Rumania, a country off the European cultural landscape? It may appear so to the superficial eye. But particularly in the modern age, powerful cultural impulses have repeatedly come from Romania. Names like Constantin Brancusi, Eugène Ionesco or, in music, Georges Enescu, Dinu Lipatti, Sergiu Celibidache and Miriam Marbe stand for this. And Violeta Dinescu. Born in Bucharest in 1953, the composer, pianist and pedagogue completed postgraduate studies at Marbe after graduating and learned “how to capture life in sound”.
Her comment shows a completely different understanding of music than that of the Western European avant-garde, who are fixated on material. Dinescu was always closed to their circle, but that didn’t do her any harm. As an imaginative and multifaceted composer, familiar with Romanian folk music through field research as well as with the laws of mathematics and the work of the Renaissance composer Palestrina, she made her international career as a loner, artistically committed to no one but herself. In 1982 she moved to Germany, where she worked as a pedagogue in Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Bayreuth and taught at the University of Oldenburg for twenty-five years. Her works have been performed in Europe, the USA and South Africa and have received international awards.
Dinescu’s work is of an impressive breadth. Eight stage compositions are included, including her hit, the fantastic children’s opera “May 35, or Konrad rides into the South Seas” based on Erich Kästner, two ballets, numerous orchestral works, solo concerts, film music. And an incredible variety of instrumental and vocal chamber music. In the small-scale works, wide horizons can suddenly open up, such as in “My eye has returned to all seven spheres” for tenor and piano over two terzanes from Dante’s Paradiso, in which the poet views the earth from a cosmic distance: In Dinescu’s setting marveling at the smallness of our planet becomes holy horror – the crucial words dig deep into the memory through obsessive repetition and constant variation.
Chamber music, the incorruptible benchmark for the compositional profession, is Dinescu’s experimental laboratory. This is where the sharpness of their musical ideas and their inventiveness come into their own. Concentrating on a clearly defined material really fires their creative imagination. The CD “Diary”, a sounding self-portrait of the composer, forms a fascinating compendium of flute playing, with all instruments of the flute family as a soloist and in the playback congenially realized by Carin Levine. They are tones of life, and those who follow them attentively may also recognize a distant echo of the mythical past of the flute as a folk instrument. Today Violeta Dinescu can celebrate her seventieth birthday.
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