rencontre avec la / meet Romania
ROUMANIE
BUCOVINE
TRESORS FOLKLORIQUES
Electrecord, ?, ST-EPE 0963
''Meet Romania'' is a series made for export so that foreign audiences can discover what Romanian popular music sounds like. Hence the text in English and French.
But as I said in previous posts this is ''national'' music developed by urban and professionnal musicians working for the state. This tendency increased during the communist period.
Of course the basic material comes from the rich rural traditions for which Romania is rightly renowned but finally most of these ensembles and orchestras sound similar whatever the relevant region. A lot of the tunes and songs are in fact modern creations supposedly respecting the characteristics of such and such area.
Here Bucovina is a very particular area part of Moldavia divided since 1945 between Ukraine and Romania. Bucovina was part of the Austrian empire for a long time and its population was very mixed with ruthenian, polish, romanian, hungarian, hutsul and jewish people. Now the population is probably very homogeneous on the Romanian side.
The period during world war II was terrible with two deportations organized by Staline in 1941 when 60 000 Romanians were expelled from Bucovina followed between 1944 and 1955 by an even more massive deportation of 253 000 Romanians. There were groups of resistance fighters against Soviet Union until 1958. Only four villages still have a Romanian speaking inhabitants in Northern Bucovina.
As I said also before, the musical appeal of this kind of recording lies in the soloists. Silvestru Lungoci appears on six tracks because he plays several wind instruments. Others play cobza, trumpet, clarinet and fiddle. Three tracks are songs by a female singers band and a the vocalist Sofia Vicoveanca. The ensemble is named Ciprian Porumbescu who was born in 1853 of Polish descent; a composer and activist against the Habsburgs he died at the age of 29 of tuberculosis.
The orchestra is led by George Sîrbu who was according to the presentation text very active in researching folklore from different areas of Bucovina.
