On Friday last week I had dinner in one of the “bring-your-own-wine” restaurants in Aarhus (in case somebody doesn’t yet know, in Aarhus and in DK or Scandinavia in general, a good wine can easily double- a very good wine can multiply it a few times…- your restaurant bill, hence these types of bring-your-own restaurants- I only know the ones in Aarhus- are extremely popular- you can basically bring your own wines and just have them serve you the meals). This time the chosen place was Le Regal (where I am very popular with some members of the staff, it appears…) and my guest for the evening was Marisa (hola, I hope you’re reading this :-)), a very good friend visiting from Seville, Spain.
At some point during the evening, three street musicians bumped in (literally) the restaurant and started playing and singing various famous Spanish (or rather, Spanish-spoken) tunes (included several pieces from the Gypsy Kings, for instance, played quite well). This lead me to think that they were Latin Americans or even Spaniards. I remained with that impression until the very last moment when they played their last piece, clearly the most impressive of the evening – judging after the reaction of the people in the restaurant. Well, this last melody was nothing else but our very Romanian famous tune, “Ciocarlia” (“The Lark” in English). I now regret that I did not ask them whether they (or at least one of them) were Romanians or Eastern European neighbours. But the important part is that to my credit (yes!!!), I immediately recognized the piece and told Marisa about it, but I attributed it wrongly to George Enescu, our most famous composer (also a very gifted violonist, pianist and conductor); I also knew that he included it in the 1st Romanian Rhapsody (which only reinforced my prior that he was also the composer- of course, this only shows my ignorance…). It turns out that in fact most people are more or less confused about the origins of this melody. After some searches, I tend to side with the Wikipedia entry on it, although it is not clear at all from there to what extent the initial folk tune was enriched by either of the Dinicu artists, who “popularized” it to start with (or by Enescu himself, eg. when including it in the 1st Romanian Rhapsody) and if it wasn’t at all (hard to believe) then the hunt for the anonymous composer behind it is/should be far from over (I have to confess that I don’t believe in the pure “folk” origin of this masterpiece, no matter how much I trust the collective creativity and musical genius of my Romanian people, even cumulated over several generations…)!
But that was a long introduction (introduction?!). To get to the gist of this post: I searched of course for renditions of “Ciocarlia” on YouTube. I found 3 (completely different ones), that are certainly worth mentioning and that I warmly recommend to you.
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The first is the “standard “, popular, version, with leading violins, interpreted here by an artist called Marek Balog and his Hungarian colleagues, playing in some pub in the Czech Republic (taking the info on the clip at face value). I thought this was a good rendition (somewhat better than the one in Le Regal by the-most likely Romanian – trio :-))- they even put some “personal feeling” in it (though there is a clear heterogeneity among the players here).
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The second version I found on YouTube would have been truly amazing if it weren’t from a sort of jam session where people in the audience simply couldn’t keep quiet. But, apart from that, this electric guitar player (Cristi Iakab if the info on the YouTube clip is correct) is extremely good and I just love his version of “Ciocarlia”.
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The last and my favourite version among the three circulated already, quite a lot, through the Romanian blogosphere (“roblosphere”), and strangely enough exactly in the last few days when I was also searching- independently!- for it, on YouTube (inter alia, I noticed that somebody placed a link to the same clip on the hotnews blogroll, yesterday). Just think of it, this seems impossible: playing “Ciocarlia” (by now you’ve listened to the previous two versions, I hope) with an acoustic guitar!!! And still, there is one artist who did it and you can admire his outstanding rendition here. Incredible, really. The musician is an Israeli flamenco (I’ll most likely come back to the ‘flamenco’ style which really experiences a hype lately, all around the world) artist called Baldi Olier, who was born in Romania in 1953 and emigrated to Israel in 1964 (info on the bios section from his website). I searched YouTube for other instrumental pieces by him, but I did not really find, among the available ones, one that- in my opinion- comes anywhere near “Ciocarlia”.
I hope you enjoyed listening to “Ciocarlia” (any impressions are welcome). If I were to talk about branding Romania through music, it is this sort of melodies (if played with style!) that I would really want to include in that set (in particular, what can be more Romanian then a “Romanian folk tune”?). But this will of course be a recurrent theme on my blog.
