the 30th Anniversary of the International Recognition of the Republic of Croatia and the establishment of the Diplomatic Relations with the Republic of Slovenia.

During more than a 50-year long career Radojka Šverko has received many awards and recognitions, both in Croatia and abroad. She has performed at a number of international festivals and stages, simultaneously building her career in Croatia. She has achieved success as a theatre and film actress, and gave her distinctive voice to several documentaries and animated films.She is also known for her diverse repertoire, which includes chansons, hits, jazz, pop, film and sacred music.

From the beginning of her career she had nurtured friendship with the Slovenian audience and Slovenian musicians, such as Dušan Velkaverh, Mojmir Sepe, Bojan Adamič, Jure Robežnik, Jože Privšek and Peter Ugrin.

In Ljubljana Radojka Šverko will be accompanied by a top music ensemble, under the direction of prof. Vladimir Babin. For the Slovenian audience Ms. Šverko has prepared a repertoire containing some of the most beautiful songs of her rich career, as well as world evergreens.
 

Folklore group COF – the Club of Optimistic Folklorists, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The jubilee performance is dedicated to the dance ethnologist Prof. Mirko Ramovš, the veteran folklore group COF’s long-standing expert advisor and friend.
The programme will be complemented and enriched by a family folk-music band, Volk Folk from Ilirska Bistrica, which have established themselves as one of the finest keepers of Slovenia’s folk singing and folk music traditions.
 

The Great He-Goat is a dark and mysterious journey inspired by the 18th-century Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya's Black Paintings. The Great He-Goat, one of his most famous works, featuring a goat in the guise of the devil overseeing a gathering of witches, is a dark satire on the condemnation of superstition and the witch trials during the Spanish Inquisition. Ten dancers, who mysteriously glide into the grotesque world of the painter's theme with their doubles, create an indescribable illusion with sensual, visual, rhythmic, tonal, physical and vocal expression that unfolds before the audience like a kind of ritual. The Great He-Goat thus becomes an apt metaphor for our time, in which the manipulative mind and the dominance of power still disintegrate our deluded everyday life.
 

Founded in August 1996, Gyeonggi Sinawi Orchestra (formerly Gyeonggi Provincial Orchestra) is an artistic group representing Gyeonggi-do and Korea.
It has consistently presented high-quality stages that creatively inherited and developed Korean traditional music.
The Gyeonggi Sinawi Orchestra has a Korean traditional orchestra, a vocal ensemble representing Gyeonggi folk songs, and a performance troupe that evokes the spirit of God. The orchestra produces a variety of contemporary creative music, traditional music, and popular music, as well as various planned performances such as Korean traditional music, dance music, and meditation concerts. In the 21st century, the orchestra devoted themselves to the goal of leaping beyond Gyeonggi-do and Korea to the rest of the world. The name “Gyeonggi Sinawi Orchestra” reflects a mission to create a new kind of Korean orchestra in the spirit of “sinawi,” a style of improvisation that has its roots in traditional Korean music.
Sinawi, sometimes spelled shinawi, is a traditional Korean music. It is performed improvisationally by a musical ensemble, and traditionally accompanies the rites of Korean shamanism. The style first emerged in the Chungcheong and Jeolla provinces, but is now widespread. The traditional sinawi ensemble followed the principle of sam-hyeon-yuk-gak (三絃六角), with two flutes, a haegeum, a daegeum, a janggu hourglass-drum, and a large buk drum. However, today other traditional Korean instruments such as the gayageum and geomungo are also often included.

The concert by vocalist, composer and singer-songwriter Haley Fohr, known by the stage name Circuit des Yeux, forms part of the Druga Godba Festival series dedicated to the world’s best female singers. 

As regards US’s art pop, it can undeniably be said that there hasn’t been a more formidable voice since Diamanda Galas. Fohr is most distinctly identified by her 4-octave voice and unique style of 12-string guitar. Her mysterious Jackie Lynn project landed her on the cover of Wire Magazine in August 2016. She has released several critically acclaimed albums. Her most recent album, -io, has garnered praise from the critics and enthusiastic response from an ever-growing audience. 

Before the pandemic cast its weather of mourning on the world, and before she began weaving together her sixth album as Circuit Des Yeux, -io, Haley Fohr found herself grieving a close friend. For a time, the loss severed her from her art. A singular, celebrated figure in the Chicago experimental music scene, known for her arresting voice and the transportive moods she grows around it, Fohr had kept a steady creative practice since she first began recording her own music as a teenager. Grief ruptured that foundation. 

