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Dan Grigore
Celebrating 50 years on stage
Friday November 2, 2007
Kimmel Center
Philadelphia, PA
part 1
special thanks to Valentin Radu for translating.
PCM: You are a very distinguished artist in Romania but here in the United States there is very little information about you. I understand you were a child prodigy. What age did you discover the piano?
Dan Grigore: I was three and a half.
PCM: How did you discover it?
Dan: We had an old up right piano in the house. I started by reaching up and playing the keys. And then I heard waltzes and romantic songs on the radio and I would start to reproduce them on the piano and then I would make up my own compositions.
PCM: Your parents recognized this?
Dan: My mother was a very gifted amateur violinist, my grandfather was very gifted painter and musician. He found my first teacher. After that I started to study harmony.
PCM: Was it hard to study in a communist regime?
Dan: There was a teacher named Mihail Jora who recognized my talent and helped me to get approved not to attend daily school but to have special schooling. Because of that I was kind of spared some of the hardships of the communist regime.
Twice a year I has to have exams to show I was learning the regular disciplines including sports. For my physical education test I had to jump over a hose. (laughter).
Then Jora’s wife got arrested and jailed for a year because her sister’s husband spoke on Radio Free Europe. There were no trails, two guys in leather coast would just show up and many times you didn’t know what was happening.
When my grandfather was 80 years old, he wrote a letter about the conditions in Romania at the time and threw it over the fence of the American Embassy in Bucharest and the KGB people saw this and he was arrested and put in a hard labor camp for seven years. His family was trying to get him out and said he didn’t mean to do this and that he was irresponsible and crazy. He said, "No I’m not! I am responsible and I know what I am doing!".
PCM: How old were you when that happened?
Dan: Fourteen or fifteen.
PCM: Did it affect you in your musical career?
Dan: My family and I were suspected after that. You have to understand how paranoid these people were. Remember I said my teacher’s wife was arrested too.
After my grandfather got out of the camp there was a regime change and there was another leader named Nicholau Ceaussescu. He was the one everyone knows but we had bad leaders before him as well.
When he came to power he stared a nationalistic attitude of freedom. In 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Romania was the only communist country that didn’t sent troops. Ceaussescu received a lot of international recognition for that, even in the West. My grandfather wrote a letter to Ceaussescu praising him for his nationalist attitude and standing up to the Soviet Union. Ceaussescu got the letter and asked his assistants about this man. He was told that my grandfather was an old man who spent time in jail and that he was very poor and didn’t have a pension anymore. Ceaussescu ordered his pension to be restored, all including from the time he spent in prison.
I speak a lot about my grandfather because he was my hero. He is where I got my moral core from. He is my inspiration and thanks to him I got the power to endure what life was like at that time.
