BBC National Orchestra Of Wales - Călin Humă: Symphony-Concerto & Symphony No. 1 "Carpatica" (2020)

“Călin Humă was born in 1965 in Iaşi, in the north‐eastern region of Romania known as Moldavia. Following high school and after completing his compulsory military service, Humă was able to follow a commercial career alongside his musical studies before being appointed Romanian Honorary Consul to the United Kingdom. He has lived and worked in Britain for over twenty years, his diplomatic duties running alongside his development as a composer. Humă is not a prolific composer. He has been a slow developer in arriving at his mature work, which has been mostly concerned in recent years with larger symphonic forms, at the head of which stand the two symphonies (2015 and 2019) and Symphony‐Concerto for piano and orchestra (2018). The language of Humă’s music may be described as being, at heart, romantic, rooted in the folk‐music of his native Moldavia yet is effectively a synthesis of genuine organic writing and an individual approach to what one might term non‐narrative tone‐poem music – by its combination of such abstractions, as a refreshing revivification of symphonic composition in a manner that is profoundly rooted in tonality. Humă’s view of tonality is that which, by its nature, abjures ‘traditional’ key‐relationships exhibiting a strongly individual compositional manner which nonetheless demonstrates the eternal truths of classical symphonic writing.” From the note by Robert Matthew‐Walker