22 CIOCÂRLIA Do you use a kind of dissolve to soften the contrast between the different registers, or, on the contrary, do you emphasise it through the way you juxtapose the pieces? I didn’t need to emphasise anything, because most of the pieces already have an inbuilt contrast between slow and fast – it’s something of a hallmark with them. Take, for example, the three pieces by Paul Constantinescu, Joc, Cântec and Joc dobrogean: the first is fast, the second slow and the third ultra-fast. I play them in the written order of the suite and the contrast is completely natural. On the other hand, when I went looking for songs and dances from southern Romania, Moldavia and Transylvania, I came across a second symbol of our spiritual vocation, in addition to the lark – the bell, which is also very present in Romanian tradition, especially in the monasteries. But I didn’t want to imagine two separate strands for these two symbols united by the same upward force; I preferred to interweave them, as if they represented a symbiosis of earthly nourishment – represented by the folk dances and folksongs – and heavenly nourishment – symbolised by the bells. Hence Ciocârlia and Bartók’s Romanian Dances alternate with Enescu’s Voix de la steppe and Carillon nocturne, which belong more to the register of elevation, and also with Dinu Lipatti’s Nocturne on a Moldavian theme, a piece that’s never been recorded before, whose theme is at once haunting and spatially fragmented, like a cubist portrait.
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