Divine

Bucharest Tango

Oana Cătălina Chițu is a Romanian singer who interprets and reinterprets music traditions of the Balkans so as to bring them closer to the audience from all over the world. Her warm strong voice masters both the exuberant sonorities of Roma party music and of heart-rending old Romanian love songs.The Balkans is home to many different peoples, each with its own highly dynamic past and present. Over the years, amid this cultural landscape, a form of music evolved that brims with rhythm and draws inspiration from multiple sources.

In 2000, Oanaformed the Balkan band 'Romenca' with the accordion player Dejan Jovanovic who comes originally from Serbia. They were joined by Vladimir Karparov (Bulgaria), sax, Dejan Jovanovic (Serbia), accordion, Alexej Wagner (Russia), guitar, and Alexander Franz (Siberia), bass. An album, Verka, followed, as well as tours through Europe, concerts that opened for the public those exotic Balkans, full of rhythm and energy.

Oana Cǎtǎlina Chiţu and the Dejan Jovanovic were raised in a  rich tradition of Romanian and Gypsy music. As a perfectly tuned duo, their repertoire includes Romanian tangos, Roma songs and the oeuvre of Romanian diva Maria Tănase. Chiţu's velvety and voluminous voice seduces listeners in fashionable bars and at rustic peasant weddings. The contrast between the often melancholic tangos and the always exuberant dances is quite stark, but Chiţu handles each transition with pure charm. In addition to their work as a duo, Chiţu and Jovanovic also perform with an ensemble consisting of three to eight members representing a mix of ethnic heritages similar to Bucharest between the two world wars. Their most outstanding work includes collaborations with the Moldavian Cimbalom virtuoso Valeriu Caşcaval.

Oana Cǎtǎlina Chiţu has been singing since she was a little girl growing up in Humulești in northeast Rumania. She studied jazz vocal performance and classical singing in Berlin, where she has lived since 1990.

Romanian singer. Chiţu's velvety and voluminous voice seduces listeners in fashionable bars and at rustic peasant weddings.

Oana Catalina Chitu

In 2013 Romanians are celebrating the centenary of Maria Tănase′s birth. This anniversary inspired the Romanian Oana Cătălina Chiţu, who lives in Berlin, to pay homage to the great singer. 

Reminiscent of times long past, when Romanias bohemians and Eastern European  intellectuals met in Bucharest′s salons.

Maria Tănase is loved in Romania like no singer that has followed her. Even before the Second World War she performed folk songs, tangos, romances, couplets and căntece de mahala, music from the suburbs, in restaurants, in revue theatres and on the radio, usually accompanied by Roma musicians, the lăutari. Tănase developed her own expressive way of interpretation, making songs of every origin her own. Then the iron curtain fell between Eastern and Western Europe. Maria Tănase was increasingly forgotten in Romania throughout the 1960s, because her dramatic doinas or the oriental-sounding songs from the mahala did not fit into the limited concept of man held by certain party officials. Maria Tănase was too much the extravagant diva and individualistic artist to allow herself to be co-opted by the state, let alone move even one millimetre towards mediocrity. And so in June 1963 she was buried like a queen at Bucharest′s Bellu Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets for her final journey. It wasn′t until the 1990s before a new light was cast on the legacy of Maria Tănase. She was able to be rediscovered.
In 2013 Romanians are celebrating the centenary of Maria Tănase′s birth. This anniversary inspired the Romanian Oana Cătălina Chiţu, who lives in Berlin, to pay homage to the great singer.
Oana Cătălina Chiţu grew up in northern Romania. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Ceauşescu regime she moved to Berlin. Upon her arrival, she founded the Balkan band Romenca with Serbian accordion player Dejan Jovanovic, but her yearning for Romanian songs and her love of the artist Maria Tănase never disappeared.
At the same time Oana Cătălina Chiţu is not an apologist, awestruck by the legacy of the Romanian diva Maria Tănase. She would like to enter into a dialogue with a phenomenal legacy which, with the exception of a few voices, has almost no creative follow-up in today′s Romanian music scene.
New Berlin acoustically encounters old Bucharest. Today musicians from both countries are once again moving as easily between the two cities as they did in the 1930s, when tango singer Jean Moscopol performed in a Berlin casino or sang in the UFA film studios. Thanks to a large number of emigrants music from the Balkans, and from Romania in particular, is better known in Berlin today than ever before; this is not restricted to a specific genre and goes far beyond the phenomenon of Balkan Beats. Oana Cătălina Chiţu is a part of this vibrant scene and her diva-like on-stage persona is reminiscent of times long past, when bohemians and intellectuals met in Bucharest′s salons.

'Bucharest Tango' is an unique album, one that resurrects a lost music, the sound of Romanian Tango as played in Bucharest cafes and parks, restaurants and clubs across the 1930s

Resurrecting the lost sound of Romanian and Eastern European Tangos as played in Bucharest cafes and parks.

...restaurants and clubs across the 1930s. Oana Cătălina Chiţu and her musicians combine the lost tango songs of that era with the folk ballads of Maria Tanase (1913-1963; the Romanian Piaf).

Oana was born in rural Romania and grew up listening to her father sing the lost tangos. Visiting relatives in Bucharest she found they had old gramophones and scratchy 78 recordings of the tangos. She began to memorise this beautiful, vanished music. At the same time she loved the songs of Maria Tanase, the tragic diva of Romania, whose voice once haunted the nation. No other singer of the younger generation from Romania has been able to approach both the tangos à la romanesque and Tanase's ballads so authentically yet freely.

Although Romania is a country with a rich musical tradition a virus of cheap, electronic pop music has seized the nation post-revolution. Oana represents the cutting edge of a new generation of Romanians interested in the brilliant - now largely forgotten - musical traditions from a bygone age.

"Da-mi gurita s-o sarut" (give me your mouth, so I can kiss it) was sung by the Romanian tango star Jean Moscopol in the thirties. The ladies of interwar Bucharest who fell for his charms were many. Moscopol lived for some years in Berlin where he entertained the wealthy clientele of the Romanian casino together with the George Boulanger Orchestra and sang in UFA films. And yet, he returned to his homeland again and again to perform. When Romania's King Mihail was forced to abdicate in 1947, many artists left Romania, crossing the green border to the West. The voices of the elegant tango and foxtrot singers were gone, Jean Moscopol had emigrated, the Gypsy singer Zavaidoc had died and Cristian Vasile had fallen silent: There was no place for "decadent tango" in the Socialist People's Republic of Romania.

‘ ... Her voice ... descends to deliver a suitable hair-raising rendition. '

Oana 1

‘Oana Chitu o revelatie pentru publicul polonez …’

Oana 2

‘ ... bewegende Musik ohne falsche Nostalgie aus Bukarest... '

Booking

Oana Catalina Chitu

Sign up to our newsletter for news, offers & tour date announcements