My first visit to Romania: 15-26 September, 2025 Bucharest, Sibiu and Braşov

16 September:

It's Tuesday so it must be Bucharest. I arrived yesterday afternoon after my flight from Munich. Our Hayllar Music Tours tour starts with a reception and dinner this evening so this morning I wandered around the area surrounding our hotel.

The two main performance venues for the George Enescu Festival are literally a few minutes' walk from the hotel. The Romanian Athenaeum is a grand, 19th century concert hall, opened in 1888, while the Palace Hall is a more brutal affair externally, dating from 1960.

In a small park next to the latter I discovered a small monument in the shape of an open Bible commemorating the Protestant Reformation in Romania. This is a development I didn't expect in eastern Europe where I've just assumed Eastern Orthodoxy to be the prevalent religion. I need to do some reading on this and, if necessary, adjust my assumptions!

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17 September:

Wednesday was the first full day of our Romanian adventure. First up was our walking tour of Bucharest, which began on time in light rain. However after half an hour it had to be abandoned as the rain became very heavy. Fortunately we've been able to reschedule part of the walk for later.

I gave my first talk to our guests in the mid-afternoon before we attended two amazing concerts.

First up, in the Athenaeum, we heard the Chamber Orchestra of Europe with legendary pianist András Schiff in a beautiful program bookended by two Mozart piano concertos.

The A major concerto K488 was followed by the Dvořák string serenade. After interval the Dvořák wind serenade was followed by the Mozart D minor concerto, K466. A beautiful program performed to perfection.

I've only known Schiff's work, or that of the COE for that matter, from recordings and videos, so hearing them live was such a joy. The concertos were just dazzling examples of their artistry.

The Dvořák serenades, performed unconducted, were likewise stylish and engaging from start to finish. Such a great start to our performance schedule!

The concert ran late and we had very little time to get to the Palace Hall, a few minutes' walk away, for our second concert. Within this vast space we heard - and saw - something completely different but just as stunning.

The Budapest Festival Orchestra, under their amazing conductor Iván Fischer, I have heard before at the Mahler Festivals in Leipzig (in 2023) and Amsterdam (earlier this year). Here we got to hear them in the music of their compatriot, Bartók. And what Bartók!

The ballet The Miraculous Mandarin is probably Bartók's most violent score. It was certainly his most controversial, being banned after its first performance in 1926. Here we heard the whole forty minute score, not the concert suite. And on a raised platform in the middle of the orchestra we had the ballet in all its aggressive, shocking glory, danced brilliantly by the Eva Duda Dance Company.

It's not a pretty story - think kidnapping robbery, murder and violent sex - but what an experience. It was electrifying.

Then after interval we had a concert performance of the opera Bluebeard's Castle, one of Bartók's most wonderful scores. Here, as with the ballet, Fischer and his orchestra were in their element. They were clearly absolutely at home with all the technical challenges of the music.

In the opera there are only two singers and both were utterly in control of their roles on this occasion. Dorottya Láng and Krysztián Cser, both singing from memory, were simply amazing. This time there was no action at all; both simply stood either side of the conductor and without histrionics controlled the room for an hour.

Special mention should be made of the orchestra's extra work in addition to their stunning playing. Both the ballet and the opera have small roles for wordless chorus, which some of the orchestra members sang as they played. (Thanks to the Kodály system, I assume all Hungarians can sing!) And the spoken prologue to the opera was included, performed eloquently by Iván Fischer himself as he conducted the opening bars.

Two incredible performances. What a privilege to witness.

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18 September:

Our Hayllar Music Tours excursion in Bucharest continues. One thing that has become clear right away in this city is its ability - indeed, its need - to deal with its past. I'm not going to outline here the intricate details of Romania's tortured history in the second half of the 20th century, but even the city's physical appearance, with beautiful buildings from the Belle Epoque alongside dreary apartment buildings from the communist era, reflects its experiences.

