Looking over the contents of this journal issue, with the precise intention to write the editorial, I realise that an idea – meant to inform only part of Issue 14 – has taken hold of the whole: we authors are all bound by direct professor-disciple connections. I had initially started from a national student musicology contest within the Lipatti Days Festival 2012, in which our journal was involved as one of the organisers, in enthusiastic response to the invitation received from the Opus Association.
The contest topic – to compare performances of Chopin’s Waltz Op. 69 No. 2 by Dinu Lipatti, Arthur Rubinstein and Alfred Cortot – inspired the two winners differently. The Grand Prize, awarded by a jury composed mostly of Radio people (Monica Isăcescu, Maria Monica Bojin, Ioana Marghita, Ștefan Costache and myself), decided to reward an excellent essay, whose maturity of style and content does not betray the fact that the author, Vlad Văidean, is only a second-year undergraduate. Another distinction went to Sonia Neagoe, a beneficiary of the inspiring impulses of Professor Dinu Ciocan’s classes on the semantics of performance (as are, we are proud to acknowledge, Antigona Rădulescu and myself).
As a theoretical introduction to the pages written by our two younger colleagues (my musicology students), I propose one of my older studies, this time in an English version, which sums up a few perspectives on musical performance (signed by Richard Taruskin, Edward T.Cone, Alfred Hoffman and Joachim Kaiser) and apply similar critical and analytical principles in comparing performances.
It is a happy coincidence that Antigona Rădulescu (a graduate of Grigore Constantinescu’s musicology class, like myself) mentions Dinu Lipatti and Alfred Cortot in her reflections on musical interpretation under the heading Thoughts, thus connecting, even though unawares, her musical discourse to that of her younger colleagues who had compared their performances of Chopin. Moreover, her references to Sonata No. 3 for Piano and Violin by George Enescu complement my own pages on the same topic (obviously, with no prior intention).
Finally, Grigore Constantinescu has sent us a review of an excellent monograph on Prokofiev, for which our colleague and former student Florinela Popa won the 2012 Prize of the Union of Composers and Musicologists in Romania.
It could be argued maliciously that, in this issue 14 of Musicology Today, we are “coagulating” in an “interest group” in which we are favouring each other (professors and students, former students and their former professors). We have no other answer than that it is great to be surrounded by a genuine professional “family”, to treat them and be treated by them with honesty, professionalism and correctness. This is what we learnt from our professors and we would like to transmit the same message to our students.
Valentina Sandu-Dediu
( English translation by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru)