Una

excerpt The authentic, unaltered Romanian population is to be found especially in the mountains of Transylvania. These vigorous mountain people, so beautiful in their lively colored national costumes, are very interesting in the eyes of those who want to study the customs

Foreword The few words that I put as motto at the beginning of this book can be translated like this: God must have had a hidden plan for this people that the western states rediscovered on the banks of the Danube and adopted like Pharaoh's daughter adopted Moses.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the Romanians, until then living in their traditional peasant autonomies, which stand for an entire, complete political order with archaic roots, arrived, after the abolition of anarchy, at their boundaries and, on one side, because of

To carry out a veracious analysis of a people's psychology is a utopian thought, and the multiple risks involved in making estimates and commentaries on the specificity of a still maturing nation become unavoidable. Each individual is a small, but unique and unrepeatable

A special moment at the close of the musical season was marked by the meeting, after 20 years, of conductor Erich Bergel with the National Radio Orchestra. Bergel conducted several times the Cluj Philharmonic – his first and most faithful love – in the past three years.

Pascal BentoiuPerformed in premiere in Bucharest Undoubtedly, composer Pascal Bentoiu must be regarded at present as one of the most outstanding symphonists of the Romanian musical school of the 20th century. The recent first performance in Bucharest of Symphony No. 7, Volumes,

Schwerin Founded by Heinrich der Lowe in 1160, the city today is worthy of its eight-century tradition. It abounds in vestiges – proudly and understandingly nurtured – of a history that is comprehensive in what regards the cultivation of music, too. The notes that I

There is a hidden passion in revealing the Romanian first absolute auditions that characterize conductor Horia Andreescu, the artisan of some essential scores of autochthonous contemporary symphonism. Besides the unknown Symphony No. 5 by George Enescu, discovered, re-orchestrated

Conductor Constantin Silvestri's first contact with the music of the Occidental world represented a shock because the entire classical and modern music deeply imprinted on the consciousness of the public was utterly shaken by a new, contemporary, vital spark of the

A few days back, a shattering piece of news darkened our souls and filled our eyes with tears: the heart of the great Romanian musician Ionel Perlea has stopped. Unable to contain this terrible pain, our memory revisited in one instant the unique days he gave us in that

The Romanian realm has given great creating spirits to the world, in all fields of activity: philosophers, historians, sociologists, scientists that made epoch-making discoveries, inventors, writers (poets, prose writers, and dramatists), brilliant musicians, painters, and

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