Jora

There are chances in life. I have made mention of it before and will not hesitate to repeat it. To some of them we turn a blind eye; for others we may knowingly not have the just power of judgment and pondering. Or, that of turning something to good account. Floria Capsali

In the summer of 1982, as I was saying an emotional good-bye at Floria Capsali's deathbed, the whole mournful world felt we were witnessing the end of a living legend of Romanian dancing. Indeed, for over half a century (she was born in 1900 in the town of Bitolia,

1921. End of the year. The Romanian State Opera House was established in Bucharest. 1938. The month of August. The young institution was holding, through its representatives, master Floria Capsali to its bosom, who was employed on that occasion to nurture the destiny of

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

Mihaela Marinescu: Did you know maestro Ionel Perlea before visiting him in New York in 1967?Theodor Grigoriu: No, I didn't, he had left the country a long time before. He was a legend to my generation, like Enescu, like Lipatti. Before my trip to the United States

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

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

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

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

He went out of the smoky-glass building without looking back. He was treading slowly, looking at the tips of his impeccably polished Timberland shoes. He hadn't even managed to answer the porter, who may have wished him well, smiling as in a dental-floss commercial.

One should add to the romantic universe of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner the love story of Maria Cantacuzino and the composer George Enescu, as the mystery of its extraordinary tension has been revealed in the recently published Ombres et lumières, Souvenirs d'une

Nowadays, the Romanians' principal obsession is the Gypsies, who make the Romanians feel as if they were living in a castle under siege. Almost all crimes are attributed to Gypsies, whose population seems to be rising every day. Although the figure given by the 1992