Iancu Dumitrescu — Ansamblul Hyperion Conducerea Muzicală: Iancu Dumitrescu (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)
It’s one thing for a musician to have come to adulthood in the 1960s, and another thing to say that they did so in communist Rumania. Forced to form in a time and place of proscription, Iancu Dumitrescu learned not only to aim high, but to carve and string his own bow. Faced with a state-controlled system that took a dim view of many current trends and enforced its perspectives by reviewing every score performed by existing ensembles, he started his own band.
In 1976 Dumitrescu formed the Hyperion Ensemble, which would remain his most frequent means of hearing his ideas realized for decades to come. Four years after it first convened, the ensemble checked into a Bucharest radio station to make its first album for Electrecord, which at the time was the nation’s sole record label. While Dumitrescu was billed as conductor, only one of the session’s four pieces was his; the other three were by Romanian composers who had been practicing longer. The program includes compositions by Octavian Nemescu and Corneliu Cezar that combine chamber musicians and electronics, as well as one by Ștefan Niculescu that called upon its players to improvise.
Dumitrescu plays a bit of piano on Niculescu’s "Sincronie," reinforcing a resonant percussive core from which woodwinds and strings branch out to form an airy structure embedded with tiny, turning phrases. Corneliu Cezar’s “Rota” combines bucking brass with in-your-face electronics that combine representations of natural phenomena with unbridled blippery. If someone chopped it up into little pieces and told you that the parts came from Can’s ethnographic forgery series, you’d have a hard time proving them wrong. Nemescu's "Combinatii In Cercuri" contains both the session’s oldest and newest music. It lays a sparse, eventful exchange between strings and woodwinds over whirring electronics, which at certain points seem to swallow the acoustic sounds whole. Taken together, they show that Dumitrescu was part of a community that was aware of advances occurring elsewhere in Europe, but did not feel obligated to pay direct homage to them.
But what makes this disc, which is finally enjoying its first CD edition as well as its first US release, more than a footnote is Dumitrescu’s debut, "Movemur et Sumus." While it is mostly performed by once cello and one contrabass, with the composer adding a middle section of bowed, metallic percussion, it never feels reduced. Each stroke of a bow across strings unleashes a spectrum of sounds that seem to simultaneously radiate and absorb light. This synaesthetic effect isn’t an end in itself, but a vehicle for transcendence. The release of this music in the USA at a moment when the country seems to be rushing headlong into the same kind of dull, domineering idiocracy that Dumitrescu had to endure seems sadly apposite; may it serve as a beacon for artists trying to figure out how to be true in false times.
