17 Jun 2017 Rhythms of the Heart of Transylvania

Rhythms of the Heart

Kruhnen Musik Halle | Saturday | 17 June 2017 | 7:00 pm

Transylvania on strings sounds recognizable and new. It has the folklore and pulse of a hora (Romanian round dance), of călușari (Romanian dance), desolation, longing, lamentation and scream. It is our new old selves.

Better yet, I think, Concert Transilvan, Vlad Maistorovici’s composition, makes something that is already in our genes sound new. We have, perhaps, a sui generis musical argument, to play with words.

Violas set the tone, violins raise the pulse, heavy instruments bring pressure and value, there is optimism, serenity, encouragement, and authentic joy.

I feel that through stretching, vibration, bow, resonance, the strings allow the array of ways to stretch from history to present and to future even in a relatively short musical sequence. There is a special richness in the classical music. It is surprising and enjoyable. Assuming the cliché, it strikes a chord…

The Rhythms of the heart have an additional weight when Brahms is played. Maybe it’s also the general heaviness, the rain, maybe the fact that the festival is coming to an end… but what I got was like a heavy weight fight. Skiing in a super-giant slalom. Running the marathon. You get the gist…

However, I’ll blame Brahms.

I think in Brahms there is an obvious sadness that touches and generates anxiety. Some sounds seem to plunge, throw, suspend, but then the next sound comes back and knows exactly what it has to say and why it follows. Some sequences seem to mock other sounds, and again the joy of dialogue, energy and exchange of musical lines. But Brahms is coded and hard to penetrate.

I wonder what it says. It seems to talk about when you didn’t try even though you could have, when you tried but not enough, when you couldn’t but didn’t really want to either.

When you forgot or just didn’t remember in time, when you really want to forget but you can’t.

Just a few hours to Dark Impulse at Patria Hall and I am still scrambling my notes from Kruhnen Music Halle in my head. Kruhnen, by the way, is top notch!

In a chat after the concert, Vlad defines music as soft power, compared to other types of artistic expression, with other media for artistic message, sentiment, sensation or whatever we want to call it.

When almost everywhere in art and not only you find violence and shock, it’s really surprising to face an appeasing vibration that doesn’t discriminate and doesn’t yell itself, reverential towards what is inherited and looking so bravely towards what is yet to be achieved.

Text | Răzvan Zlăvog

Photo | Andrei Paul