Category: World of Culture

” We go to the opera for the same reason we read a good book, for the same reason we indulge in contemplating a work of art, for the same reason we go and watch a good movie, a fine play. In other words, we come to the opera to recall who we really are.” (Tiberiu Soare)





Here is a strong reason why we should go to the opera, a reason the talented and charismatic conductor Tiberiu Soare spells out at the conferences he gives every moth as part of the “Why Do We Go to the Opera? “ series. The cultural program was launched earlier this year by the Calea Victoriei Foundation jointly with the National Opera House in Bucharest. The organizers’ avowed aim is to approach opera in a relaxed and interactive way. Here is the conferences’ host Tiberiu Soare, talking on that series of events:





Tiberiu Soare: “ I don’t like calling them conferences: I ‘d call them interactive meetings instead. These are meetings where I invite participants to feel free and ask questions related to the night’s topic. Those meetings mainly target the younger audience, aged between 16 and 35. Yet they also target all sorts of people, from all walks of life, irrespective of age and background, people who want to find out something they had been ignorant of, regarding the opera and ballet. I have been actively seeking to purge my talk of any technical details that might make topic s hard to grasp. I suggest a topic — and at that I have been very pragmatic and have always picked up topics that are on the repertoire at the National Opera House in Bucharest. In other words, people either have watched the show previously, or are about to watch it, if discussions arouse their interest in any way. The meetings act more like an introduction to, or enable people to go deeper into, the understanding of a show they may have watched already. I come up with all sorts of details, even biographical details of composers and performers whose names are related to the title; first of all details help my audience make sense of the plot of the libretto. I believe any opera which is self-respecting starts off from the libretto, only to return to the libretto in the long run. Which means that text and plot are of utmost importance. Before anything else, an opera is theatre.”



A diversified public also means a wide range of questions curiosity. With details on that, here is Tiberiu Soare again:





Tiberiu Soare: ”The audience asks many questions, some of them are closely connected with the night’s topic, yet others turn out to be more general. Once I was asked for instance, why operas are divided into acts and scenes and what the difference is between an act and a scene. I made it clear how an opera show is made. I received questions such as why musicians in the orchestra wear a tuxedo, and that I think is an appropriate question; I also had more profound questions. There were people who asked me about the relationship between characters, or about the time reference incongruities they had spotted. In any case, the questions demonstrated an obvious interest in the operatic area and even a passion for opera, I should say. There were questions related to the conductor ‘s activity and they were most welcome because what I am coming up with is not the result of a musicological research study but is rather based on the knowledge gained during my entire conducting career .”



The first conference of the “ Why do we go to opera “ series was delivered in January. Its theme was “Individual freedom in Verdi’s La Traviata”.





Tiberiu Soare: “It was not by chance that we chose to speak about Verdi’s La Traviata in the first conference as part of this series of conferences. I think that La Traviata is the most representative opera and one of the most famous. It served as a departing point for my conferences, because it approaches one of the most accessible themes — it deals with social, moral tensions and it also refers to love and sacrifice all of them making for a Romantic drama. La Traviata is said to be performed every night, somewhere on the planet. I personally think that the major theme in La Traviata is the individual freedom versus social constraints.”





The program launched by the Calea Victoriei Foundation is meant to help the public become familiar with the beauty of opera. Conductor Tiberiu Soare, however, believes there only exists music, which is well or poorly performed. As for his musical taste, Tiberiu Soare is happy to realize that his hobby overlaps with his profession.





Tiberiu Soare: “I listen to operatic and symphony music with great pleasure. I enjoy Mozart, Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius and my range of preferences is quite wide. I am a rock music fan — I like listening to Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Queen, Red Hot Chili Peppers and once I enjoyed listening to Nirvana. I also find hip-hop quite interesting as well. Eminem is musician I look upon with tolerant eyes. Yet there are some musical genres like disco and pop music which I don’t understand very well and which I find to be outside my scope of sensitivity”.





