Pianist Florian Mitrea gave information about the 2025 edition of the Festival "Hoinar. Odyssey" in an interview with Ana Sireteanu.

Mr. Florian Mitrea, you have chosen the theme of the 8th edition of the "Hoinar" Festival to be the journey, thus, each of the five performances of the current edition combines, as you have accustomed us, several arts. How will this theme that you are proposing be musically illustrated in the five performances taking place from May 15th to May 20th, 2025?

Travel is a very topical theme. Life itself is a journey and music could not fail to reflect this in so many facets, but as you mentioned, we also wanted to express this through stories told directly to the audience and which I hope will impress. We begin on Thursday, May 15th, with a classical piano recital, accompanied by a light show and including a transposition of the orchestra into an electronic soundscape for the last piece in the recital. For this recital we have chosen the Romantic repertoire, Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms, arguably the greatest seekers in music history. The Romantics were always restless, searching for the answers to the great questions of mankind and explored them in their music. That's why it seemed the most appropriate repertoire to tackle on the opening night of the festival. On May 16th, we continue with a new musical, a script written by me and actress Sarah Gabriel, with music by George Gershwin and Kurt Weill. There is the most common journey, the journey as a form of immigration, it is about the drama of uprooting from one's homeland, the drama of family separation, but also the chance of great encounters between cultures, where the greatest musical currents have been born. It is about the migration to America in the 1930s, when a very large European population went to America and brought with them their own culture, which merged with the American culture and gave rise to this plethora of music. It's very simplistic to call Gershwin only jazz music because there are many more influences that combine in his music.

On Saturday, May 17th, we have a more unusual performance, inspired somewhat by the family life of Mozart, the first musician to go on tour with his father, playing at all the royal courts of Europe and beyond. And the show M, as it is called, is inspired by his family life, his relationship with his parents, with his sister. It's a show about our journey, everyone's journey, in our own family, the misunderstandings, the arguments, but also the reconciliation that comes at the beginning. It is a theater performance with live piano music, exclusively music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. On Sunday, May 18th, we come to the fourth show at the Act Theatre, Remnants of an Idea. There it's a deeper, more intimate journey, the journey of the soul on the border between life and death, with a Trio no. 2 for piano, violin and cello by Dmitri Shostakovich and excerpts from Franz Schubert's Winterreise (Winter Journey), arranged for piano trio by pianist Daria Tudor, who also wrote the story of the evening, it's a newly conceived novella by Daria about a young war doctor who goes through this journey I told you about and - to the accompaniment of Shostakovich and Schubert's music - we discover what happens to Dima after he is wounded on the battlefield. Finally, we arrive on May 20th at the performance in the Great Hall of the Romanian Athenaeum, the closing concert of our festival, which we have called Hallelujah Junction. It's the title of the play by John Adams included in tonight's program. This is about the journey coming to great crossroads. Hallelujah Junction is a work for two pianos, which will be accompanied by a non-verbal theater choreography created especially for the closing night of the festival by actor Paul Cimpoieru. In this way, we wanted to bring even to the Athenaeum, in the conventional temple of music, a pairing of theater and music, a perhaps unusual association for this venue.

You are also back with invitations for the public to meet the festival's artists in a series you have called Hoinar la taifas. Could you tell us more about how you have envisioned these interactions with the audience and also what feedback you have received on the syncretic performances you propose from the audiences of previous editions?

Hoinar la taifas is inspired by the 2024 edition of the festival in which we proposed a meeting with the audience after the performance of Francis Poulenc's The Human Voice. We had guests from the world of theater, music and psychology, with whom we discussed the issues of the opera with the audience who had just witnessed our performance. It was a great evening, with people talking openly about a musical work, not necessarily accessible, but I was pleasantly surprised to see people from all walks of life attending the opera and staying for the discussion. This inspired us to go out to the audience again, this time with four meetings at chit-chat. So, after each performance at the Act Theater, we stay for a discussion with the audience of that evening's performance, moderated by Bogdan Stănescu from Romanian Television, and we are very keen to understand how the audience perceives these performances, whether our formats which are, let's say, more unusual, help them to access classical music that they may not listen to frequently.

We don't want to make a festival for ourselves, we want to make a festival for the public and to contribute, as much as we can, to the widening of the audience of culture in Romania. We don't dilute the message of the music in any way, the music is presented as it was conceived by the composer in each case, but we propose it in a new concept that addresses not only the ear, but also the soul and the mind. Every piece of music has a message that can be understood by anyone, you don't have to be a musician, not even a music lover; if the issues of the piece are understood, you can understand the music and enjoy it.