (also featuring Večković and his bagpipes), which represented Croatia at Eurovision and led one journalist from Novi list to comment that 'Željko Joksimović really won Dora'.

Tonči Huljić's reputation as an entrepreneur of musical exoticism is well-established; these days, however, it seems he has competition.

* Otherwise known as 'the thing Željko Joksimović played on Lane moje', needless to say.