Sunt Numai Urechi (I'm All Ears) for solo cello by Ovidiu Marinescu

The purchase includes the pdf of the score/cello part.

Sunt Numai Urechi (I’m All Ears)

Composed in five days, Sunt numai urechi (I’m all ears) is my first completed piece. For years I had been performing a lot of new music for cello that ranged between challenging, innovative, inspirational, and sometimes unidiomatic and uninspired. One summer day in 2015 it crossed my mind that rather than occasionally criticize other composers’ music I should just write a piece.

Sunt numai urechi (I’m all ears) aims to connect with an audience of any background. The artistic seed came from watching a video clip of a flamenco guitar player whose virtuosic technique blew my mind. In an instant, I picked up the cello and tried to emulate the musical gestures present in the flamenco piece. And for the first time, I sat down and wrote the musical ideas flowing out of my heart, through my fingers, onto the sound of the cello. The flamenco-inspired gestures became the second section of the piece, featuring mixed meters, dizzying passages, and percussive sounds, making this section exciting to play.

The work starts with a busy introduction built on a sinuous gesture along an open-string drone. In the middle, the piece relaxes into a lyrical, ethnically eclectic section that includes a quote from a traditional Romanian drinking song: “Bun îi Vinul Ghiurghiuliu” (Good is the Rosé Wine) made famous by mid-20th century Romanian singer Maria Tănase. The concluding part - using mixed meters — climbs into the stratosphere of the cello register and ends with technical pyrotechnics. — Ovidiu Marinescu