So, throughout the album, there’s a sort of counterpoint between the solar and diurnal register symbolised by the lark, and the vesperal or nocturnal register symbolised by the bells? Yes, the Lipatti piece and Violeta Dinescu’s Échos de carillons are nocturnes by their very nature, and Voix de la steppe is also a projection of a dreamworld, while everything that is dancelike takes us back to the diurnal register, since here everyone is meeting up on a Sunday, at the village festival. Then there’s a more spiritual aspect, which is a continuation of the folkloric side of things, in the Romanian Christmas Carols collected by Bartók – two books of colinde, some of which are still sung today in Transylvania, as if to remind us that eternity was indeed born in the village. Let’s not forget that Romanian music was essentially that of the church – with its Byzantine chants – and that of the people – with its folk dances. Music of the western classical tradition in Romania dates back no further than Ciprian Porumbescu, at the very end of the nineteenth century, which is virtually a drop in the ocean in terms of history. Our composers appeared very late, as the last witnesses to a musical tradition that developed over the centuries, but which remained totally unknown, because it was ephemeral. If I keep coming back to our popular songs and dances, it’s no doubt because they give me the feeling of living intensely in the present moment while accepting its evanescence, and isn’t that the very essence of music as a lived, sensuous experience? A great Romanian conductor, Sergiu Celibidache, even took this notion as his credo, since he refused to allow his performances to be recorded – and I can imagine that, in some sense, the origins of this lay in an ancestral wisdom stemming from Romanian oral tradition. 23 DANA CIOCARLIE
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