Tiberiu Soare is one of the most talented and famous conductors of the young generation. In 2003 he won the Musical Critics’ Prize for his contribution to the Traviata 150 project. In 2006 the Actualitatea muzicala magazine granted him the Best Young Performer award and in the same year the Anonymous Foundation nominated him for the Best Young Artist of the Year in the Prometheus Awards Gala. Tiberiu Soare is currently the conductor of the State Opera House of Bucharest where he made his debut with Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” in 2005.

The winner of the 6th NexT International Film Festival’s held in Bucharest is the French short reel film “Mediteranees” directed by Olivier Py. The festival’s judging panel described the film as “a wide-scale cinematographic poem, based on 40-year old video recordings of a family”.

Inaugurated in 2007, in memory of the late director Cristian Nemescu and sound designer Andrei Toncu, NexT (with a capital N for Nemescu and a capital T for Toncu) every year gathers short and medium-reel productions from around the world, inviting the audience to take part in debates and keynote events.

The “Cristian Nemescu” best director award this year went to filmmakers Julia Ducournau (for her short reel “Junior” ) and to Rudi Rosenberg (for the short reel” Aglaee”). The jury decided to equally grant the award to two films exploring the same universe in different ways, reminding one of the spirit of the films made by Andrei Toncu. ”Aglaee” captures the teenagers’ world, with its typical mischievousness, dishonesty and vulnerability, while “Junior” tells a spectacular tale of unexpected situations, daringly mixing comic thrill with the David Cronenberg-type of horror. Ada Solomon is the initiator and producer of NexT. She says that short-reels attract large audience to cinema halls.

”Each year we try to attract people to come and see the movies, to convince the next generations of the value of these films and, since cinema halls are packed withpeople, we can say we are happy. I believe people do have a taste for the short reel and given that these days everyone is in a hurry and wants to rapidly consume everything, even emotions, the short reel is extremely sought after. And at NexT you can watch a package of short reels, and you can also pass on quite rapidly from one register to another…I dare say it is a genre working well, people do like short reels, it’s just that they do not have a place to watch them. Reason enough for them to opt for coming to NexT.”

This year as well, the screening of the so-called “Oscars’ Night” was part of the NexT International Film Festival‘s program, presenting short reels nominated for the 2012 edition of the American Film Academy Awards, as well as the 2011 winner. Film lovers stepped onto the red carpet in the spotlight, rubbing shoulders with the festival’s guests. Opening the screening was “God of Love” directed by Luke Matheny, last year’s winner of the most-coveted statuette for the short films category. As happens every year, NexT brought in novelty once again. Ada Solomon presented some of the novelty items, such as NexT Dance and NexT Imaginaria:

“We have these two new sections, but the older sections are just as fresh. NexT Dance is a section where we gathered movies with both classic musical, and contemporary dance; these, however, are not contemporary dance recitals put on film. We have films with electronic beats, but also opera, some of them are extraordinary. I have a passion for dance, but I also have a passion for musicals, and I can say that this is a daring combination, musical and short film”.

This edition included, once more, the NexT Kids section for children, with short films and activities for the little ones created by special guests. Of the four Romanian films competing this year, the jury granted the best Romanian short film award to “From This Day On” by Dorian Boguta. “Hello Kitty” by Millo Simulov was the public’s favorite, getting the Audience Award for a Romanian film. Here is Ada Solomon again:

“The festival has an ever growing reputation, and people are very enthusiastic. Since I travel a lot for my job as a producer, I met filmmakers who congratulate me for NexT. A lot of young filmmakers came to Bucharest on this occasion, because out of the 27 movies that entered the competition, 21 are represented by a member of the crew, and I can say that people leave the festival with a great feeling. Also, they like very much the fact that they interact with their audience, because we have a young and talkative audience. On top of the conversations, there are the after parties, where people make friends, and even plan projects together.”

