Mr. Bregovic, who was born in Sarajevo, dropped out of violin studies at a conservatory and became an Eastern European rock star leading the band White Button for 15 years. Then, in the late 1980’s, he became a soundtrack composer for the Bosnian Serb filmmaker Emir Kusturica and others, often using traditional Balkan and Gypsy sounds.
Mr. Bregovic’s Wedding and Funeral Orchestra is by no means a traditional wedding or funeral band. “Don’t die,” he joked. “We’re very expensive.” Pulling together his entire musical experience, it includes a string section, a male choir, an accordionist, female Bulgarian singers, his electric guitar and the brass band, which made its entrance strolling through the audience.
The ensemble is by no means the first mélange in Balkan music history. In Eastern Europe traditional songs have long been orchestrated and rearranged for classically rooted, state-sponsored, regionally mixed ensembles like the Mystère des Voix Bulgares. Mr. Bregovic has expanded the music with his own impulses.
He has the crucial skills of a soundtrack composer. Mr. Bregovic can write melodies and motifs to recur throughout a film, lending a subliminal coherence. He can also compose music that hovers in the background, to be completed by the images on screen. At Avery Fisher Hall he used the strings and choir for somber, spacious, atmospheric music like “War,” from Mr. Kusturica’s “Underground”: sustained minor-key chords for strings with a lone Balkan clarinet or a bagpipe keening above them.
The first part of the concert leaned toward Mr. Bregovic’s classical, ethereal side. A reverent “Sanctus Deus,” from a liturgical suite called “My Heart Has Grown Tolerant,” topped the male choir’s hushed harmonies with a tangy Bulgarian solo voice. He also hinted at his rock years with “In the Death Car,” a straightforward song from his score for “Arizona Dream” that he sang himself; on the recording the vocalist is Iggy Pop.
Yet it was the more traditionalist music — much of it from Mr. Bregovic’s 2002 album, “Tales and Songs From Weddings and Funerals” (a Universal import) — that stirred things up.
Serbian Gypsy brass bands are party generators, and Mr. Bregovic’s compositions let them do their job: pumping out chords behind the elaborately ornamented vocals of Adem Ademovic or the band’s gutsy third trumpeter, Ekrem Demirovic, or just trilling and declaiming their own melodies. The former Yugoslavia’s war-torn history is tied up in the music; one of the encores, which Mr. Bregovic pointedly described as “an ironic song,” was the rowdy “Kalashnikov” (named after the rifle), with a singalong chorus: “Boom, boom, boom.”
Mr. Bregovic’s orchestral hybrids weren’t confined to Balkan or even European styles. “Ausencia” was a tango sung in Portuguese; “Ya Ya” (from the “Underground” soundtrack) sandwiched Lee Dorsey’s old New Orleans R & B hit with a zigzagging Balkan tune. Sometimes the choir and strings joined in to make more cinematic crescendoes. But when the brass band was huffing away, all the superstructure seemed unnecessary.
