colinde and school lunch

I have been treated to lots of Moldovan Christmas and winter songs (colinde) during the past week. I love them for their simple and beautiful melodies. Children's songs tend to be syllabic while adult colinde are more melismatic but not anything like the "glorias" in "Angels We Have Heard on High." Last week Andrei, one of the young people who run Acasa la Mama (my neighborhood Moldovan food restaurant) gave me a CD of colinde because we had talked about them one evening. Last Monday I attended a beautiful concert of colinde at the Sala cu Orgel featuring a solo female singer and a wonderful classical guitarist. Their arrangements were excellent, the performance was great, and the setting was quite elegant.

Then today I went to a festival-competition for the performance of Moldovan winter traditions at a school in the neighborhood called "Botanica." I heard about fifteen schools present various versions of Moldovan winter and Christmas musical and dramatic forms. These include a hilarious acting out of a man trying to sell a goat. The goat gets sick and they call in a doctor or a gypsy healer and then haggle a lot over the price. We also heard boys doing men's songs with a whip, bells, and a friction drum and shouting. There were a few beautiful solo songs and at the end of each performance lots of new year well-wishing and throwing of grain (the adjudicators were covered in grain). I knew two of the adjudicators and they invited me to "share the table" with them which in this case meant a school lunch at the Liceul Teoretic "L. Rebreanu." It was excellent. We had large bowls of soup, bread, beets, cabbage, two kinds of meat, fried potatoes, cheese bread, Moldovan pizza, juice, and hot tea. We all felt well fortified to hear more performances! And I may not have to eat for a few days.