In Memoriam: Cornel Țăranu

Chamber Music Concert

Saturday, February 24, 2024 / 3 p.m.
Steinway Piano Gallery Detroit, 2700 E West Maple Rd, Commerce Charter Twp, MI 48390

Join us for the chamber music concert “In Memoriam: Cornel Țăranu” on Saturday, February 24, 2024, at the Steinway Piano Gallery Detroit. Cornel Țăranu (June 20, 1934–June 18, 2023) was a Romanian classical composer, musicologist, conductor and cultural manager. A native of Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania, he was always attached to this region and contributed to cultural cooperation between Romanian and ethnic Hungarian musicians. The Romanian Academy remembers him as “a complex personality of contemporary Romanian cultural life, an illustrious creator and teacher.” This concert is the world premiere of Remembering Ţăranu, composed by Ionica Pop, which was commissioned by the American Romanian Festival after the death of Romanian composer, musicologist, and conductor Cornel Ţăranu in 2023.

Concert Program

György Ligeti (1923–2006)
Ballad and Dance (1950)
Hai-Xin Wu & Marian Tănău, violins

Cornel Ţăranu (1934–2023)
String Trio (1952)
Hai-Xin Wu, violin; Mike Chen, viola; Jeremy Crosmer, cello

Cornel Ţăranu
Remembering Bartók (1995)
Marian Tănău & Hai-Xin Wu, violins; Mike Chen, viola; Jeremy Crosmer, cello; Sarah Lewis, oboe 

INTERMISSION

Cornel Ţăranu
Baroccoco (2004)
I. Preludio ostinato
II. Madrigal
III. Siciliana-swing
IV. Swing
Hai-Xin Wu & Marian Tănău, violins; Jeremy Crosmer, cello; Zhihua Tang, piano

Ionica Pop (b. 1967)
Remembering Ţăranu* (2024)
•••World premiere; commissioned by the American Romanian Festival.•••

Cornel Țăranu

composer

Cornel Țăranu (1934–2023) was a distinguished Romanian composer of mostly orchestral, chamber, and vocal works that have been performed throughout Europe and North and South America.

Prof. Țăranu studied composition with Sigismund Toduță at the Gheorghe Dima Academy of Music in Cluj-Napoca from 1951 to 1957, where he later earned a Doctorate in Musicology in 1974. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire from 1966 to1967 and with György Ligeti, Bruno Maderna, and Christoph Caskel in Darmstadt from 1968 to 1972.

Among his many honors are the Great Officer of the Order of Cultural Merit (2004, Romania), five prizes from the Romanian Composers Union (1972, 1978, 1981, 1982, 2001), the Prize of the Academy of the SR of Romania (1973) and the International Koussevitzky Award (1982, for a recording of Garlands). He has been a member of the Romanian Academy since 1993 and was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002.

Prof. Țăranu founded the chamber orchestra Ars Nova in Cluj-Napoca in 1968 and served as its Artistic Director and Conductor until his death. He also served as the Vice-President of the Romanian Composers Union from 1990 to 2023 and as director of the Cluj Modern Festival from 1995 to 2023. He published many musicological works, as well as the book Enescu în Conștiința Prezentului (1969, Editura pentru Literatură).

He taught at the Gheorghe Dima Academy of Music in Cluj-Napoca from 1957 to 2023, where he was Professor of Composition. Prof. Țăranu also gave lectures in Germany, Israel, Switzerland, and the USA. © 2023 by Cristina Taranu. 

Ionică Pop

composer

Ioan (Ionică) Pop was born in Sîngeorz–Băi, Romania, on August 20, 1967. He studied oboe and piano at the Lyceum of Music in Cluj-Napoca from 1977 to 1985. He continued with graduate studies in composition at the Gheorghe Dima Conservatory of Music in Cluj-Napoca from 1986 to 1991, under Professor Cornel Ţăranu, who directed his doctoral thesis, Tendencies and Structures in Today’s Music. Ionică obtained his Ph.D. in music in June 2004. 

In 2006, Mr. Pop completed a diploma as Director of Musical Theatre at the Gheorghe Dima Academy of Music in Cluj-Napoca, and in 2009 graduated from a module course in organ in Professor Erik Turk’s class. He performs piano and organ concerts both at home and abroad. 

