The 8th edition of the "I Love Lipatti" Festival will take place in Bucharest on March 19th-23rd. Alice Barb, founding director of the Dinu Lipatti House of Arts Cultural Centre in the capital, gives more details about the calendar of events.

Mrs. Alice Barb, the 8th edition of the "I Love Lipatti" Festival will take place in Bucharest on March 19th-23rd. How did you plan the programme of events and who are the artists invited to honour the name of Dinu Lipatti?

Because it was a real achievement to reach the eighth edition, I made sure that our guests were, as always, first class and I managed to put together a very consistent programme in which, during the five days of the festival, no less than 20 artists of all generations will perform Dinu Lipatti's compositions no less than 35 times on the stage in the music room of our house. I think it's quite a performance and the names of the guests will speak for themselves and the quality of their performances.

So, on the first evening, I have invited, as I always do in every edition... I am opening with young artists. This time, I have invited the great soprano Elena Moșuc as a university lecturer, with students from the Lied class who will be accompanied by pianist Bogdana Grecova and who will each perform - in addition to international music and Romanian classical music - a Lied by Dinu Lipatti, which is very important.

On the second evening, we have a guest from Paris. It is the pianist Dimitri Malignan, who graduated from the Cortot School, who also won the Cortot Prize so closely linked to Dinu Lipatti and who will also play Romanian and international music; he will start with two compositions by Dinu Lipatti.

On the third evening, we have as our guest the great flutist Ion Bogdan Ștefănescu, who will also play Dinu Lipatti together with contemporary Romanian composers.

On the next evening, we have pianist Viniciu Moroianu, well known to Dinu Lipatti lovers because he is a veteran of our Festival. We have invited him to each edition and convinced him to add new compositions by Dinu Lipatti to his repertoire at each edition, so that three years ago we managed to record the complete solo piano compositions of Dinu Lipatti as a world premiere - an album that we released and was a great success. Two discs with a trilingual booklet, it sold very well, showed great interest and we ended up last year putting out a second edition.

And last but not least, on Saturday - the last night of the festival, March 23rd - we have invited soprano Elena Moșuc as a soloist, who, together with the wonderful pianist Verona Maier, will also perform the complete Lieder of Dinu Lipatti. She and pianist Viniciu Moroianu... they are the only two performers who have these two complete works in their repertoire, the only performers in the world, and I am proud of this.

And we also managed last year to record with Elena Moșuc and Verona Maier this complete set of Lieder on a CD. In the recital programme, as on the CD, you will be able to listen to the 9 Lieder composed by Dinu Lipatti on verses by great French poets, to which we have added the 7 Lieder on verses by Clement Marrot by George Enescu.

That's pretty much the musical programme, but the Festival is very complex. We have 5 film screenings - one each evening, we have the big exhibition about Dinu Lipatti's life and career, we have the mini-library of the Lipatti House with all our cultural productions - two new scores, the scores of the children's compositions and the score of Dinu Lipatti's lieder, but in a transcription for baritone voice that we commissioned from the composer Vlad Răzvan Baciu, etc.

So, 5 days, we will talk, listen, think, discover or rediscover not only the greatest Romanian pianist of all times, but also a great composer about whom his composition teacher Paul Dukas himself said in his first year at the Conservatory, when Dinu was only 15 years old, that Dinu Lipatti would be a second Enescu. But the legacy he left us, of more than 50 of his own compositions and transcriptions, must become known to all those who love Romanian culture and Romanian classical music.

This year's edition of the "I Love Lipatti" Festival has a double significance. On the one hand, the 107th anniversary of the birth of the famous Romanian composer and pianist and, on the other hand, the "Dinu Lipatti" House of Arts Cultural Centre in the capital celebrates 6 years since its official inauguration. Looking back, do you think you have achieved everything you set out to do when you set out on this journey? Is Lipatti's music sufficiently well known among young people?

Not yet, but this is not due to us, but to the teachers at the specialist high schools who do not open the scores we have given them. Anyway, Dinu Lipatti, thanks to my efforts at the House of Arts in the 3rd district, where I started this project, and the festival, and everything I've been doing for years, Dinu Lipatti is definitely much better known today than he was a few years ago. And, from this point of view, I can say from the bottom of my heart that I have fulfilled the mission that I set myself. I still have a project and I would like to complete the trilogy of CDs I want to record by next year, when I retire, while continuing to put on a third CD all the other compositions I have not yet recorded, so that all those who want to get to know Dinu Lipatti truly and in depth, in all his complexity as a musician of genius, not only as a pianist, but also as a composer, to have at their disposal his biography which I have circulated, his brother's autobiography, the letters which I have released as a world premiere, and then these three CDs containing all his recorded music. The scores were already in print, and our magazines and all our materials, the daily calendar of the "Dinu Lipatti" house of arts, all our postings, all our films, the recordings of the festival editions (for example) from the pandemic period, which we didn't give up making - we simply made them online... we collected thousands of minutes of music composed by Dinu Lipatti and performed by artists from all over the world. We sent his compositions and recorded CDs as far as Brazil, as far as

America, they went to China, to Japan, everywhere. We have planted thousands of seeds in the years since we created the Lipatti project and, little by little, these seeds are beginning to bear fruit. I was visitedby a great soprano, RodicaVica, who came especially from Vienna to give her the scores and the CD and to introduce these lieder into her repertoire.

Dinu Lipatti is sung abroad almost more than here, but I think this will change here too. All those who come and listen to Dinu Lipatti's compositions at the House Lipatti and did not know them, discover them astonished by their beauty and complexity and promise to study them and then present them to the public.

I believe that in time we will all discover that Romanian classical music, besides the great George Enescu, the patriarch of our music, has another composer of genius and his name is Dinu Lipatti.