PiE

The Lord Of Romanian Conducting

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

A Portrait In Smithereens

At night, when sleep is slow to come in a somewhat strange bed, you listen tensely to any sort of noise and try to decode the shades momentarily cast by car lights on the white of the walls. That is how I realized she was there, waiting on the threshold of the door. You

Echoes: Excerpts From The Farewell Concert

In an obituary published in the Tages Anzeiger of Zurich, Mario Gerteis draws a suggestive portrait of Celibidache in his youth. A nervous fiery ball, halfway between histrionics and insight, between passion and obsession. His dark locks hanging over his face in disorder,

The Last Saint Of Music

Among all 20th-century great Romanian conductors, indubitably the most extravagant, original, paradoxical maestro of the baton remained Sergiu Celibidache. Perhaps only Herbert von Karajan enjoyed the status of absolute star during his life time as the Romanian conductor

The Romanian School Of Conductors

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

Editor's Note

The idea of this anthology has been haunting me for a long time. Respect, fear, admiration, even fascination made me postpone incessantly such an attractive project. What would be the framework? How would so many strong personalities, volcanic tempers cohabit between the

P.S. With Victor Brauner (This Is How I Would Like To Write)

With immense delicacy and great scrupulousness he [Gellu Naum] would each time talk about Victor Brauner – the friend from his youth years he had met on the occasion of an exhibition opened at Mozart Hall in Bucharest. It was 1935. The twenty-year old youth, Gellu Naum,

The Passage

1. You open one door and there appears another, then another, and another, up to the last one – which does not even exist – and thus you find yourself at the first door – which does not even exist – and you make a round, once more, unto familiar places, as what you

Modernity Without Avant-Garde: B. Fundoianu (Benjamin Fondane)

excerptsFondane's interest in the psychological mechanisms of illusion did not come from a strictly neutral or intellectual curiosity. Deeper resources of his personality contributed, and his poetry is testimony to that. As a general rule, only the disillusioned are

Quote

The play unfolds in our time. The first scene, or exposition scene, brings the Jew and king Belshazzar face to face: a parable of two enemy peoples, Jewish and pagan, of slavery and absolute power, of the weak and the strong, of the poor and the rich… The crux of the tragedy

B. Fundoianu

(14. 11. 1898 – 2. 10. 1944)He was among the first promoters of pure poetry. In fact traditionalism represents a form of modernism. Traditionalists are most of them former symbolists and therefore Baudelairians, keeping their habit of embracing the universe. Poetry, says

Critics About M. Blecher

The unconscious is a privileged territory for Blecher's creation. It's the storage room of all chimeras, the source of imagination, the combustion of the narrative discourse, the origin of the delirium, which feeds the revelation and the inspiration. We can talk