A Young 50-Year Old Conductor

With Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Horia Andreescu endowed his own anniversary (50 years of life, which is both little and a lot in the life of a conductor) with a well-deserved brilliancy. On the other hand, while defining his assuredness, the merits of a 27-year career came also to be finely evidenced."A young conductor". These are not just well ringing words since they express the very reason of my writing. All the experiences that in time gave personality to Andreescu's interpretations, helping them grow, go very well together with a constant youth. I am not so interested in how this is perceived but in how it is heard. There is in Horia Andreescu an élan of unwariness, of astuteness, and gentle behavior, no matter how hard he had to bear the yoke of duties not as soothing as music. Serious, exact, and involved in old styles of music – the bright vocations of Italians and beautiful instrumental song, the rigor of Germans in polyphony, the elegance of the French in movement and drawing, - all these the Virtuozii of Bucharest preserve with freshness and stimulation. One can easily understand why Horia Andreescu was standing guest of a few important orchestras in Germany (the Radio Berlin Symphonic Orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic, the State Chapel of Schwerin), for this is a severe and prestigious undertaking. His openness to what the finicky, knowledgeable music lover wants to hear – from Mozart and Beethoven to Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, from Mahler to Stravinsky – also proved of an alert, dynamic quality, animated by effort and imagination, whether at the George Enescu Philharmonic of Bucharest, or conducting the National Radio Orchestra. Beethoven's Missa Solemnis as we listened to it Friday night is a proof of Horia Andreescu's success in his drive to remake from within the first ensemble of the Radio-Television, to give the Radio Choir – constantly trained with exactness by Aurel Grigoras – an opportunity to show it is capable of the so dangerous, so burdensome mission of creating splendor.The reader could have difficulty in understanding us if, speaking about music, we turn to architecture, filling the sentence with words such as edifice, construction, volume, and blocks. And if we say "blocks of time" his confusion could even double. Nevertheless, it can't be helped. A composer also builds. In its colossal proportions Missa Solemnis is a grandiose edifice, so daringly erected in the sound space that we cannot contemplate it without taking our distances (more prosaically, in the concert hall). As if an eye could better contemplate the majestic proportion of architecture from the opposite sidewalk. That is why we will have to admire this moment turned into a musical event, the psychological meaning of the classical text as Beethoven interpreted it along its five parts (time blocks).Now I need no longer fear as I did once when the performance of a Missa was a nearly subversive action, seldom and only with difficulty allowed. If now, more than one hundred and fifty years after this work by Beethoven was written, I say that it goes beyond the framework of the sacred standing out by its egolatry, gigantism, and drama (almost theatrical) then I could be faulted to have tried, following who knows what covenant with the devil, to hide its Truth. "God has never abandoned me," said Beethoven. And this is key.
Cotidianul, 6, no 247, October 21, 1996


by Ada Brumaru