The composer Ulpiu Vlad is part of the board of musicians born in 1945. And his anniversary is on 27^th January, the same day of the first month of the year, month in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born, too.

The light - the leitmotiv of his creation

Regarding the great Viennese classic, Anton Rubinstein said: "Light, your name is Mozart"; through a transfer of his artistic personality, Ulpiu Vlad drowned in an inspirational area, in which the light generated sounds and composed works, such as, Symphony no. 1, Paths in the Light, Lights at Sunset, The Light of the Dreams or Light for the Future.

A musician with a deep skill in handling different musical instruments, Ulpiu Vlad started by studying the oboe at the Bucharest National University of Music and then he transferred to composition, graduating, in 1971, as a disciple of Anatol Vieru. He then improved his musical abilities at the Santa Cecilia Academy of Rome, with Virgilio Mortari and, in time, he astounded with this metamorphosis of the instruments turned into a creator, in the work series called Mozart, series which appeared as a consequence of his researches of unlimited possibilities to combine different timbres of the symphonic orchestra instruments, as well as between them and the vocal quartet.

Going close to the Romanian folk music, during 1977-1980, period in which he was a researcher at the Ethnologic Institute of Bucharest, Ulpiu Vlad created a personal musical phrase, punctuated with motives drawn out from the sonar archetypes based on which, since ancient times, the Romanian creative lead was constructed. We can identify more significantly these tendencies in another succession of works, bearing the generic title Dreams, shortly followed by a valuable collection of vocal-instrumental opuses - Resonances.

A Professional of Music

This is what the musicologist Viorel Cosma tells us about these creations of Ulpiu Vlad: "If the dream, in the sense of leaving the reality towards the eternal sonorous reality, conducted the composer towards the conception based on the idea of selections resulted from a deep spiritual tension, then, the resonance has materialized the attempt to transcribe the reverberations of these struggles belonging to the moments of coil."

The public met and appreciated this music professional, gifted with an extraordinary imagination and a special inward warmth also as a director of the Musical Publishing House of the Composers Union of Romania (1984-1992), director of the Music Directorate belonging to the Ministry of Culture (1992-1993), a Reader (1993-1996) and, since 1996, as a Professor at the Bucharest National University of Music and Vice-President of the Composers Union of Romania (UCMR).

We wish him "Happy Birthday!", as well, to the master Ulpiu Vlad and we dedicate him the Contemporary Sounds show, on Tuesday, the 27^th January, at 23:30. The show will be a sonorous portrait in which you will be able to follow him expressing his inner researches and also to listen two of the most interesting instrumental and choral works he composed.