The baroque music ensemble "Sempre" will perform a recital on Sunday, March 23rd to mark Early Music Day, celebrated on March 21st.

Mr. Laurențiu Constantin, we are approaching the 21st of March, Early Music Day. What have the musicians of the baroque music ensemble "Sempre" prepared for the traditional concert on this day, which they will perform on March 23rd?

The members of the "Sempre" Ensemble have prepared a repertoire built around nature and its sounds, as heard in the works of some of the composers of the baroque music who can be considered as a kind of avant la lettre programmers. This preoccupation with nature, with its sounds as we see them reflected in cultured music, began particularly in the Renaissance, continued in the early Baroque, and is to be found in almost every great period of music. If we think only of Antonio Vivaldi's Il gardellino, La tempesta di mare, La notte, The Seasons... they are all built around nature and its sounds.

This concern for nature is a long-standing one of the "Sempre" Ensemble, it started last year and will continue. We believe that this concert "Naturalia by Sempre" is just the beginning. The repertoire will be enriched with other pieces and will be presented in other concerts, but in a slightly different form.

The concert is organized in the context of the celebration of the Early Music Day, celebrated on March 21st, an event that we have been organizing for 9 years in Romania, which is positioned on Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday and the beginning of spring - that is, two episodes in history that are wonderful occasions for a celebration dedicated to old music, meaning by early music more than a millennium of music in the European space.

"Stylus Fantasticus" is the title of the concert on April 6th, which the Sempre Ensemble will perform together with violinist Mira Glodeanu. How is the title of the concert reflected in the chosen program?

Stylus Fantasticus may sound very abstract and very musicological, so to the informed, but it is a style that emerged and is very present in today's concert repertoire, except that we don't talk much about this stylus fantasticus, we only talk about the joy of music. Very many of the masterpieces of Baroque music being played today, as I was saying, belong to this stylus fantasticus. It's a style with its origins in works such as fantasias, toccatas, intonation, preludes... it appears somewhere in the 15th century and is found in the writings of some important composers of the Baroque period - Bach, Biber, Buxtehude, these three being the composers from whose pieces the concert program is composed. It is a style of music characterized mainly by improvisatory genres, it is based on the fantasy of the composer and also on the ingenuity of the performer. What we today consider and call basso continuo can be included here, i.e. a set of rules, if you like, which obliges the performer first of all to learn to obey all the rules and then to take the liberty of breaking any rule after he has learned the first ones and falls between them.

Finally, what can you tell us about the next edition of the Bucharest Early Music Festival?

This year, the Bucharest Early Music Festival is celebrating its anniversary. We are celebrating 20 years since the festival was founded, which is why this year's edition brings to Bucharest some heavier names, with repertoires and concert programs that we have never had before. I would like to mention two CD releases, two productions by the "Sempre" Ensemble that are already in the works. One of them is a demi-stage production, as they say, semi-assembled; we are talking about another project realized with musicians from Eastern Europe under the aegis of the Eastern European Early Music Platform. We will have a series of solos, including an evening of Bach's suite, whose 340th birthday we celebrate this year. So part of the festival repertoire is dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach. And just to name a few names that will be the highlights of this year's edition, we are happy to announce that Jordi Savall will return to Bucharest. At the end of November, we are talking about the presence of countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and, in the field of vocal music, The King Singers will be coming, if I am not mistaken, I believe for the first time to Bucharest.

(Photo by Alex Damian)