Despite having been a familiar London face for more than 20 years, Alexander Balanescu is Romanian from his boot heels to his black fedora. On his 1994 album Luminitza, he grasped his eastern European ...

The long-running electronic and postpunk label Mute is launching a new series called An Introduction To..., giving listeners entryways into the catalogs of some of the label's most prolific, if not ...

For many it must have seemed as if time had stood still. There was the Balanescu Quartet live onstage performing their hearts out in many of their iconic numbers from the late ’80s onwards. Other than ...

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Alexander Balanescu, the London-based violinist of Romanian origin, leads the avant- garde string quartet Balanescu Quartet, formed in 1987. Before that, Balanescu was part of the Michael Nyman ...

3 Mariska Hargitay Will Make Broadway Debut in EVERY BRILLIANT THING The performance at The Michael SchimMel Center is inspired by the legendary Romanian singer, Maria Tanase (1913 - 1963). Maria T.

Admiration for Romanian violinist Alexander Balanescu’s renowned Quartet has led Vyvienne Long, one of our most idiosyncratic musicians, to invite them to Ireland on a national tour. The Balanescu ...

When Romanian singer Maria Tanase died in 1963, almost a million people flooded onto the streets of Bucharest for her funeral. A brief archival snippet on the internet reveals a sea of mourners ...

Maria Tanase, who died at the height of her fame in 1963, has been described as Romania's Edith Piaf. A film star as well as a singer, she combed villages for songs, like a true ethno-musicologist, ...

There seems to exist the opinion that if it is good music, it has to be complicated and you have to suffer for it. I think that it has to be complex in the sense that it has to be rich in emotion. For ...

Current music is full of work that seems to aim for a dream-like state, detaching music and sound from its physical reality. Disembodied performances - samples, loops and a cappella sections - are ...

Although composer Alexander Balanescu and his quartet may have touched on his Eastern European roots on earlier albums like Luminitza, here he wholeheartedly embraces it through a personal tribute to ...