Raluca Enea is a graduate of the National University of Music Bucharest, where she studied Instrumental Pedagogy (Piano) and Performance (Harpsichord) under Professor Ogneanca Lefterescu. Since 2005, she has continued her harpsichord studies in Germany, under the guidance of professors Harald Hoeren, Glen Wilson, and Ketil Haugsand.
She has attended masterclasses with Menno van Delft (Netherlands), Frédérick Haas (Belgium), Malcolm Bilson (USA), and Ketil Haugsand (Norway), as well as the Sablé Academy courses, studying harpsichord and baroque singing with Françoise Lengellé and Howard Crook, and chamber music with Jan de Winne, Marcel Ponseele, and Hervé Douchy (Belgium). Raluca has performed concerts in Romania, Germany, Norway, and Hungary. She is the founder of the baroque music ensemble SEMPRE, holds a PhD from the National University of Music Bucharest with a dissertation on J.Ph. Rameau’s harpsichord music (supervised by Professor Dana Borșan), and has been a faculty member at both the National University of Music Bucharest and Transilvania University of Brașov.
Raluca Enea, as artistic director of the Bucharest Early Music Festival and coordinator of educational and training projects for early music supported by the Antiqva Cultural Association in Romania, will showcase her harpsichord virtuosity in a solo recital. With the program “Rameau. Le musicien des Rois,” she will reveal the complexity and beauty of French Baroque music, bringing to life the brilliance of Rameau’s compositions.
Jean-Philippe Rameau is quintessentially a “musician of kings.” His music was created within the context of the rise of French power. The French monarchy had conquered vast territories in the New World, founded a powerful empire, and established a musical “accompaniment” to match. Rameau composed for a king to whom his subjects attributed all the qualities of ancient Greek deities. His rivals, such as Antoine Forqueray, François Couperin, and Marin Marais, along with his predecessor, the brilliant Jean-Baptiste Lully (the passionate Florentine musician of Louis XIV, the “Sun King”), did the same. All of them composed for a dazzling court, where supreme taste reigned. The monarch was the supreme star, the Sun, Apollo, the god of beauty, serenity, and light, the civilizer of the primitive, “savage” peoples newly conquered. The Baroque period was a cornucopia of abundance in all the arts: music, dance, visual arts, architecture, not to mention fashion, the art of conversation, and even the culinary arts. Even the art of love was elevated to new heights of seduction and pleasure, so much so that Ovid, the ancient poet and author of the treatise Ars amandi, was considered outdated.
To maintain the Court’s splendor and the cult of personality of the extravagant French monarchs, the royal fleet brought the most expensive spices and perfumes, the most precious silks, velvets, and brocades to the ports of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Splendor and refinement were the words of the age, from the sounds that filled the sumptuous rooms of the Palace of Versailles to the gardens where fountains sang, filling the air with their melodies, alongside fragrances. The art of vocal performance, later enriched with new dimensions by the voices of the “castrati” (such as Farinelli), also remained a point of reference.
The Baroque era set the standard for supreme refinement in all the arts. And Rameau, a musician for two kings, Louis XIV (with his long reign of 72 years) and Louis XV, brought French Baroque music to its highest peaks.