Greetings from Bistrița! (pronounce: BEES - tree - tsah). I doubt you know this city, unless you are either Romanian, somehow connected by work, family or interests to Romania, or a hard-core fan of Bram Stoker's Dracula (I happen to be all the three of them!), in which case you would know that the city is mentioned as the placement of the hotel "Coroana de Aur" (Golden Crown), a hotel that was effectively built to make nature match fiction many years after the novel's publication (1897) - something that the hotel management, conveniently, omitted to mention in their webpage. Be as it may, I must confess that in a literary corner of my heart I was hoping that the organizers (Societatea de Concerte) would put me exactly in that hotel. Of course, that didn't happen, but I plan on visiting the place tomorrow after the concert!

The Romanian edition of my Tango Rendezvous International format features a group of talented, enthusiatic musicians. I hope I will have the time to write in more detail about each of them and my interactions and conversations with them. Enough for now to mention that, although being far from a specialist in tango dance, I was kindly coerced into giving two introductory "tango lessons" to both our pianist (Raluca Săbau, from Cluj) and the second violin of the ensemble (Károly Lokodi, Hungarian-Romanian from the same city), to the delight -or disconcert!- of the rest of our hotel's guests, since these happened in the dinning room. I am enjoying also thoughtful conversations on Hungarian, Romanian, Gypsy and Balkan music with double bass player Márton Kostyák, with whom I feel connected through our double music background (tango/classic and Hungarian folk/classic, respectively). I knew Dana Tolan, our first violin, from the US, from the Southern Illinois Music Festival (in which, in fact, we participated in a mini tango project) and had the pleasure to met here French violoncelist François Chanon, a man with an exquisite combination of mild manners, music talent, lively curiosity and sharp intelligence, as well as Hungarian-Romanian violist Mólnar József.

After my more-than-accidented arrival in Bistrița, in fact, starting that very morning, we have been working intensively on our program. I am confident that we will be ready to offer a solid rendering of Piazzolla's music, and feel that my colleagues are really getting to the spirit of it. My plan is to wrap up the program in the morning (touch-up session and a run), and then devote the afternoon to some sight-seing (Coroana de Aur, there I go!), some very needed practice, and relaxing before my Romanian debut.