Under lockdown, her typically collaborative songwriting practice became solitary. She wrote on piano and organ, instruments on a larger scale than her usual guitar that felt more "like a solid foundation you can stand on." Her lyrics kept returning to images of black holes and gravity, all-consuming phenomena that rend our common experience of physical reality. "I became obsessed with black holes, which is the ultimate gravitational pull," Fohr says. "It also makes such a synonymous metaphor to death. Things go in, they can only go one way. They go in and they never come out." From that colossal gateway, songs began to form. They followed the disintegration of the world as it stands, the hard-wrought rituals and habits that are already beginning to fracture under the pressures of climate catastrophe, as on "Vanishing," where Fohr sings "goodbye" to everything she can see and touch around her. They pinned down claustrophobic moods through the threatening whispers of "The Chase," and they shook them loose with sweeping vocal runs, like those that lattice the slow, enveloping "Walking Toward Winter" and pierce the melancholic "Stranger," a chilling piano-and-string composition that was recorded live in a single take. 

Working at home on her computer, Fohr wrote, arranged, and produced each note of -io. She wrote for a 23-piece orchestra, gathering strings, horns, and drums around her daring vocal melodies. She staged -io on a scale vaster than anything she'd recorded before, a scale that matched the enormity she'd weathered, big enough to hold the world in its tumult. 

Under COVID restrictions, Fohr could only record with six other players in the studio at a time. She and her collaborators – 13 renowned musicians from Chicago’s jazz, classical, and experimental scenes – built -io layer by layer, entwining its pain with the clear yearning that sparks at its dark heart. Horns cry out like terrified and distant voices from the dizzying waltz of "Neutron Star." Strings thrash against each other like sheets of rain amid "Vanishing's" apocalyptic thrum. Amid them, Fohr's voice rears in space, overdubbed to the point where it becomes an architecture of its own, at once the subject in the narrative and the surrounding environment. The effect is at once capacious and crushing, like being drawn into a gas giant. This is what happens when you take grief's smothering and render it in space: It expands. It becomes something you can traverse. That quiet, impossible feeling of loss can suddenly be crossed. The body moves through it. What once seemed to be an impenetrable collapse turns into a site of possibility. From the wreckage, something grows, and the ruin is no longer a ruin. In all its smouldering and all its weight, it is simply a place to begin.

In Ljubljana, Circuit des Yeux performs with a three-member band and special guests SGS (Slovenian String Sextet). The chamber ensemble Slovenski godalni sekstet (SGS) was formed in September 2017 and includes Ana Dolžan and Vid Sajovic on violin, Nejc Mikolič and Anuša Plesničar on viola and Izak Hudnik and Katarina Kozjek on cello. 
 

The breathtakingly beautiful and multi award-winning play Dead Man Comes for His Mistress is based on the eponymous folk song as well as Slovenian poet France Prešeren’s adaptation of Bűrger’s Lenore. While adopting the magical rhythm of folk tradition, the author, Svetlana Makarovič, tackles the narrative poem from different angles and offers a signature reworking. She introduces two protagonists, two Micka characters, who fight for dominance and survival. Moreover, there is also Sveti Tadej, an errand boy, a seer, a confession-taker. And two mothers. Micka’s and Mlinar’s. None of them was able to escape the sharp pen of Makarovič and the insightful direction of Jernej Lorenci. 

With his novella, A Christmas Carol, the great English novelist Charles Dickens created one of his most important works and a Christmas myth for the modern time. He first self-published it in 1843: it enjoyed instant success, becoming an engaging read for generations to come not only in England but all over the world. This is the first story in the history of literature that includes time travel and one of the most popular ghost stories ever. Today, the story is a peculiar phenomenon, traditionally revived all over the world over the festive season; the novella has been adapted to various media, including film and animation (over fifty adaptations to date), and has been published several times in Slovenian. 

A sparkling festive treat!

Exquisite Afro Soul, flavoured with Cape Verdean rhythms and melodies 

The Cape Verdean artist honed her vocal talents as a church singer. The unknown Elida won huge acclaim for her debut album and the song Nta Konsigui (2.7 million views on YouTube). On her second album, Kebrada (named for the village where she grew up), she asserts her African identity, seasoning her Cape Verdean beats – batuque, funaná, coladera and tabanka – with Latino energy. Her fiery temperament and joie de vivre do nothing to undermine the social criticism she expresses in her nostalgic ballads tinged with pop. Winner of the Prix Découvertes RFI in 2015, Elida Almeida has made a name for herself performing at world music venues in Europe, Africa and North America.
 

Turkey’s top music artist with one of the world’s most beautiful voices

The most prominent Turkish singer of our times, Aynur is a member of the Kurdish ethnic community. Her music is grounded in traditional Kurdish folk songs, with several of them being more than 300 years old. The singer gives them a fresh, contemporary makeover, her astonishing lyrics narrating stories about the life and suffering of Kurdish people. She sings in Turkish and Kurdish.

Aynur has collaborated with a range of acclaimed artists and bands, including world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Silk Road Ensemble, Kayhan Kalhor, Javier Limón, Kinan Azmeh, Mercan Dede, and Salman Gambarov, Cemil Qocgiri, Morgenland All Star Band, Nerderland Blazers Ensemble, and Sertab Erener. She has appeared in many documentary films, including “Istanbul Hatirasi / Crossing the Bridge” by Fatih Akin, and “The Music of Strangers”, a documentary by Morgan Neville about Yo-Yo Ma and Silk Road Ensemble.