The Head Of The Orchestra
I think the idea of a head of the orchestra arose two and a half centuries ago, as a result of the activity of the Mannheimer Circle, who had invented acoustic dynamics: the game of intensity, as a component of the agogic, a quite unproductive term for most of the music
A Hero Without His Right Wing
Far from his country, across the ocean, in 1957, while he conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in New York, conductor Ionel Perlea had a heart attack. He had the courage and most of all the strength to go on conducting until he finished the Ode to Joy, after which he
I May Count Myself As Having Been Born Under A Lucky Star
As early as my years of instruction, while at The Academy of Music in Bucharest – as part of the group of the grand and incomparable professional singer and mentor Constantin Stroescu (Enrico Caruso's partner in Boston, 1915, in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci) – destiny
Echoes
On 20 November 1921 an enthusiastic letter written by the poet Cincinat Pavelescu is published in Rampa, a letter which we see fit to transcribe in full: Dear Mr. Editor in Chief, My life's absorbing activities of incessant work at the head of a newspaper without any
The Lord Of Romanian Conducting
After almost a century of symphonic music in Romania (as early as in 1846-1848, the first symphonic concerts changed the artistic life of Bucharest), after three quarters of a century since the establishment of the first philharmonic in Bucharest (1868), a magician appeared
The Romanian School Of Conductors
It is no secret to anyone that in Romania every person who has a good voice and musical talent has sung at least once, in his or her youth, in a choir. People say about Banat, the western region on the boundary with Hungary and Yugoslavia that it is the land of choirs, because
Editor's Note
The idea of this anthology has been haunting me for a long time. Respect, fear, admiration, even fascination made me postpone incessantly such an attractive project. What would be the framework? How would so many strong personalities, volcanic tempers cohabit between the
The Violin Player Ion Voicu
It is hard to say when the Gypsies came to Romania for the first time, and then settled for good, but the oldest documents date from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the royal charters mentioned the fiddler slaves, sold alongside the dependencies and objects from