Costin Petrescu (musician)
He has a prestigious activity in avant-garde contemporary music, performing alongside Iancu Dumitrescu / Hyperion Ensemble and participating in the works of other composers such as Vlad Ulpiu, Mihaela Vozganian, Horia Surianu, as well as his personal projects.
He took piano lessons early in his life but unfortunately the family instrument had to be sold in order to cover the high cost of living created by the crisis of the '50s after the second world war and the establishment of communism in Romania.
In 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, The Pioneers became Olympic'64 and the new band quickly established itself with the music fans due to numerous engagements in clubs, concert halls and the Romanian Television.
The two rock operas that came out of this collaboration, the Dodecameron of the White Fire and Karma Kaliyuga made history at the Pop-Rock Music Festival organised by the Faculty of Architecture in Bucharest.
The band is now notorious in Romania but Costin wants something else and he begins a love affair with jazz and other musical forms, listening to Weather Report, Blood Sweet and Tears, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, John Coltrane or Sun Ra.
Phoenix is working now on their fourth album, a double one titled Cantafabule, but due to incompatibilities with the leader of the group, Nicolae Covaci, Costin leaves the band during the recordings.
Their repertoire consisted of old Romanian music picked and transposed by Anton Pann, Domitian Vlah, Dimitrie Cantemir, Ioan Căianu, Ieromonahul Vlahu, Filotei but also of the music of some Romanian modern composers considered interesting in Europe at that time, including Iancu Dumitrescu, Aurel Stroe, Stefan Niculescu, Corneliu Cezar, Octavian Nemescu, Costin Cazaban, Horia Surianu etc.
From this moment, Costin enters the world of the so-called "avant-garde music", falls in love with the new and vast universal sound and begins to build his own arsenal of percussion instruments needed to reproduce the vibrations inside his head.
In Paris the attempts to resume the musical activity failed and at the advice of the great musician Michel Berger and his wife France Gall, whom he had already met, Costin returns to architecture.
He organised immediately with a few friends from the diaspora an association called CRED (Consensus pour la Roumanie Européene et Démocratique) with the idea to help Romania at that precise moment.
He draws in pen and pencil graphics, visits the most interesting and sophisticated exhibitions in Paris, travels often to Bucharest and spends hours composing, assisted by the computer and using electronic percussion instruments as well as real and virtual tools.
