EXCELSIOR: OUR MUSIC, MY LIFE

(Confessions of the Conductor, Professor, and Composer Valentin Gruescu, in Conversation with Musicologist Petruța-Maria Coroiu)

Abstract

Once upon a time… Indeed, like never before. Like more than twenty years ago, when I was about to leave the Music University in whose exceptional educational space I had spent the most beautiful years of my professional life, having the privilege to know legendary professors… Legendary people, who sign not only pages in the book of your life, but chapters… Legendary professors who write not only on notebooks, but also on our hearts.

A maestro: Valentin Gruescu, deep and warm, sincere and emblematic, grand and natural. The Master whose musical Liturgies we hoped would never end, officiating in spaces which for many others were just concert or lecture halls, the musician who lives his art as an offering to God (The Giver of all gifts and – according to his own testimony – “...the best director of our lives”), the man able to joke about suffering and operations, but not about his Concerts, not about the responsibility that the conductor’s fate carries before the entire Universe. The ever-present memory of his interpretative gestures that always dematerialized towards the sky, where Music brought – in this unique way – a sacrifice on the Altar of the high serene. Maestro Valentin Gruescu.

In the book that I managed to motivate him to write, the book of his life, Master Valentin Gruescu confesses precious words that had to remain settled in writing: life experiences, interpretation experiences, pedagogy. Much about OUR MUSIC, less about HIS LIFE (he insisted on confirming this order in the title, giving absolute priority to Music, in the service of which he profoundly placed his LIFE): “I accepted to write (guided by formidable interrogative milestones) not a page, which was not very easy, but a Book, all about Our Music and Life. In general, Life, and, in particular, mine. Our music, my life. Elevated to Him, the best Director of our lives. Excelsior. And thus, the title remained” (p. 8).