Romanian violinist Gabriel Croitoru starts the 2022 Enescu's Violin tour in Bistrița-Năsăud
The Enescu's Violin tour has reached its tenth edition this year and will start in two villages of the Bistrița-Năsăud county, according to News.ro. On Thursday, October 27, a concert will be held in Căianu Mic, and on Friday, October 28, a concert will be held in Prundu Bârgăului.
After 10 years of traveling around the country with pianist Horia Mihail, violinist Gabriel Croitoru has invited his daughter Simina Croitoru to join him in bringing classical music to the villages of Romania, as well some of the stages of big cities throughout the country. Together they will take George Enescu's music back to the roots of the village that inspired it, dispelling the prejudice that classical music "isn't for everyone".
At the end of the tour, on the evening of November 19, they will be joined by pianist Horia Mihail at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest.
While rehearsing this year's tour program with his daughter, violinist Gabriel Croitoru recalls how it all began ten years ago:
"We started this tour in 2012. We had set out then, like George Enescu, to travel the country and give our music to people who don't have access to such performances. One of the concerts was in a village near Bucharest - the locals had been sent by the village priest to the Cultural Center to listen to us. Among them was a mother with seven children, and the youngest was the age of my granddaughter. Even now I get emotional when I remember how attentively and lovingly the children listened to our recital and how the mother thanked me at the end. I knew then that what we were doing was right and that we would continue to take Great Music where no one else thought of taking it."
The history of this tour, from 2012 to the present, is particularly diverse. Enescu's Violin has reached villages in the most remote corners of Romania, in cities all over the country, and in the great concert halls of Beijing, London, Spain, and Portugal.
Gabriel Croitoru is the violinist who won the privilege of playing the Guarneri del Gesu violin, the so-called "Cathedral", which George Enescu played during his lifetime (an instrument that is part of the heritage of the National George Enescu Museum). He is a concert soloist of the Radio Romania Orchestra and Choir, concert soloist of the Paul Constantinescu Philharmonic in Ploiești (since 1987), member (violin I) of the Transylvanian State Quartet of the Philharmonic in Cluj-Napoca, and professor at the National University of Music in Bucharest.
Simina Croitoru began studying the instrument at the age of five with her mother, Ioana Croitoru. She then began studying with her father, Gabriel Croitoru, in whose class she completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at the National University of Music in Bucharest, and in 2020 she received her doctorate in music.
She has won important prizes at national and international competitions and has performed numerous concerts with all the philharmonic orchestras in the country, as well as with symphony orchestras from Austria, Germany, Finland, Mexico, and China. Following in her father’s footsteps, she has been teaching at the National University of Music in Bucharest since 2016.
(Photo source: Gabriel Croitoru on Facebook)
