I invite you to spend An Evening at the Opera on Saturday, 7^th June, starting at 19:00. It is a performance which states high and audibly a great admiration for a Romanian artist who has enlivened the lyric performance area worldwide for two decades. It is an anniversary Evening that brings forward the mark, 'Ileana Cotrubaş - 75' and the sonority of perhaps the purest voice. It is a voice that embodies her feelings and emotions. She has given births to scores and characters from Mozart's Pamina, Suzanna, Contesa, Ilya and Vitellia to Gilda and Violetta, and from Mimi and Norina and Micaela, Mellisande and Leila. She feels wisely and forcefully the contemporary lyric performance's perils. She owns an absolute sovereign voice that will give us flashbacks and some fond musical phrases, impressions and unique artistic heart beats, accents and notes, brightness and high-mindedness at the even fall, in a three-hour broadcast.

She comes from a past affluent of legendary voices and she is a model that acts for all those recordings named by the French people disques cultes - meaning exemplary achievements for the discography of some works such as, La Traviata, La Bohème, the Magic Flute, the Marriage of Figaro, Pelléas et Mélisande or the German Requiem by Brahms. Thus, the voice of Ileana Cotrubaş remains an ever young font of music, music atmosphere and culture. I hope that her voice will entirely enchain you on Saturday. She will speak out on the endangerment of the mediocrities in opera and will perform one of the initial roles in the French repertoire, expressing her gratitude to her Romanian maestros and pointing out the high and particular performance of the young generation in a resistless and amiably voice.

I brought off the interview,which I am going to broadcast on this occasion, ten years ago and unfortunately it is the last interview in the archives of Radio Romania. We have chosen the complete performance of Manon by Jules Massenet, recorded in 1982 by the EMI Label for this anniversary hand in glove with Ileana Cotrubaş. If you wander why we made this choice, our great soprano gives you the reasons: 'I performed Manon's role for the first time in 1974, when I made my first appearance at the Palais Garnier in Paris; and I performed the way I felt I should at that moment. I only had to sing in five performances. I think I sang it best when I recorded it with Janine Reiss - who was a kind of La Papesse for the French music. I embraced with her not only Manon, but almost all my works from the French repertoire: the Tales of Hoffmann, the Pearl Fishers, Pelleas et Melisande. I must say that I was also ell prepared for my first appearance in '74 by the maestro Constantin Stroescu, my Romanian teacher; but I studied with Janine Reiss mainly the temper of the character, and this is the hardest part in construing this character. And I dare say that when I recorded it there weren't any failings. I performed along with Alfredo Kraus, also a very good French opera performer. This is why, I find Manon by Massenet a perfect choice for your Evening at the Opera programme. Perhaps it is one of my best complete performances,…'

I invite you to join me on Saturday evening and I hope you won't miss my performance!