We were made aware of these experiences - especially the horrors of the Ceausescu regime and the 1977 earthquake - when we had a guided tour on Thursday of the Palace of Parliament. This monolithic building is impossible to describe adequately. A monument to Ceausescu's insane megalomania, this is said to be the fourth-largest building in the world. Over 15 levels it covers 365,000 square metres of floor space. It has 1,500 spaces, 280,000 square metres of carpet, a million tons of marble, 2,800 chandeliers...one could go on. The scale of the rooms we saw was mind boggling, even more so given that this opulent edifice - now the home of the democratic Romanian Parliament - was built at eye-watering expense in the 1980s, causing national poverty and hardship.

I couldn't take any pictures that would do the place justice. The Wikipedia article is worth reading for more information:

After this we headed back into the centre of the city for an amazing lunch of traditional Romanian food in a beautiful restaurant.

Our excellent local guide was with us and after lunch he walked us back to the hotel, completing the walking tour that had been interrupted by rain the day before.

A couple of hours to rest and it was then time for my second talk for our guests. This was in preparation for our attendance at a single concert, in the Palace Hall, given by the Orchestre Nationale de France, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.

Another legendary soloist joined the orchestra in the first half: violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. The concert opened with a very recent work, written for her: Air by Thomas Adès. This was very beautiful, a series of gently intertwining canons cloaked in exquisite orchestral colours. It was followed by Mozart's first violin concerto, K207, which as you'd expect was given a stylish and dazzling performance.

After interval came Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, the complete one-hour ballet score. Along with the George Enescu Philharmonic Choir, the ONF gave a shatteringly good performance of this glorious score under Măcelaru's wonderful direction. The performance was accompanied by a work of video art which was projected on the walls surrounding the performers. The content of this bore little relationship to the ballet and I found it annoying and distracting, the one downside to an otherwise thrilling performance.

The concert was also an occasion for the giving of awards. At the end of the first half Anne-Sophie Mutter was awarded the inaugural George Enescu Prize, partly in recognition of her financial support over many decades of Romanian orphanages. The speeches were touching and heartfelt honouring her work and her connection with Romania and its children.

Then, at the end of the concert, Măcelaru and the ONF were awarded a prize from the recent International Classical Music Awards for their recording of music by George Enescu. It was all pretty special.

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19 September:

Friday was another day of great experiences for the heart and mind here in Bucharest.

After my third talk for our guests we walked to the National Museum of Art, which is housed in the former royal palace and which is literally across the road from our hotel. This is a massive collection of art, mainly paintings, and our guided tour took us through two main sections. The major collection is of Romanian art, ranging from the middle ages to the present. The other is a wonderful collection of European art derived from the private collection of Romania's king Carol I.

In an hour and a half we could only get a glimpse of the treasures contained in this enormous building, but it was a sumptuous visual feast nonetheless.

Later in the day we attended two more performances in the George Enescu Festival. In the late afternoon we returned to the Athenaeum to hear the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Emelyanychev give a wonderful performance.

The program started with excerpts from Beethoven's ballet music Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (the overture is one of my favourites), and ended with probably the most wonderful Beethoven 5 I've ever heard. Emelyanychev blew the dust off the alleged old warhorse and showed it to be a dazzling, sprightly thing after all.

In between came a modern British classic, James MacMillan's percussion concerto Veni, Veni Emmanuel. Colin Currie was the soloist, displaying energy and power - and an extraordinary feat of memory - from start to finish.

It was also wonderful to see Australian flautist Adam Richardson sitting patiently through the first three movements of the symphony in order to play the piccolo part in the finale. At least he had more to do in the wonderfully raucous Scottish encore!

Within an hour of this concert ending we were seated in the nearby Palace Hall ready for another performance by the Orchestre Nationale de France under the direction of Cristian Măcelaru. And yes, it too was stunning.