Currently, Mr. Pop is Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology of the Gheorghe Dima National Academy of Music, in the Section for Theory, Solfeggio, and Dictation. His works have been performed in prestigious festivals such as Cluj Musical Autumn, Cluj Modern, and George Enescu International Festival; at the George Enescu Museum in Bucharest; and in Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Denmark, France, Israel, and the U.S. In recent years, he organized the Aurel Stroe Festival and Symposium from Buşteni, Romania. 

Mr. Pop is interested in investigating the convergence between composition and direction in instrumental theatre, and also in original ways to compose for voice using his own poems as lyrics. Since 2008, he has been leading the contemporary music ensemble Impact XXI, which includes soprano, trombone, piano, and percussion.

Program Notes

György Ligeti (1923–2006)
Ballad and Dance (1950)
György Ligeti composed Baladă și joc (Ballad and Dance) in 1950. The work is a short composition for two violins based on two Romanian folk songs, the result of Ligeti’s Romanian folk music research conducted at the Folklore Institute of Bucharest in 1949. The work’s two movements are Ballad, a slow, melodic, contrapuntal, and highly expressive work, followed by Dance, which is energetic, exuberant, and virtuosic.

Ionica Pop (b. 1967)
Remembering Ţăranu (2024)
Remembering Ţăranu was commissioned by the American Romanian Festival after the death of Romanian composer, musicologist, and conductor Cornel Ţăranu in 2023. The work is written for string quartet and piano and employs a twelve-tone row, which also serves as a musical cryptogram, as the unifying feature. Pop uses Ţăranu’s full name in the cryptogram as follows: C-do, O-do#, R-re, N-fa#, E-mib, L-labb; U(t)-do4b, N-to, A-fa, R-re2#, Ă-la#, T-dob, with “Ţăranu” musically spelled in retrograde as “unarăŢ.” Juxtaposed with the incredible structure a twelve-tone work requires is the free implementation of several musical quotations. Among them is the children’s song “Ţăranu e pe câmp” (“The peasant is in the field”). The inclusion of a song that includes “Ţăranu” in its title is doubly meaningful, as this song was also a favorite of Ţăranu’s daughter, Cristina, when she was a child. Other quotations used by the composer include Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, a Romanian “Happy Birthday” song, “O Tannenbaum,” Ţăranu’s Remembering Bartók, and the opening rhythm of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The middle of the work is aleatoric and improvisatory in nature, so that no two performances will ever be the same. This is the world premiere of Remembering Ţăranu.

Nichita Stanescu
How to invent a flower (A inventa o floare)
Passages from the poem will be read during the performance of the Remembering Ţăranu.

Romanian:
Din nou mă sprijin numai de cuvinte
Nu e nici o muzică să izbucnească din osul nimănui
Și nici sufletul nu are în sine liniștea potrivită orelor fericite legănate în adaosul de alcool blând.
Și nici prietenul cel puternic și apropiat tristeților și marilor idei.
Și nici femeia credincioasă
că o bătrână vulpe gravidă și atotștiutoare
în amănunțitele treburi ale câmpiei.
Și nici îngerul tatuat cu hărți,
nici unul
nu este de față.
Numai cuvintele, numai ele prea puțin doritele,—
că niște mercenari nervoși
îmi urmăresc gestul inimii amorțind,
jetul privirii pulverizând
imaginile tradiționale ale lumii mele
alergând sub ramuri, înotând în mare levitând în aerul plin de simunuri
English:
Again I rely only on words
There is no music erupting from anyone’s bone of the heart
And neither does the soul have within itself the tranquility suitable for hours swayed in the addition of mild alcohol.
And neither is the strong and close friend of sorrows and grand ideas,
And neither the faithful woman
like an old fox, pregnant and all knowing
in the detailed affairs of the field
And neither the angel tattooed with maps,
Not one of them
Is present.
Only the words, only they the ones very little desired,
like angry mercenaries
follow the gesture of my heart, numbing,
the jet of a gaze pulverizing
the traditional images of my world
running under the branches, swimming in the sea levitating in the air full of simooms