Mediterraneo, that is the title accordionist Nihad Hrustanbegović gave to his latest cd, full of his own music inspired by the Dalmatian – Adriatic coasts, nearby and more distant countries that influenced the composer's life. Beautiful rugged beaches, rich in nature and ancient settlements that were inhabited long before the ancient Greeks, Romans, Illyrians, Celts and other more or less vanished peoples, adorn the shores of the Adriatic Sea.
Such an area, bursting with history, colored with melancholy, romanticism, hard labor, delicious food, breathtaking coasts, cities and villages has inspired many artists and continues to enchant them. Today it also inspires composer and accordionist Nihad Hrustanbegović. He dreams away with his accordion, with notes marked by the Balkans or not. But be careful, the man was also traveling in Italy, France and more places. One of his home bases is Amsterdam where he came in his young years and the Netherlands was also the country where he broke through as an accordionist and composer.
"The compositions are largely inspired by travels in 2024. Split, Ancona, Genua, San Remo, Monaco, Antibes, Brač, Hvar and Dubrovnik. In addition to the Mediterranean influences on the album, there is of course also Amsterdam."
Mediterraneo, which contains meditation and Mediterranean in it, consists of 10 successive parts that you can also easily connect separately from each other and can perform and / or listen to each one on its own. More than one piece of it would fit perfectly in a film, whether documentary or not, about that enchanting environment. The music creates images. Are you in Sarajevo, the capital of the country where the composer lived in recent years? Are you staying as a tourist in the picturesque UNESCO world heritage town of Kotor in Montenegro? Or are you enjoying the sun, the sea, the table set with delicious grilled meat and salad on a Croatian island or are you in the young, densely populated, lively university city of Novi Sad in Serbia or do you choose for the clear water of Europe's deepest lake, the Lake of Ohrid in North Macedonia or are you a tourist on the other side of former Yugoslavia in the small but very neat, beautiful Slovenia with its eye-catching capital Ljubljana? Of course you could also be in a little apartment in the heart of Amsterdam. Oh, it doesn't matter where you are when listening, what counts is where the composer takes you.
We will not discuss the ten parts separately here, you must listen to them. Close your eyes and let the images that go with the music appear before you. It is so special, the feelings that Nihad shares with the world through music. The composer performs himself and he also wrote the text for the cd. This way you can better understand what this Mediterraneo is about. Travel along with musical tour guide and dreamer Nihad Hrustanbegović and discover how beautiful this part of Mediterranean Europe is. Close your eyes and meditate with the composer who pays a well-deserved tribute to all that beauty.