The program opened with Enescu's second Romanian Rhapsody. Măcelaru obviously has this music in his DNA and the orchestra gave a heartbreakingly beautiful performance. This was followed by the Gershwin Concerto in F, a work I can't recall ever having heard live before. Rudolf Buchbinder - yet another legendary artist! - was the soloist, playing this tricky but tuneful work with panache and a great sense of fun. It was joyous.

After their wonderful Daphnis the previous night, the ONF served up more Ravel in the second half. Yan Pascal Tortelier's orchestration of Ravel's Piano Trio was the major offering after interval and this worked brilliantly, coming across as the symphony Ravel never wrote. After this, the formal program ended with La Valse, that sexy, decadent French take on the already decadent Viennese waltz.

Ravel's decadence is always cultured and polished and we were given a breathtaking performance that just shone decadently. It brought the house down.

Their encore, also French and very polished, also brought the house down - literally in the case of this particular opera. It was the sexiest performance of the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila that I've ever heard.

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20 September:

Our Hayllar Music Tours visit to Bucharest started its Saturday with my fourth talk to our guests. We then had a long lunch at a magnificent restaurant, Kané, where over three hours we enjoyed a wonderful tasting menu of small but perfectly presented dishes. Highly recommended if you're ever in town.

After a few hours to recover - and no need for dinner! - we attended one performance in the evening in the Palace Hall. Given our visit to the Concertgebouw Mahler Festival in May, it almost felt like meeting old friends; this concert featured the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Klaus Mäkelä.

Mäkelä is someone I've written about before so I won't go on too much about him here. Suffice to say I'm a fan, and having seen him conduct Mahler 4 in Aix en Provence last year, and Mahler 1 and 8 in Amsterdam in May, I was anticipating something special this time. And we got it.

The program opened with an extraordinary work, Rendering. This is Luciano Berio's very personal take on the unfinished sketches for a D major symphony which Schubert left at his death. This is not an attempt to reconstruct a performing version of Schubert's symphony; it's a completely new work in its own right. It "phases" fragments of Schubert with delicate, dreamlike fragments of Berio. I loved it.

After interval came Mahler 5. This orchestra playing Mahler is of course a special event, and it occured to me that I heard the Concertgebouw play Mahler 5 in the Leipzig Mahler Festival in 2023. On that occasion I was struck speechless by the experience under the conducting of Myung-whun Chung.

Here in Bucharest we heard a stunning performance of the work and I noted in particular that Mäkelä's reading of the score was at times quite leisurely; there was none of the propensity for overly driven tempos for which he is sometimes criticised. The opening of the third movement was particularly relaxed and it seemed to work.

Of course when Mahler calls for the tempo to be driven, it was there in spades, breathless and thrilling when required. It was wonderful and the audience loved it.

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21 September:

Sunday in Bucharest was our last day in the Romanian capital and the last day of the George Enescu Festival. (The Festival goes for a month; we just caught the last week.)

After a morning off our schedule got under way with my fifth and final talk to our guests in the afternoon before we headed off to two concerts.

Firstly, in the Athenaeum we heard the Romanian National Radio Orchestra, conducted by Francesco Ivan Ciampa. The soloist was the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva, a leading star of major opera houses around the world.

The program started with two of Enescu's haunting songs setting texts by the 16th century French poet, Clément Marot. This set the tone for all of Yoncheva's offerings, which were all in French: opera arias by Massenet, Bizet and Verdi. The orchestra contributed the Bartók Romanian Dances, the Meditation from Massenet's Thaïs, and the overture to Verdi's Sicilian Vespers.

It was a delightful performance with some truly glorious singing.

The evening performance - and the final concert of the Festival - saw us return to the Palace Hall for another blockbuster concert by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Klaus Mäkelä.

The program opened with a passionate and thrilling performance of the first of Enescu's Romanian Rhapsodies (we heard the second a few nights ago with the Orchestre National de France). The audience reacted wildly to what was a wonderfully authentic sounding rendition of this music. At least it sounded that way to this non-Romanian!

