The famous actress Alexandrina Halic and the pianists Florian Mitrea and Daria Tudor proposean event that combines music and storieson the 7^th of December, at the "Act" Theater, dedicated to the whole family. The show is entitled "A December Story" and includes, in the first part, music from the concert suite after the ballet "Sleeping Beauty" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and selections from the suite "My Mother, the Goose" by Maurice Ravel, and in the second part - selections from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's music for "The Nutcracker".

An interview with pianist Florian Mitrea:

Music and stories interweave in the performance you propose for the 7^th of December. How did this project called "A December Story" come to life?

It started from an idea of mine to bring classical music closer to children, to the younger generation, and I thought about how I fell in love with it. I come from a family where there were no records with Beethoven's symphonies when I was growing up. Instead, there were the great, wonderful children's radio theater productions that were illustrated with the greatest musical masterpieces. I listened to Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Prokofiev not knowing that I was listening to the greatest music. At the same time, I was also falling in love with literature, stories and music. To me, it seems to be an excellent way for a child to go towards great music, without intermediaries, without any explanations about all the techniques behind the music, but simply that music comes as a package, it comes merged with a story that he understands, he grasps it directly, it speaks directly to his soul. This is what we wanted to create on stage!

We are particularly honored to collaborate on this project with a legend of children's radio theater, the actress Alexandrina Halic, who has spoken to so many children's souls both on stage at the "Creangă" Theatre and on the microphone of the radio theater. And, we hope, that in this way, we won't only educate, but also put on a beautiful show, a magical holiday show.

What should the audience expect?

Our wish is that the audience can find something in this show for every age, no matter what age they are. Both young and old audiences are allowed to imagine anything during the show. The little ones will be drawn to the story itself, the way the music colors the emotion of the story, the images that will be projected along with the musical-narrative storytelling and hopefully further help the message of the story to reach the little ones. And the grown-ups... we hope that they will have a nostalgic, melancholic experience, perhaps remembering their childhood, the stories they tasted at the time and finding them now in a different perspective. As we all know, any story can be re-read at any age and we can find in it new values, new values even in adulthood.

It is a musical theater performance, but without compromising the music. I didn't want to compromise the integrity of the musical for the sake of the story. The concert suites from "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Nutcracker" will be presented as Rachmaninov arranged them for 4-handed piano at Tchaikovsky's request. Tchaikovsky himself commissioned Rachmaninov to turn them into a concert suite for piano duet. They will be presented in their entirety. Between the parts of the suites the history of each story will be told by Mrs. Alexandrina Halic and we hope to create in this way a full performance, a complete show, for all ages.

One could say that interdisciplinary performances are already a significant part of your work. How important do you think they are in today's cultural environment?

It is. I very much like to combine the arts, to combine them with socially relevant notions.

To answer your question directly, I think it's essential, it seems to me that we need to lean towards our art, to look carefully at what we have to do in order to get its message to reach a wider and wider section of society.

We are living in very difficult, very disorienting times and it seems to me that art and culture in general can offer an anchor in positivity, an anchor in normality and we just need to find a way of developing them in such a way that we can make them accessible to everyone. Some people may not have had access to a concert hall, they may not have had access to a musical education since they were children, but they can understand a story, they can understand a light show, they can understand an acting game that merges with a piece of music without explaining to the person concerned how to compose a symphony and so on. Of course, my wish is that afterwards they will get to the concert hall and go to a conventional, traditional classical music concert, but I want to offer that entrance that was offered to me.

I come from a non-music-loving family, I didn't have musicians in my family... it's simply how I learned that classical music is the greatest music, in an indirect way. And that's what interdisciplinary performances want to do. It's much harder to go into a school and talk about a symphony than to go as I did last year, as part of the "Wanderer" Festival, on a tour of schools, where we brought a piano with us and story projections, playing pieces of Chopin, Prokofiev, Liszt on the piano exactly as a soundtrack, and the kids were watching a silent movie, basically, whose soundtrack we were producing live, there in front of them.

And it was a great experience! I chatted with them after the shows. I asked them if they had been to concerts before. They asked us how the piano works. They came, they looked in a grand piano for the first time and I think that's great!