I didn't need to look at the subtitles because I'm fluent in Romanian - its one of the three foreign languages I speak. I did not watch the whole video, just the beginning of it, but I would wager that they didn't have one single solitary piece of Pan Flute music in the whole soundtrack. That's a crying shame, because the Pan Flute is an indigenous folk instrument of Romania, and NOT of Peru or South America, which is where everyone thinks it is from. Gheorghe Zamfir, the King of the Pan Flute, and one of my teachers, is Romanian - but not a gypsy. There are Pan Flute virtuosos who are Romanian gyspsies, most notably my first Pan Flute teacher, Damian Luca, and the Paganini of the Pan Flute, Simion Stanciu, who called himself Syrinx. Although Simion Stanciu played an incredibly wide variety of genres of music on the Pan Flute, his great specialty was classical and baroque music. Fanica Luca, who was Damian Luca's great uncle, was the grandaddy of the Pan Flute in the twentieth century, and saved the Pan Flute from extinction. In the late thirties, he looked around and saw only a handful of feeble old men who still played the Pan Flute. Fanica Luca realized that if he didn't teach the Pan Flute to a new generation of musicians, it would go extinct. And so, he started teaching Pan Flute at the music conservatory in Bucharest. Damian Luca started accompanying his uncle Fanica Luca out on his concert tours, and was kind of like a "poster boy" for Fanica Luca's teaching skills, inspiring other parents to send their sons in for training on the Pan Flute. Gheorghe Zamfir went to the conservatory with his heart dead set on learning how to play the accordion, but the accordion class closed due to insufficient interest and enrollment, and Zamfir was shoved, despite his vehement protests, into the Pan Flute class - and the rest is history. I leave you with a link to a video from YouTube of Fanica Luca and his nephew Damian Luca playing the Romanian Rhapsody as a duet. This popular folk tune, whose name translates to something like, "I have a Leu (dollar) and I'd like a drink" was used as the opening theme of a Romanian Rhapsody composed by Romania's national composer, George Enescu, who was Yehudi Menuhin's violin teacher.
And a video of my main teacher, Damian Luca, playing Ciocirlia, a famous gypsy piece in which the Pan Flute imitates the Sky Lark:
And a video of the incomparable Simion Stanciu, or Syrinx:
This is an anthology of some of SimionStanciu's most memorable pieces put together posthumously in his memory, with an emphasis on gypsy music - which is why I selected it. My favorite piece of his is the second one, the Hora Dinspreziua, or Hora in the Twilight.
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