Stellar pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet then joined the orchestra for a dazzling performance of Saint-Saëns’ fifth and final piano concerto, the "Egyptian" concerto. This was glorious, with all the exotic colours on display from both soloist and orchestra. Thibaudet's gentle encore - one of the Liszt Consolations - was just beautiful.

Then after interval...The Rite of Spring.

What can I say? It was the Concertgebouw under Mäkelä. It was utterly incredible. The orchestra clearly knows this masterpiece inside out but played it with verve and excitement and even terror in such a way as it came alive in a way I've never heard before. I know this piece reasonably well and heard things I'd never heard before. Mäkelä was dynamic and thrilling, too, but never obstructive, and totally in control. Totally. Yet despite the control it was edgy, almost risky. Such a privilege to witness, and such a brilliant way to end our time in Bucharest.

But the tour is far from over. Tomorrow we head out of the city to other parts of Romania. Next stop, Sibiu.

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22 September:

Monday was a travel day on this Hayllar Music Tours visit to Romania, leaving behind the bustle (and sensational musical experiences) of Bucharest and heading 275 km north-west by road to Sibiu. This beautiful city - in the centre of Romania - is in the Transylvania region of the country. We've left the plains of Wallachia behind and have crossed the Carpathian Mountains.

On our way here we stopped in the town of Curtea de Argeş and visited its famous monastery. The church, five centuries old, is small but exquisite. Sadly the exterior was covered in wooden scaffolding for restoration work, but the interior was a riot of figurative and decorative design. Two of Romania's four kings, and their wives, are buried in the church as well, cementing its importance in the national psyche.

We had lunch in the town before continuing on to Sibiu.

Our guide from Bucharest, George, is travelling with us and as we walked through the old town centre of Sibiu to our restaurant for dinner he gave us lots of fascinating information about the city's long history.

The old town, with its huge main square and large churches (including an enormous Lutheran church right next to the Catholic one) was restored around 20 years ago in preparation for its role as European City of Culture in 2007. It really is very beautiful, with a vibrant open-air restaurant culture.

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23 September:

We're into the final few days of this extraordinary Hayllar Music Tours visit to Romania and Tuesday's experiences took us out of Sibiu to visit two historic sites in Transylvania.

In the morning we visited the citadel of Alba Iulia. This huge site has Roman origins dating back to the first century CE after the Roman defeat of the Dacians. Some Roman ruins are still visible but the major attractions are the two churches.

The Romanian Orthodox church is significant for it being the place where in 1922 Romania's second king, Ferdinand, and his queen, Marie, were crowned as monarch's of the newly-united Romania. This followed the addition of Transylvania (formerly owned by Hungary) to the existing provinces of Wallachia and Moldova. The proclamation of the expanded Romania was made in the building behind the church in 1918, following WW1.

Next to the Orthodox church is the Catholic cathedral of St Michael, parts of which date back a thousand years. This is an austere building, exuding a calm, almost plain aesthetic after the gorgeous decoration of the Orthodox building. It contains historically significant graves and is really beautiful.

We walked the length of the citadel's central road, the Via Principalis, seeing the ornate gate at the other end and breathtaking views over the plains and distant mountains. This is an extraordinary place.

After lunch we moved on to the town of Hunedoara, the location of the magnificent Corvin Castle. Started in the 15th century this fantastic structure is intimately connected with John Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania and later King of Hungary, a man revered in both Hungary and Romania. (He's buried in St Michael's cathedral, referred to above.)

It's said that the [in]famous Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned here for a decade. Regardless of that, the castle is stunning, well laid out for visitors but requiring careful negotiation of many steps.

We now move on to our final location, Braşov. This will be my seventh hotel since leaving home!

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24 September:

Our Wednesday journey from Sibiu to Braşov was full of wonderful experiences, aided by perfect weather here in central Romania.

Our first stop was in Biertan, a town with medieval origins listed as a UNESCO world heritage site. It contains a beautiful example of a fortified church which, over the centuries since its completion in the early 16th century, has acquired three encircling defensive walls.

