The RADIRO International Festival of Radio Orchestras

Europes only large-scale festival to be exclusively dedicated to radio orchestras, RADIRO has begun in Bucharest.

Corina Cristea, 23.09.2016, 14:09

As of Friday, Bucharest is the meeting place of some of the world’s most
appreciated radio orchestras as part of RadiRo, the only international
classical music festival for radio orchestras. Now in its third year, the event
is organised by Radio Romania and will be seeing nine concerts in nine days,
featuring six different symphony orchestras from Europe and Asia, and 19
conductors and soloists.

Present for the first time in the event, the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra
opens the festival with George Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody. The Chinese
orchestra will be followed by the orchestra of the Norwegian radio, then by the
orchestras of the radio broadcasters in Leipzig and Vienna. The BBC Concert
Orchestra is due to perform on International Music Day, on October 1st.
The Romanian Radio Orchestra, the Academic Choir and the Children’s Choir under
the baton of Cristian Macelaru will play one of the most spectacular music
pieces of all time, Carmina Burana. Cellist Razvan Suma, who is also the
director of Radio Romania’s orchestras and choirs, will be the soloist:

For us, musicians, organisers and the public, this festival is a
fantastic event. It takes place in the gap between the biennial editions of the
Enescu Festival and is extremely important because it brings together
orchestras from abroad. It requires some extraordinary logistics and a huge
amount of work because such a festival cannot be staged without great effort. I
believe that everybody will benefit from it, including the guest orchestras.

On September 29th, the festival’s 7th concert will
feature the famous violinist Gidon Kremer and the conductor Cornelius Meister.
The two will be performing together with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, whose repertoire includes pieces from the 19th
century as well as contemporary works. Cornelius Meister, who has conducted
this orchestra since 2010, says he is happy to return to Romania because he has
some extraordinary memories of the way in which the performance of Mahler’s 8th
Symphony was received by the public. He also said he considers himself lucky to
be able to return this time with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, who are
in Romania for first time. The festival will be broadcast live on the European
Broadcasting Union network.