22 Aug On a Different Kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and on Their Bands of Musicians who Conquered an Audience in Hamburg
< by Oltea Șerban-Pârâu >
In the winter of 2017, I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural concert of one of the most modern and spectacular concert halls to have been built in Europe in the last fifty years, in the presence of the highest-ranking officials, who were there to set their seal on an investment of almost nine hundred million Euros aimed at putting Hamburg on the world’s cultural map more emphatically even than hitherto.
The name of the concert hall was ElbPhilharmonie Hamburg and at the time, impressed by its architecture, acoustics and, above all, exceptional integration into the city’s story and cultural tourism attractions, I did not think about what chances of playing there a Romanian orchestra might ever have.
More quickly than I could have imagined, if I had ever for a moment thought about it, the Romanian Youth Orchestra (who else?) was invited to take part in a short series for youth orchestras (along with similar ensembles from the United States, Germany and the European Union) during the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, performing on the stage of none other than the ElbPhilharmonie’s 2,200-seat auditorium. After philharmonic concert halls in Berlin and Paris, after Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Musikverein, after Santa Cecilia in Rome, and many other venues, in the summer of 2019 the Romanian Youth Orchestra played at the ElbPhilharmonie Hamburg, as part of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival.
Soon after its foundation in 1986, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival became one of the world’s most spectacular cultural events. In addition to the performances held in the usual concert halls and opera houses, many of the events take place in castles and barns, in unconventional spaces, in the most spectacular churches of Schleswig-Holstein, and even in unexpected places such as docks or factory halls. But an important series of concerts is also held in the superb ElbPhilharmonie Hamburg.
The responsibility of the two maestros in charge of the Romanian Youth Orchestra’s tour—conductor Christian Mandeal and Marin Cazacu, manager of the Romanian Youth National Arts Centre—was huge, and the programme chosen—Richard Wagner: Prelude and Isolde’s Death, Richard Strauss: Rosenkavalier Suite, Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, op. 47—was extremely demanding.
After two performances of this programme in front of Romanian audiences, at the Enesco and the World’s Music Festival in Sinaia (Salle Casino, 7 August) and at the Magic Summer Festival in Bucharest (Romanian Athenaeum, 8 August), the Romanian Youth Orchestra and Cristian Mandeal prepared for the most important concert of the summer, at the ElbPhilharmonie Hamburg. It had not been long since they played at the Berlin Konzerthaus, as part of the Young Euro Classic Festival, where they received an extremely favourable reaction on the part of the German critics, who declared the concert as “abundantly deserving of five stars.”
But even so, it had been their seventh appearance in Berlin, whereas Hamburg made felt the trepidation of a premiere. Tickets for the concert had been sold out for three months and the auditorium was packed. The first discreet strains of Wagner’s Prelude and Isolde’s Death took the audience’s breath away, and Cristian Mandeal’s courage in tackling such a work of supreme refinement was rewarded with rapturous applause by the German concertgoers, who, it may be assumed, had plenty of terms of comparison.
Once all trepidation as to the audience’s potential reaction had been allayed, Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Suite began to flow, naturally, dancingly, with strongly outlined solos, in an intellectual but intensely emotional interpretation characteristic of Cristian Mandeal, which brought to the fore the individualities of the young orchestra, as well as their strongly personal sound as an ensemble, particularly the string section.
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, op. 47, a very different kind of music, perhaps more familiar to the young Romanian musicians, provided them with an opportunity to showcase both their cohesiveness as an orchestra and their individual solo talents, ranging from Radu Dunca, the orchestra’s concertmaster and one of the few musicians who has been part of this project from its very beginning, in 2008, when he was still a lycée pupil, to impressive tympanist Ilinca Lorentz, an element of personality and equilibrium in the orchestra. I wish it to be understood that naming them in particular is symbolic, from the “first” to the “last”, since among the almost one hundred members of the orchestra there are as many names of which I am sure we shall hear more.
Cristian Mandeal’s courage in starting the same journey afresh with every new generation of the Romanian Youth Orchestra—now in its third or even fourth incarnation of its eleven-year existence—might seem quixotic, but in the end it is always crowned with a success that we can no longer regard as surprising.
Actually, it is hard to say which is Don Quixote and which Sancho Panza in the unbeatable duo that is Marin Cazacu and Cristian Mandeal, who have taken this project to almost every major concert hall of Europe and even beyond. What is important is that they exist, that they hold out against times that sooner urge one to give up than to be daring; that one hundred young musicians, always new, but always the same, are enthused by the two’s dream and, through three colourful encores that kept a German audience of two thousand in their seats, they make us forget that the world of today’s Romania, the world we live in, seems overwhelmed by depression, cares, uncertainty, and bitterness.
It is a dream, it is a drop in the ocean, but it exists, it is full of life now, in the summer of 2019, and its name is the Romanian Youth Orchestra.