The church was built as a Catholic church and was completed around 1514. Within a few years the Protestant Reformation had reached this part of Transylvania and the majority of the town - and the church - became Lutheran. Its interior is simple but the authorities retained the beautiful multi-sectioned altarpiece. There's also a staggeringly complex locking mechanism on the sacristy door, an imposing organ, and a beautiful pulpit.

Biertan itself is undergoing wholesale renovation of its medieval houses. Those already restored are beautiful and I marvelled at the rooftop workers near the church re-tiling a high roof with no apparent safety harnesses or barriers.

From Biertan we retraced our journey 3km back along the highway to Richiş, a very small village which is also seeing its medieval houses slowly restored. We stopped at one such place, owned by a lovely family known to our guide, George. Over nine years they have restored what was a virtual ruin into their own lovely home and garden with rooms for paying guests. They provided a magnificent lunch for us (complete with excellent wine made by the owners' son, Alex) and showed us such joyous hospitality. This visit to the Villa Rihuini Wine House was really one of the highlights of the entire tour.

After lunch we headed to Sighişoara, another medieval town with a magnificent citadel. Vlad Draculea, later Voivode of Wallachia, was born here. Better known as Vlad the Impaler (he really did impale people), he was the inspiration for Stoker's Count Dracula.

The citadel held a little surprise for us when we discovered a plaque commemorating Brahms's visit to the town with Joseph Joachim in 1879.

From Sighişoara we finally made it to our hotel in Braşov where we'll spend the last three nights of the tour.

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 25 September:

After some very busy, full on days of travel and sightseeing, our Thursday schedule in Braşov is a fairly easy one: just a morning walking tour of the old city, led by our wonderful guide, George.

Like Sibiu, Braşov has an old town centre, surrounded by the modern city. Braşov's old town is really lovely, with buildings many centuries old in excellent condition and brightly painted.

Our walk took us through the old town and into the large main square, beyond which we encountered the Black Church. Completed in 1476, this beautiful edifice - now Lutheran and still active - is said to get its name from its appearance after a devastating fire in 1689, but this is disputed by some historians. Whatever the reason, the interior is beautiful and I counted five organs. The main organ, in the rear gallery, is a 19th century instrument and is said to be the largest organ in Romania.

(Indeed, the church itself is currently the largest church in Romania, but this title will go to the new Romanian Orthodox Cathedral in Bucharest when that building is completed.)

An organist was practising on the main instrument while we were there. Our journey around the building was accompanied by the Buxtehude Prelude, Fugue and Chaconne in C. That brought back memories of a past life!

Our walk continued, passing the city's beautiful Synagogue, until we came full circle back to the church and the square, just in time for lunch.

We have the rest of the day free in preparation for a busy final day tomorrow.

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26 September:

Friday was a big day out and about for the final full day of this Hayllar Music Tours visit to Romania. Our morning saw us visit the town of Bran, the location of the 650 year old Bran Castle.

This imposing edifice atop an elevated rock, surrounded by mountains and on the border of Transylvania and Wallachia, was the inspiration for Dracula's Castle in Bram Stoker's famous vampire story. The real castle has no known connection with Vlad the Impaler, but judging by the tourist tat on sale in the bazaar nearby, the vampire aesthetic sells well.

It's quite a climb getting up to the castle, and the narrow passages and staircases within are tricky, but it's an impressive structure.

After lunch at a nearby restaurant we were on the road again to the town of Sinaia to see another impressive structure, Peleş Castle. This is actually a palace rather than a castle, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the summer residence of the first Romanian King, Carol I, and his Queen, Elizabeth.

Built at the King's own expense, this voluptuous, ornate palace is a riot of wood carving, expensive decoration, magnificent furniture and wall coverings to die for. One of the first such buildings to be powered by electricity, it also has central heating and a ducted vacuum cleaning system.

The King collected weapons and these also are magnificently displayed...if that's your thing.

We're about to head off to our farewell dinner to end the tour. Tomorrow, home to Australia after six weeks in Europe.

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