Almost everything i’ve explored hitherto from the 2026 ISCM World New Music Days has been music submitted by sections and individuals to be considered for the festival. But one of the great advantages of WNMD – and there are many – is the way it provides an opportunity for the host country to showcase examples of its own, invariably overlooked, music. That aspect of this year’s festival was particularly outstanding, making one wonder why on earth Romanian composers are performed and recorded so rarely elsewhere.
The most fascinating electronic music we heard came from the equally fascinating Octavian Nemescu, who died in 2020. His music, across all genres, encompasses the most enormous extremes, from halting, introverted intimacy to gargantuan forms of convoluted overload, all infused with elements of ritualised esoterica (thankfully not aligned to any particular belief system – which only makes it more potent). During a day at the Mogoșoaia Palace, within the Fosta Bucătărie (the former kitchen), we were treated to two works by Nemescu situated at the more measured end of the spectrum. Natural – Cultural was composed in 1973, revised a decade later, and is subtitled “music for a mountain top at sunrise”. (Among the large number of CDs i brought home from Romania there are several of Nemescu’s music, and most of them have similar temporal indications.) However, while i’m still only scratching the surface of Nemescu’s unique way of envisaging his work and our engagement with it, it’s clear that his references to time and place are less about idealised situations for listening than that the music itself is an encapsulation of that time and place. A crude way of putting it would be to say that Natural – Cultural is what a mountain top at sunrise ‘sounds like’. Kind of.
The way time passed and events unfolded in Natural – Cultural demonstrated a keen concern for patience, allowing sounds literal time and space to be appreciated. A woman’s voice, a drone, metallic shapes – for a time Nemescu kept these free in the mix, focusing on the mess and unrefined edginess resulting from their disjunct proximity. Over time, though, they merged into unity. Previously caught between still suspension and rapid vibration the result was a radiant, rippling, pulsing dronal state. We lost a tangible sense of core—layers—surface, the whole instead becoming a complex, hard-to-parse sound object, abstract and seemingly infinite.
It was followed by Nemescu’s Gradeația, subtitled “music for the ambiance of a monastery”, composed in 1982. A demonstrably more dramatic work, it sought both to celebrate and to mourn – being in part a response to the Ceaușescu regime’s forced destruction and relocation of churches. Characterised by vintage analogue timbres, the work partly sought to operate at a meditative level, yet this was undermined by pulsating, surging elements that consistently encroached into its space. The earliest instance brought to mind a bomb with a timer, and a later example even suggested a missile rushing past. The ensuing friction was palpable, tilting between these menacing, hard-edged intrusions and efforts to reset, refocus and return to the more contemplative music. It’s hard to say what prevailed; the analogue synths persisted to the end, though their closing scale figurations were so assertive they conveyed both triumph and desperation.
The most striking solo Romanian work came from Tiberiu Olah. Performed by Emil Vișenescu, Olah’s 1963 Sonata for clarinet solo “Pasărea Măiastră” references in that subtitle a magical, enchanted bird, highly significant in Romanian folklore. Part of a five-work cycle inspired by Brâncuși’s sculpture Coloana infinită, the piece was a beautifully effective melding of contrasting impulses, silky lines and explosive accents. All of which found their unity through a highly rhythmic display, the music’s momentum changing and fragmenting, with a strong lyrical thread woven through.
In the same concert, Ștefan Niculescu‘s Duplum for clarinet and piano (1982) was like a puzzle being worked through. The duo – Vișenescu joined by pianist Adriana Maier – took their time, lingering and repeating as necessary, figuring things out as they went, concerned more with pace than progress, moving through the material with immense care. Despite this sense of intellectual focus, the piece was very lovely, particularly its still conclusion.
Throughout the festival, composers seeking to ‘engage’ with music from the past tended to disappoint. Not so with Aurel Stroe‘s W. A. Mozart – sound introspections for string trio, composed in 1994. Performed by Gaudeamus Quartet Filarmonica Brasov, its six short pieces presented brief glimpses of Mozart, tiny and jewel-like, in an entirely new setting. First flowing, then variegated, before being caught within an amazing, emphatic fixed chord, granite-like. Exploding into a wonderful collection of small-scale ideas, the music flowed again, now with tones protruding outward, only to be pulled under some immense gravitational weight. Yet its density was immediately inverted as Stroe made everything vaporous, reduced to tiny taps and bare suggestions of pitch. The end was pure marvel, a threadbare waltz with unsettling hanging notes, the quartet like some weird machine. Utterly arresting stuff, that went way beyond the usual limitations of working with extant material.
The most stunning Romanian chamber work – one of the brightest highlights of this year’s World New Music Days – was Adrian Pop‘s second string quartet, Mătasea şi metalul [the silk and the metal], completed in 2013 and performed by the Arcadia Quartet. Passing through super-intense patterns of group movement – initially tentative, muscular, then brisk but mysterious – it was as engrossing as it was unpredictable. The quartet split into two duos, hypnotically seeming to circle, reuniting to move through a succession of different states and behaviours but somehow never sounding episodic, the product of highly varied evolution and juxtaposition. Its narrative was convincing and compelling, turning unexpectedly solemn in the latter stages, lyrical but weak, over a trudging pulse. Yet energy was pumped through the quartet, briefly electrifying them all before they slumped back, ensuring that nothing in the piece was ever entirely what it seemed.
