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Alexandru Agache: The Songs of Nicolae Bretan

£12.69

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Label: Nimbus

Cat No: NI5810

Barcode: 0710357581021

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Release Date: 1st October 2007

Artists

Alexandru Agache (baritone)
Martin Berkofsky (piano)

Artists

Alexandru Agache (baritone)
Martin Berkofsky (piano)

About

Alexandru Agache was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and studied there at the Conservatory (now renamed Music Academy). In 1979 he joined the Cluj Romanian Opera Theatre, making his debut in a major role in 1981 singing Sharpless (Madama Butterfly).

He won the Lucca International Singing Competition in 1983 and has since then appeared in the famous opera houses worldwide.

Of Belarusian ancestry, Martin Berkofsky was a child prodigy who began giving public performances at the age of eight. His principle teachers were Mieczyslaw Munz (a student of Ferruccio Busoni,) Konrad Wolff (a student of Artur Schnabel,) Walter Hautzig, a student of both Schnabel and Munz, and Hans Kann. His early years were marked by recordings with the London and Berlin Symphony Orchestras, co-directorship of the Long Island Chamber Chamber Ensemble, where he met and worked with the Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness, and recordings of the lieder of Nicolae Bretan for Nimbus with the Romanian baritone Ludovic Konya.

Nicolae Bretan (1887 - 1968) was a Romanian opera composer, a baritone, conductor and critic. He studied in Cluj, Vienna and Budapest before becoming one of the pioneers of Romanian opera. That the name Bretan is hardly known internationally was due to the Communist Regime that, in 1948, marked the composer as a "non person". His works belong to the best of Romanian Operas.

Bretan’s operas, and above all his monumental folk epic Horia, can perhaps be seen as his main body of work; and yet it is a song that runs like a connecting thread through his entire creative life. Whereas the operas were largely written during the time of his activity at the two theatres in Cluj, the composition of songs occupied him from his youth until the late years of his life.

Bretan, who discovered his passion for singing very early and began to cultivate his voice, felt just as early the urge to express himself in songs of his own, to give musical form to his feelings. Although he availed himself of poems in various different languages for that purpose, his own language seems to have been music, and his true home the realm of tones. With the title “My Lieder-Land” and the motto “We do not always belong to the land in which our cradle rocked, and therefore we are often searching for our true fatherland,” from Théophile Gautier, which he placed before his collected songs, he himself confirmed that song was consciously a central manifestation of his life and work.