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Written in fRoots issue 271/272, 2006
 

ION PETRE STOICAN
Ion Petre Stoican - Sounds From A Bygone Age Vol. 1
Asphalt Tango CD-ATR 0805 (2005)

It’s good to see the eastern European treasure-trove beginning to open up as former state labels open their huge back-catalogues so that great recordings are emerging once more. Asphalt Tango have done just what’s needed with this one, the auspicious first in what should be a fascinating series of Sounds From A Bygone Age. The good packaging the music deserves, and rather more information and background on the artists than was usually divulged on the original release.
      Petre Stoican was a Romanian wedding fiddler, born in 1930, who died just after the ousting of Ceausescu. A good violinist, but not a great one and not big name, and not one of the tight team who did most of the playing in Bucharest. Not, that is, until he made this album, which gave him the Bucharest status he needed in order to work there, because it featured a once-only gathering of an unusually big band comprising fourteen the leading Gypsy musicians. Violinists, clarinet players, bassists, trumpeter Costel Vasilescu, the brilliant accordionist Ionică Minune (whose album on Electrecord, not only dazzling but deeply musical, I rave-reviewed in fR 262), and all arranged by international virtuoso Toni Iordache, the greatest Romanian cimbalom player of the time.
      How Stoican got to make the album is a strange story, narrated in the album notes, involving him catching someone the Stasi were after as a spy and refusing their offer of payment in the form of a house, because he wanted to make an album, for the state and only label Electrecord, with top musicians instead. He got to make an EP in 1966, and in 1977 the authorities finally gave in and let him make a whole LP. This CD contains fifteen tracks from those recordings. The material is the standard wedding fare of predominantly horas and sîrbas, most of them from Constanta, the port where he played for the years between the EP and the LP.
      The playing is, as one might expect, thoroughly tight and and exciting. Iordache’s syncopating cymbalom is well up in the mix at the heart of it, while Stoican, who bursts into melismatic song to good effect for just one number, the bride-dressing song Ia-ţi Mireasă, Ziua Bună, plays well but doesn’t have quite the richness of tone and creative command of one of the greats. It’s a classic recording nevertheless.

      www.asphalt-tango.de


© 2005 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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