Since it isn’t just the audience that wants to come back every year at NexT, but also former guests, as part of the Festival Friends section, the organizers presented short films made by older friends of the festival, directors who have made a name for themselves, such as Tudor Giurgiu, Paul Negoescu, Nash Edgerton, Iulia Rugina and Stanca Radu. This section also presented short films made by high school students passionate about film, encouraged by NexT, in the hope that they can compete for real in the future in this competition.

The Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest last month played host to the launch of one of the few books on Romanian dance: “Oleg Danovski — the Man, the Artist, the Legend”, written by Doina Jela. The book is a biography of the man whose creative genius inspired and fed into the ballet of the Romanian Opera in the 1941-1977 period, a time span of nearly 40 years. Danovski also founded the first ballet theatre in Romania, as well as one of the top-performing ballet groups in Europe, both in the eastern city of Constanta.





Oleg Danovski was born on February 9th 1917 in the city of Voznesenk, in Trava guberniya, Ukraine. As author Doina Jela points out, his mother took him to Romania in his early years. At age 17 he became a “stage legend”, as Doina Jela describes him, or the “Slavonic prince” and later “the Slavonic sphinx”.





At merely 18 years of age he was employed as a choreographer at Carabus Theater, only to become the youngest choreographer of his time, to the pride of actor and pamphleteer Constantin Tanase, then director of the theatre. Danovski signed dozens of original choreographies, which were “stunning in terms of technical accuracy, stage direction, creativity as well as something that always brought abstract ideas to mind and was telling of deeper, metaphysical meanings.





People used to describe him as follows: “Oleg? Well, Oleg is something else”, writes the author in the Preface. She adds: “20 years since he passed away, Oleg Danovski’s personality remains shrouded in legend. One cannot live without legends. This book is an attempt to go beyond the legend in order to unveil the portrait of a man and tell his story”.





Doina Jela is a novelist, editor and author of a large number of essays, reviews, interviews. At present she works as an editor and series editor at Curtea Veche Publishing, which brought out Danovski’s biography in cooperation with the “Camil Petrescu” Cultural Foundation. Doina Jela sums up the process of writing this book:





Doina Jela: “The story of writing this book started back in 1980 or 1981, when I was a teacher in a village in Constanta County near Medgidia. I saw a poster announcing the tour of ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ by Oleg Danovski at the local Cultural Centre. I had already seen some other shows with artists coming from Bucharest or some other big cities. I was accustomed to seeing artists go on tours out of Bucharest to relax, and not to electrify performance halls, probably because they did not believe in the value of small town audiences. ‘The Dangerous Mandarin’ by Oleg Danovski is, as I wrote in my book, a ‘grand opera’ show. The show, as I saw it in Medgidia, was breathtaking, and I was amazed not so much to find that such a performance is possible, but rather to see that the artists put on a show as if they were performing before a knowledgeable jury. Everything was perfect, it was breathtaking. That was my first meeting with Oleg Danovski. I knew that he was working in Constanta and I was wondering how he could manage to overcome the daily routine, rust and ruin — the three inconveniences of living in the province.“





Back in 1993-1994, two years before the artist‘s death, that came in 1996, Doina Jela recorded almost 20 hours of interviews with Oleg Danovski for the Tomis magazine, which she included in her book





Doina Jela: “He was a genius, he was a high-flier. Whatever he did was definitely above what he had known. And in addition, he was a very charismatic person. If you read the interviews, you will find that everything he says is brilliant and far-reaching.“





Here is a sample of Oleg Danovski‘s statements included in Doina Jela‘s book: Quote “I live for one thing alone, and that is ballet. If you ask me what the use of theatre or culture in general is, I will answer by quoting one of my friends saying, ‘A country without culture is a barbarous country. My aim is to help put an end to barbarity.“





Dance critic Gina Serbanescu recommends Oleg Danovski‘s biography to all those who want to understand how a model is shaped and she describes the book “Oleg Danovski – The Man, the Artist, the Legend” as follows:



