On Friday, November 7th, 2025, the "Héritage" Hall in Cluj-Napoca will host the inaugural concert of the international tour Way to Kölner Philharmonie, performed by the newly founded Romanian Symphony Orchestra. On this occasion, violist Cristian Andriș, the ensemble's Artistic Director, spoke with Ioana Țintea about this event.

Cristian Andriș, to begin with, could you tell us more about the Romanian Symphony Orchestra project, described in the press release as a "national team" of Romanian musicians? How did the idea of creating this ensemble come about, and what is the orchestra's current structure?

The Romanian Symphony Orchestra is an expanded version of the Romanian Chamber Orchestra. The idea of creating this new name came to me in August 2024, after we performed at the Concertgebouw last year with a symphonic version of our group-about 50 musicians on stage-under the name Romanian Chamber Orchestra, which didn't quite fit. I felt the need to establish a new ensemble that builds on the previous one-its traditions and principles that we have followed since 2019. We will use this new name for all the large-scale projects of the Romanian Chamber Orchestra.

So, the Romanian Symphony Orchestra is essentially the symphonic version of the Romanian Chamber Orchestra, comprising between 50 and 80 musicians. The musicians fall into three categories, the largest being Romanians living abroad.

The goal of our projects is to connect musicians from the diaspora with those in Romania-the 16 million Romanians living in the country.

That means the first level consists mainly of Romanian musicians active abroad. The second level includes some of the most representative Romanian musicians performing in the leading orchestras of Romania.

And in each of our projects, we also feature scholarship holders we are very proud of. For example, in this project, over 25 young violinists applied for the six available positions in our ensemble, of whom 12 were from the diaspora.

The Way to Kölner Philharmonie international tour, centered on the theme of "destiny," begins on Friday in Cluj-Napoca and continues through several cities in Germany, also marking 145 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Germany. In your view, what does cultural diplomacy mean, and how does this project contribute to strengthening it?

Cultural diplomacy plays a very important role because it raises awareness of the fact that musicians from a given country-Romanians, for instance-have reached Germany and now hold leading positions there as section leaders or concertmasters in their orchestras. However, once they represent, say, the Nuremberg Philharmonic or the Kaiserslautern Radio Philharmonic, they are perceived as musicians of those ensembles, even though each orchestra in Western Europe includes 25 or 26 different nationalities.

But when such a musician returns to their country of origin, that bond with the place where they were born and trained is re-established. At that moment, they perform, so to speak, under the Romanian flag-representing a Romanian ensemble that aims to showcase the cultural values of Romania spread across the world.

Could you tell us more about the program the Romanian Symphony Orchestra will present to the Cluj audience at the opening of the tour, and who the guest artists will be?

First of all, as you mentioned, the theme of this tour is destiny. Why destiny? Naturally, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 is the central piece. Its theme is universally known, but since this marks the birth of a new ensemble, destiny symbolizes a path that will be defined from concert to concert.

At each of our tours, we distinguish ourselves from other orchestras because we don't perform identical programs everywhere, and for each concert hall we feature different soloists.

Thus, we will perform Brahms' Double Concerto, both in Cluj and Cologne. Violinist Ioana Cristina Goicea, with whom I also performed at this year's Enescu Festival, will be the violin soloist, and Benedict Klöckner, an old friend of ours, will be the cello soloist.

In addition, together with Benedict Klöckner, we will perform Strauss' Don Quixote in Koblenz-the most extensive work of this tour and a real challenge for us. It will be by far the largest orchestral setup we have ever had. We will also perform Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, with Sérgio Pires, principal clarinetist of the London Symphony Orchestra, as soloist.

Moreover, we wanted to include a piece with Romanian folk influences, so we chose Béla Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances.

This time, we will have a single conductor for the entire tour-Maestro Gabriel Bebeșelea.