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Musical Travels: Bucharest and the Enescu Festival

Classical 91.5 WXXO-FM | By Victor Poleshuck,

Mona Seghatoleslami

Published March 18, 2026 at 3:04 PM EDT

There's a great tradition of musical travelogues, including some particularly notable ones from back in the 18th and 19th centuries by music historian Charles Burney that have always intrigued me. Every now and then, I hear from listeners or colleagues who have taken a marvelous journey with music as a part of it, so I thought it would be fun to get share some of these stories occasionally here on the WXXI Classical website.

Here is one from WXXI listener Victor Poleshuck, who traveled to Romania, to hear music by Avner Dorman (the composer of the new work that Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony are premiering with the RPO this weekend!). Thank you Victor for allowing us to repost this writeup from your blog! ~Mona

Bucharest and the Enescu Festival, Sunday, September 14, 2025

Today was the event which precipitated this trip to Romania, the concert at which Avner Dorman’s Tanyaderas was played in the Romanian Athenaeum.

We slept late, had a late breakfast, and spent almost three hours wandering Bucharest, especially the old city, where there is a vibrant life of cafes, galleries and shops. The George Enescu International Festival includes over 95 concerts and performances taking place over about 29 days, and the concert by the Berlin Academy of American Music began at 10:30 PM on this Sunday night. Amazing. We had a dinner reservation for 8 PM at a lovely restaurant about halfway between our hotel and the Athenaeum, and as we were leaving a bit before 10:00, people were still arriving to sit down.

We arrived at the venue a little after 10:00. At the entrance is a bust of Enescu:

Two stone pillars, with the gray stone bust of composer George Enescu between them, sitting on a tall base that reads "George Enescu, 1881-1955"

The lobby is lovely:

A concert hall lobby filled with people milling about. There are stone pillars, and the ceiling is decorated with brown and aqua tiles.

The concert hall is round and has a capacity of about 800:

A panoramic shot of a concert hall stage with chairs and a few instruments, red seats with a few audience members, and a round ceiling decorated with round paintings that look a bit like portholes.

It is covered by a dome with incredible decoration:

A dome ceiling decorated with elaborate red and gold abstract designs and a series of light blue flower-pattern circle paintings, that almost look like windows.

The hall was about 3/4 full (at 10:30 on a Sunday night), and the concert was quite wonderful, with a Romanian violinist, Mihaela Martin, playing the Barber Violin Concerto beautifully. The Dorman Tanyaderas opened the second half of the concert, and was very enthusiastically received by the audience.

An orchestra stands on a stage, holding instruments, and being applauded by the audience. The stage has organ pipes at its back, and red and gold decorations on the side.

The concert ended at about 12:40 AM on Monday morning, after a rousing encore by the orchestra of the Bernstein Candide Overture, and we went backstage to congratulate Garrett Keast, the conductor, before taking an Uber back to the hotel.

Read more of Victor's adventures here, check out Dorman's music this weekend with the RPO, and send me a note if you have some musical travels to share!