Pianist Florian Mitrea returned to the country to perform Maurice Ravel's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G major on Friday evening on the stage of the Radio Hall, accompanied by the National Radio Orchestra. Giuseppe Mengoli will conduct. The pianist, founder of the "Hoinar" Festival, which recently ended successfully on the stage of the Romanian Athenaeum, spoke to our colleague Ariadna Ene Iliescu:

What is your perspective on the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G major, a work written by Maurice Ravel shortly after his return from an extensive tour of the United States?

I think we can see in this concerto pretty much all the influences that came together at that time, but especially in Ravel's personality. There is already a well-known jazz, jazz-inspired side to this concert. What is perhaps less known and less brought out is the Basque influence. Ravel was half Basque; his mother was of Basque origin, from the Iberian Peninsula. And especially in the first part, in my opinion, there are some folkloric influences, a certain nasalness, if you like, of sound, a certain dissonance done intentionally... sure, molded with the jazz part that inspired him in America. He must have been inundated with all these American influences that Europeans were discovering with a fantastic frenzy. Stravinsky was crazy about jazz, the music of Debussy and so on took the bait of this American jazz, which was appearing in this era.

You seem very enthusiastic... would you say that, from an expressive point of view, Ravel's concert explores this area of joy, of vitality?

Absolutely! It's a playful concert, an exuberant concert. It's a concert where both the solo part and the orchestral part explode in a plethora of emotions, of emotional states through which we pass from the first part - which is, as I said earlier, European folk and passes a little into the American zone - to the second part, which could be a simple song - extraordinarily simple, with some very colourful harmonies and a fantastic duet between the piano and the solo instruments in the orchestra (flute, oboe, English horn...). Lots of duets that chain together in this part.

And the third part, which my master compares to a fair, a marketplace where you hear everything - bugles blaring, merchants selling their wares, children playing... it's a whole human circus in this third part, quite a far cry from the jazz we had in the second part, a bit in the first part.

It's a very short concert, considering that usually piano concerts are half an hour and up; in this one, in 20 minutes you go through almost every possible human emotion - from melancholy to exuberance to joy.

How does it feel for you to collaborate again on stage with the National Radio Orchestra?

It's a privilege, a great honour. They are such a caliber body that it's always a thrill and I try to live up to their expectations. I have a lot of experiences with the Radio Hall, especially recently when I was also a recital soloist in the "Mihail Jora" Studio. It's a joy to be there again! Even recently, in the Enescu Festival, my concert was also here, in the Mihail Jora Studio. So, it's wonderful to be performing a work I've never played in Romania, it's exciting, but at the same time, I can't wait!

And now, let's go back to the "Hoinar" Festival for a moment. You are the founder of Hoinar Ferstival, which aims to be a different kind of classical music festival for a wide audience. Looking back at the most recent edition, which ended on the 14^th of May, what do you think worked best?

I think that our intention to propose classical music done at the highest level. At no point did we set out to simplify classical music to make it more accessible, but on the contrary, we go with classical music exactly as it was intended, as I feel it, which is with a lot of emotion.

I don't think classical music was composed for concert hall protocol, but it was composed for the human soul. Otherwise, I don't know why anyone would have bothered to compose it. So we thought we'd go with the idea of putting classical music in its original form, as it is, but in a more unusual format. So each event was a regular classical music item with a slightly different angle.

For example, the opening night was a lied recital with drama, a set, a light show and a narrative thread that tied all of these lieder into one theme.

The second recital was a piano recital, again, with a slightly unusual twist; the music was chosen only from the repertoire inspired by fairy tales, from stories, and the recital was held in semi-darkness because, on the wall behind the piano, we projected the stories that were told by the music and so the children - because that was who the recital was for - could follow the story and listen to the music at the same time and so realise that classical music is actually a very vivid form of expression through which we tell stories as easily as we tell them through film or theatre.

The third evening was an evening of opera, again unusual - one actress, one pianist, in a small independent theatre, where basically the subject of the opera took place only half a metre away from you. We even had feedback from the audience, someone told us, "It was like being in my best friend's room listening to her talking on the phone to her boyfriend."

And the fourth night, the closing night, was a chamber recital at the Romanian Athenaeum. The unusual idea there was to present this Carnival of the Animals, which can be read by all ages. Children enjoy it because of the humour and the very accessible subject, but also adults, because they can read it in a different, more moralizing, way. And we had with us the wonderful actress Alexandrina Halic, a voice of radio theatre, who framed each character, each animal in the carnival, with poems and texts by Ion Pilat, Mihai Eminescu, Otilia Cazimir, George Topârceanu... And the audience reaction moved us.