Lux Animae by Horațiu Rădulescu

Redefining the 20th Century:
An Arraymusic presentation of works by Gerard-Charest, Rădulescu, Royer and Scelsi.

Vincent Royer – viola

Horatiu Radulescu was born in Bucharest on January 7 1942.. Upon graduation in 1969, Radulescu left Romania for the west, and settled in Paris, becoming a French citizen in 1974. He returned to Romania thereafter several times for visits, beginning in 1991 when he directed a performance of his Iubiri, the first public performance of any of his mature works in his native country. One of the first works to be completed in Paris was Credo for nine cellos, the first work to employ his spectral techniques. In the early 1970s he attended classes given by Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and by Ferrari and Kagel in Cologne. He presented his own music in Messiaen’s classes at the Paris Conservatoire in 1972-73; Radulescu recalled that while Messiaen himself was sympathetic, later calling him “one of the most original young musicians of our time” (Radulescu 199), some of the students were more reticent, not understanding his music’s “colourful, dreamy, mystical” inclinations (Radulescu cited in Krafft 2001, 48).

In the mid-1980s Radulescu was based in Freiburg in Germany, though for many years he retained an address in Versailles. In 1988 he lived in Berlin on a DAAD fellowship, and in 1989-90 he was resident in San Francisco and Venice as a laureate of the Villa Médici hors les murs scholarship. In the mid-1990s he moved to Switzerland, living first in Clarens and later in Vevey. He died in Paris on September 25, 2008.