On Sunday, the applause for the laureates of the Gaudeamus Book Fair almost overlapped with the first chords of the RadiRo International Festival of Radio Orchestras. Both are top cultural events and both are organised by Radio Romania, and were dedicated this year to the public station’s 90th anniversary and the 100th anniversary of the Great Union of Romania. Now in its 25th year and held from Wednesday until Sunday in the biggest exhibition venue in Bucharest, the fair had the theme “Romania’s Centenary”, after dedicating previous editions to the United States, the Nordic countries, Israel and the Russian Federation.
This year, the Museum of Romanian Literature, in collaboration with Radio Romania and the City of Bucharest, exhibited 600 different volumes dedicated to the Great Union of 1918, when, in the wake of the First World War, all provinces with a majority Romanian population in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire came under Bucharest’s control. Prizes of excellence were awarded at the fair to the publishers Stiinta, Arc and Cartier from the Republic of Moldova, a neighboring ex-Soviet state with a majority Romanian speaking population, and to Scoala Ardeleana and Casa Cartii de Stiinta from Cluj Napoca, in the north-west, Romania’s biggest city in Transylvania, for what the organizers described as “their admirable national editorial activity in the Centenary Year”.
Other prizes, based on readers’ choices, were awarded to Humanitas, Polirom and Nemira, the traditional leaders of the Romanian book market. Igor Bergler’s book 6 povesti cu draci (“Six Stories with Devils”) won the award for the fair’s “most coveted book”, while Vali Florescu won the best translation award for her rendition of Richard Ford’s Women with Men.
This week, the spotlight is on classical music. The Radio Concert Hall and the Auditorium Hall of the National Museum of Art are playing host to eight symphonic concerts and, for the first time at RadiRo, four jazz performances. The guests this year include leading international orchestras, conductors and musicians. Europe’s oldest radio orchestra, the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, returns to Romania, while three famous ensembles will be performing at Casa Radio for the first time: the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, from Great Britain, the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, from Lugano, Switzerland, and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra from Ireland. All concerts are broadcast live by Radio Romania and are recorded and will be broadcast at a later date by the public television and by other radio stations that are members of the European Broadcasting Union.
