The greatly appreciated pianist Daria Tudor will be the stage partner of cellist Jan Sekaci in a new recital by "The Heirs of Musical Romania". The event will take place on Tuesday, June 10th, 2025, starting at 7 p.m. at the Radio Hall. In the first part of a wider interview, the young pianist introduces the program of the recital and tells us about her collaboration with Jan Sekaci, and about other key points of her musical career so far:

Jan Sekaci told our colleague IoanaȚintea during an interview about the program you are preparing for the recital on June 10th. We would love to hear your perspective, too.

This program is very close to my soul; these are works that I have accumulated in my repertoire at very different stages of my training,during my undergraduate studies and afterwards - works that have somehow built an arc from the beginning to the end of my undergraduate studies. The Sonata in F major by Johannes Brahms is a touchstone for every pianist approaching Brahms' chamber repertoire, certainly along with other works, but it is an extraordinarily technically demanding work for the pianist, for the cellist, and an extremely difficult work to carry as an ensemble. I am delighted to be able to bring it to Romania, togetherwith Jan, along with a sonata that is a musical jewel, as I would call it, the Debussy sonata. This is a kind of music that I have had a very hard time getting close to and which I have come to love enormously, and I hope that this sonorous universe will captivate the audience and bring them into the concert hall. It is an extraordinarily diverse program that we both love in so many ways.

Please tell us about your musical collaboration with Jan Sekaci.

The collaboration with Jan started in 2020, I hope I'm not mistaken, at the "Eufonia" Festival in Timisoara, but we both finished the same high school. I left; I finished the "Dinu Lipatti" National College of Arts the same year Jan came. We knew about each other, but we didn't meet at that time. Later we met in Timișoara and we found out that we were both in Berlin and since then, the collaborations between us have started gradually and more and more often; and now Jan is a master student at the Barenboim-Said Academy, where I am the pianist of the cello classes. Therefore, for a little over a year now we have been seeing each other weekly and we have created a lot of memories together - from the "Enescu" Competition to dozens of recordings, preparations, emotions, backstage life. Many memories have accumulated over the past year.

Who were the mentors who have influenced your musical career so far?

This is the first time I am asked this question. Some, both in Romania and in Berlin, that I would like to mention are: my teachers, Adriana Bocăneanu and Șerban-DimitrieSoreanu from when I was in Bucharest, following those from the time when I came to Berlin - Pascal Devoyon, my piano teacher and these people I speak about with very great affection, the Artemis Quartet, in the version of Natalia Prischepenko, GregorSigl, EckartRunge, Frank-ImmoZichner, Konstantin Heidrich and my lied teachers - Eric Schneider and Axel Bauni.

You are also exploring other artistic landscapes in connection with music - for example in the "Songs of the Clown" project, or in the more recent performance of "Remnants of an Idea". Could you tell us about these approaches and about the way in which they influence your artistic perspective?

These approaches came very naturally, because I believe that our mission as artists is to convey the message of music. And out of a feeling that maybe the audience has changed, that maybe the interest has decreased a little bit in the direction in which we traditionally convey the messages, I wanted and still want, without the classical music being altered in any way, but presented exactly as it was composed, to always be supported by something else. Because I think - this is my theory - we can no longer reach young audiences on one sensory channel alone. I don't know whether they still have the patience to decode a message that only comes through the auditory channel. And so we wanted, both in "Songs of the Clown" and "Remnants of an Idea", to reach them with another sensory channel - either with a story, or a costume, or both...With a program that shouldn't have been programmatic - because those lieds had a title, but they were never written in the form of a show - the show is our creation, that's how "Songs of the Clown" came out. And I think this is a successful endeavor. From the feedback I've received, I think there's potential; in fact, there's the desire for people - young people - to listen to classical music. However, they have lost the handle to grasp and to open the door to this world. And I'm firmly convinced that this is not the only way... but I also think that performances like "Remnants of an Idea" or "Songs of the Clown" are a way of opening the door for young people to the world of classical music in the form that we know - the untouched, pure, aural way.