17 DANA CIOCARLIE So the lark is a sort of eyewitness, in a first-rate vantage point to watch the country’s geography and history flashing past? Dana Ciocarlie: Exactly, an eyewitness that communicates to the world, through its song, everything it has seen, heard, and thought it understood. Not surprisingly, the result reflects an essentially folkloric, even bucolic universe, since Romania is one of the last countries in Europe with a pastoral or agricultural vocation, a country where the relationship with the land has always been a very physical one. But above all, it’s a timeless Romania – the place the poet Lucian Blaga was probably thinking of when he wrote ‘eternity was born in the village’. My album explores this intimate, privileged relationship between the bird, the village and eternity. It starts, inevitably, with the song Ciocârlia which, with all its trills and imitations, is a real study in admiration – proof, if proof were needed, that humans can manage, with a great deal of effort, to reproduce what a bird can do naturally. The lesson is the same for a fiddler trying his hand at the tune on a festive Sunday in the country, and for me tackling a piano transcription of it by Fred Harranger. That said, the lark is in dialogue not only with eternity, but also with the sun. It has the crazy idea of projecting itself into the blue beyond, the unknown, the far distance, without fear of burning its wings like Icarus. I’ve said to myself more than once that migratory birds like us do something very similar . . . Yes, you may well be right. In many cultures, including our own, the skylark is seen as a sacred bird, precisely because it’s a tiny little thing that tries to get as close as possible to the sun and sing its glory. It’s like an arrow that cleaves the skies. That
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTAwOTQx