The Kenwood summer concerts are a conductor’s dream according to Nicolae Moldoveanu. Joel Taylor spoke to him

THERE is a clear buzz of excitement in Nicolae Moldoveanu’s voice as I talk to him regarding the Kenwood concert he is due to conduct on Saturday night.
His one major worry, though, is the weather.
“In terms of reward for the conductor,” he exclaims, “the programme is the best you can get. But it all depends on the weather.”
It is the third time that the Romanian-born, Swiss-naturalised, conductor, pianist and violinist, has performed at the Music on a Summer Evening series at Kenwood House.
The programme seems to include all the best bits from everybody’s favourite operas, such as Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, from Turandot, Verdi’s Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, from Nabucco, and no doubt a rousing version of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.
But bitter experience at outdoor concerts tells him how important it is to have a clear evening.
He says: “Outdoor concert venues are really nice if the weather is good, but if it is poor it is difficult. I have had some bad experiences, not at Kenwood, but I remember one evening several years ago when I was conducting an outdoor concert in Chester.
“We were performing Carmina Burana (by Carl Orff) and we had a choir of children waiting to perform. They were just about to sing but it was so bad we had to cancel the concert just before they began.”
But he adds: “It is most important to have excellent acoustic engineers and at Kenwood we have always had them.”
Yet throughout Nicolae’s career he has had far more pressing problems with which to be concerned.
Now 43, he was born in Romania, which was ruled by the tyrannical and maniacally controlling Nicolae Ceausescu, a dictator so hated that following the revolution in 1989 he and his wife Elena were publicly hanged in the capital Bucharest.
Even as a child Nicolae Moldoveanu disliked the communist regime.
He says: “I hated it to be honest. As a child I did not understand why we had to wait for him (Ceausescu) to arrive at events and wave flags at him. All this communism in Eastern Europe was a very bad disease, but Romania had a different type of Communism, it was a ‘praise Ceausescu’ regime.”
Nicolae began his musical education at the age of seven, learning the violin and piano, a relatively late age.
He says: “I think with musical instruments you can never start early enough, it is ideal to start at four years old.”
He has no complaints regarding his early music education, describing it as “typical”, working through baroque, classical and romantic styles of music like many other music schools in the West.
But after completing his school studies Nicolae was expecting to go into further education in Romania to continue his musical education but he found that education policies were trying to steer him away from such a course.
He says: “It was just after the Cultural Revolution in China and the government was trying to cut down on the humanistic side of education, away from the arts and philosophy, and more to things like agriculture.
“I auditioned as a violinist for an orchestra in East Germany and was lucky enough to get a job.”
He left Romania aged 20 and four years later he fled to the West.
But that did not end his problems as his status as a refugee made it very difficult for him to work in different European countries. He says: “The image of a conductor is exactly the opposite of that as a refugee. I think I had a lot of problems working because I was a refugee.”
As his conducting career was taking off he was in increasing demand across Europe but without work permits he faced significant challenges.
He adds: “It was like a James Bond movie, I would be making solo car journeys across the Alps. Promoters might want me to perform but they might not have wanted this problem.”
He finally got Swiss citizenship three years ago and his first break in England occurred when he became resident conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 1996 and he has conducted with the BBC Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Orchestra, and became associate guest conductor of the London Mozart Players in 2002.
As a conductor he has been careful not to get pigeonholed, and varies his repertoire as much as he can. He says: “A conductor should be able to read any score, baroque music or modern music. Last year I played the harpsichord at Kenwood, but this year there is a full range of opera goodies with an orchestra and a choir.
“I just hope the weather will be good and everyone will be cheerful.”