One of WNMD’s flagship concerts took place in the jaw-dropping interior of Bucharest’s Romanian Atheneum, given by the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gabriel Bebeșelea. On the one hand, it was a strange event; instead of being an obvious vehicle for some of Romania’s unknown, progressive composers of relatively recent times, it focused instead on the one Romanian composer most people have actually heard of, George Enescu, and a sprinkling of Hungarians, Bartók, Kurtág and Ligeti. Not bad music – not at all – just a bit of an odd decision.
On the other hand, the opportunity to hear Enescu live in the concert hall – as long as it’s not one of his endlessly-over-performed Romanian Rhapsodies – is always going to be mouth-watering, and while not as forward-looking as his symphonies, the 1948 Concert Overture on Romanian Folk Themes demonstrated more than a little of his marvellous imagination. Delicacy and muscularity worked together, powerful and robust one minute, slow and lyrical the next. This seemed less about balance than about giving sufficient emphasis to an implied gravity, even darkness, beneath the surface. Thus Enescu let it get into a jaunty stride only to pull it back, revealing the scope to be broad and grand, with a rich harmonic underlay. Again he pushed it on, now marvellously tumbling forward, displaying real wildness, before finally directing it to a potent place of solemnity.
An unexpected inclusion in this concert was Xenakis‘ solo percussion piece Rebonds B (1988), performed with hugely infectious energy by Bogdan Pop, its propulsion seemingly unstoppable. It was, in hindsight, an ideal prelude to what would prove the concert highlight, Levante by Dan Dediu, composed in 2018. It opened with loud clamour and clarion calls, as if it had absorbed all the energy from the Xenakis and was now channelling and detonating it. Intensity was maintained through a rich, dark-hued vein of melody, heightened to the extent that it became borderline ferocious. From this volatility a folk tune broke out with the same intensity, in due course clarifying more and more that song lay at Levante‘s heart. The environment may have been explosive, white-hot, but line was unmistakably driving things in terms of momentum, harmony and structure, cranking up to full speed in order to literally power through the work’s closing eruptions. Breathtaking.
Three of the Romanian works have particularly stayed with me during the last few weeks, and for very different reasons. The most low-key of them – though in some ways the most provocative – was Memorial, composed in 1990 by Anatol Vieru. The work was composed in memory of victims of the devastating Iași pogrom, which Vieru himself survived. Performed by the Radio Chamber Orchestra conducted by Cristian Mandeal, Memorial‘s material was engagingly strange: spindly and circular, getting fixated on a rising and falling minor third. This was tantamount to music reluctant to engage, and even when percussion sought to bring focus, everything ended up polarised and halting, spare and sparse.
And again after: the potential heft of a tutti, replete with tam-tam, yet rendered elusive in tone, somehow blank despite efforts from the brass. The music fizzled, fragmented. This was not ‘holocaust music’ so much as music responding to the idea of ‘holocaust music’, seemingly testifying to the impossibility of the task. In so doing, Vieru perhaps said more about the immensity of the horror than by seeking to address it directly. Wind counterpoint was half-hearted, the strings hovered and prevaricated, before being overtaken with twitches following a brass pseudo-climax. The ending summed things up perfectly, softening but in the process becoming microtonally skewed. Memorial is among the most genuinely remarkable works i’ve ever encountered, a rare example of a composer refusing consolation or closure, allowing the music to reveal its own inadequacy in the face of what it confronts.
Another of Ștefan Niculescu‘s works made a huge impression on the penultimate evening of the festival, performed by the Profil Sinfonietta conducted by Tiberiu Soare. Composed in 1998, Undecimum was complex and radiant, lyrical but weird, bright but dirty, bold and increasingly declamatory. At first the material seemed rooted in chordal activity, though it became apparent that almost everyone was doing their own thing, yet with an uncanny sympathy and coordination. Gathering points reinforced that sense of connection, as well as being vital moments of respite within such wildly convoluted counterpoint. The brass writing was fascinating: injecting chord progressions that felt downright implausible in such a context, not really anchoring anything, aspirational at best, perhaps even a red herring.
The music underwent an enormous timbral gear change, refocusing on the strings, echoing each other, while clarinet and bassoon lurked at the periphery. Clarity was definitely intensified from now on, even becoming more harmonically settled, and while complexity haltingly returned in closing fanfares, a sense of unity was by now unequivocal. A breathtaking piece, with a genuinely spectacular approach to invention.
For me, the absolute highlight of this year’s World New Music Days came at the end of the Radio Chamber Orchestra concert. In Doina Rotaru‘s work for violin and orchestra Himere (she told me later that she didn’t regard it as a concerto), composed in 2020, the initial impression was that Rotaru had set up the violin to fail. Featuring soloist Diana Moş, she seemed absurdly small – dynamically, behaviourally – in comparison to the orchestra, yet in ways hard to grasp she dominated, and not simply because the players tended to draw back when the violin spoke. Her material carried weight; at one critical point she threw a note across the lower strings, causing the orchestra to sag down to a strange abyssal suspension, worried by a slow-turning ratchet.
From here, it felt like one and all navigated the terrain together – yet the orchestra also was the terrain, wind calls and noise intensifying yet opening out to an odd panorama: more rattle, a yawning muted trombone, and a slowly materialising drone. Stability? Sort of, for a time. Before long the violin was skittering over a shaking, thumping foundation, opening out into a new vista, all trills and glitter over the drone, Moş’s violin singing from a great height (a gorgeous sequence), turning emphatic, descending again, her song echoing through the orchestra. The glitter prevailed, the violin spinning upward and upward, until completely out of earshot. Romanian contemporary music at its most ravishingly wonderful.
