Cabrillo Festival Goes Romanian

Conducting wizkid Cristian Măcelaru teams up with seasoned composer Dan Dediu to premiere the latter’s "Levante", a passionate, chimeric musical map of his native Brăila, the charming port-city at the mouth of the Danube. The dream-like composition, transposing a spiritual, imagined topography of "the East", is presented, with the support of RCI, at Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Californian musical feast curated by Cristian Măcelaru. The piece will be performed as part of ”Contrasts” Orchestra Concert at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on Saturday, August 3, 7pm.

Dan Dediu was born in 1967 in Brăila, Romania. He earned his undergraduate degree in composition at the Academy of Music in Bucharest and attended postgraduate courses at HMdK in Vienna. He later earned his Ph.D. at the National University of Music in Bucharest. Dediu was awarded scholarships and fellowships by the Alfred-Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg; Alban-Berg Foundation, Vienna; New Europe College, Bucharest; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; and Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr, Switzerland, Bavarian Ministry for Culture, Germany. Among his many awards are first prizes in a national competition in Cluj-Napoca (1986,1988), in a competition for chamber music with brass in Budapest and Barcs (1990), and in the competition of the Orchestre Français de Flûtes (2000). Other honors include the George Enescu Prize, the Prize at Expo 2000 in Hannover from the Romanian Development Agency (2000), the Prize of the competition of the Galliard Ensemble in London (2000), the Erster Preis in the competition of the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin (2002), and the cultural prize Prometheus-Opera Prima in Romania (2002). His more than 160 works are performed worldwide and produced as recordings by Albany Records, Cavalli, NEOS, and Casa Radio.