Lautarii and the nai maker

It continues to be very cold in Chisinau but today the sun is out. It is not like Wyoming with its dry air. We are very close to the Black Sea so the air is humid and stays very cold even in the sunshine. When the wind blows up from the southwest it is bitter! Yesterday I went to see Lautarii, one of the national folklore ensembles in Moldova. It is led by Nikolae Botgros, a member of a family with a long standing line of "lautars" or professional musicians.

The original lautars were primarily Roma musicians serving as slaves in Turkish and Romanian courts starting in about the 16th century. They were required to play all kinds of music in order to earn money for their masters - Turkish and Western European classical music as well as Moldovan village music for weddings and other special events. After the end of slavery in the mid 1800s these musicians continued to perform and developed guilds of players capable of playing a wide variety of musical forms for every kind of event. This may have been the beginning of the fascinating ability of Moldovan musicians to use nai, cobza (lute with an attitude), and other local instruments for all these kinds of music. This ensemble of 17 violins, bass, cymbalom, two accordions, two trumpets, two valve trombones, two clarinets, and nai, played with speed and precision that is hard to believe. The president of Moldova spoke along with many dignitaries in honor of the 40th anniversary of the group (it always seems that there is an anniversary connected with concerts) and it went on for five hours. Earlier in the day I had the pleasure of spending two and a half hours with master nai maker Grigori Covaliu in his workshop in the village of Durlesti. He is a dedicated and talented craftsman with a wide reputation for his excellent work. I now am very happy to own two of his instruments, one with a three octave range and one with that plus four extra low notes. We talked (all in Romanian) and played many different nai plus a lot of other flute type instruments that he makes. It was a great adventure for me to ride the 101 microbus to the Alimentara Izhvor (a sort of convenience store with two springs by it) where I called Covaliu and he walked down from his house to show me the way. A great day!