Gina Serbanescu: “Mrs. Doina Jela has the merit of having put three hypostases into an equation, and you can not leave any of the variables aside of the equation. Because you cannot isolate the man from the artist and the artist from the legend, and all of them are intertwined. Through this highly important cultural document, Doina Jela sheds light on a less known facet of Oleg Danovski‘s personality, providing an insight into the human dimension of genius.“





We have also asked the author, Doina Jela, about her feelings when the volume came out:





Doina Jela: “I think Oleg Danovski deserves this book, and I pray that God will help people receive that as I meant it to be received. I wouldn’t like to see a clash of egos, with artists counting how many times their names were mentioned in the book. Instead, I would love them to understand my effort and good faith, and my admiration for this great artist.”





The volume “Oleg Danovski — The Man, The Artist, The Legend” came out after six years of thorough documentation, because although dancer, choreographer and director Oleg Danovski died in 1996, there are few documents on his life and work.

“One of the things I firmly believe in is the consideration you show to the other, to the whole world. Look and listen! Life is short enough, and if you don’t look and you don’t listen, you miss the whole show!” This statement belongs to Israeli writer Amos Oz, considered by many a Nobel Prize favorite. He recently visited Romania in late February, at the invitation of Humanitas Publishers.

The conflict-torn history of Israel is being captured in most of Amos Oz’s writings. Actually, Oz firmly believed his urge to write and his passion for literature lay in the traumas he had been through, in his mother’s committing suicide, the Nazi Holocaust in 1940s Europe and the conflicts in Israel.

“We were afraid that once the British army withdrew from Jerusalem, the Arabs would come and slaughter us Jews. That’s why when I was a kid I wanted to be a big book when I grew up, and not a man. I may have been green at that time, yet I knew all too well how easy it was to kill people. I also knew how easy it was to tear books apart. But I thought that, if I got to be a book, a copy of myself would survive, no matter what the others’ fate may be” said Amos Oz in one of the talks he gave in Bucharest.

Amos is also one of the most active militants in the “Peace Now” movement, a movement that, for more than forty years now, has been pleading for the two-state solution on the ancient territory of Palestine. Actually, the writer labeled himself as “a specialist in comparative fanaticism”.

In his essays, Oz urged political or religious fanatics to read the great writers: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Faulkner. “We are confronted with all sorts of fanaticisms, and not only with religious fanaticism. In some parts of the world, religion is the main form of fanaticism. In other parts of the world, we witness another form of fanaticism. We can see secular, ideological, political, and sometimes even ecological fanaticism. We’re confronted with all forms of fanaticism. Europe could contribute crucially to peace in the Middle East, providing help and sympathy for Jews and Arabs alike. We should not choose between being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. We should just be pro-peace.”

Some of his readers advised Oz to stop doing politics and write as much as he could. Others told him to stop writing altogether and get involved in politics one hundred per cent, yet Amoz Oz divides his time between politics and writing, and, just as the writer himself confessed, he never mixes writing with politics. He wakes up at five in the morning, takes a quick stroll in the desert, has a cup of coffee, gets himself seated at his desk and asks himself ‘What would I be if I were her?’, ‘What would I be if I were him?’. ”That’s my job. I imagine other people. That comes out of curiosity. I even believe that a curious man is a better lover than a man who is not. Curiosity is, I think, a powerful antidote against fanaticism”, said the author in jest.

This was Amoz Oz’s third visit to Romania, this time at the invitation of the Humanitas Publishers. On the writer’s first visit to Romania in 2004, Oz was granted the “Ovidius” Prize, awarded as part of the “Days and Nights of Literature” International Festival held in Neptune, a resort on the Romanian Black Sea coast. On that occasion, Amoz Oz was awarded by the University of Bucharest an honorary doctoral degree. Another eagerly-awaited event this year was the launch of the “Amos Oz” author series as part of the Humanitas Fiction collection, including ‘A Perfect Peace’, ‘Black Box’, ’How to Cure a Fanatic’, ‘Rhyming Life and Death’, ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’, ‘Scenes from Village Life’.