Music Time: BrancuSING
This new show in the Music Time series explores a fascinating topic: music and the work of the world-famous Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi
Ana-Maria Popescu, 03.05.2026, 15:57
With 2026 officially declared as the Year of Constantin Brâncuşi, the artist’s 150th birthday anniversary was celebrated, among other things, with an international tour of concerts and lectures called BrancuSING. The tour started in Bucharest and concluded in New York on May 1, having covered Târgu-Jiu, Viena, Budapest, Rome, Madrid, Porto, and Paris.
At the centre of the event were the art historian Doina Lemny, a leading European expert in Brâncuși’s work, and two remarkable musicians: the soprano Rodica Vică, one of the most versatile and original voices of her generation, as well as the initiator of cross-disciplinary projects focusing on the dialogue between music, cultural memory and artistic identity, and the pianist Angela Drăghicescu, a chamber music professor at the University of Delaware and associate professor at The Juilliard School in New York, but also an indefatigable promoter of George Enescu’s works.
While Brâncuşi’s role in redefining universal sculpture is widely recognized, his love for and interest in music is something the public may be less familiar with. BrancuSing highlighted the dialogue between sculpture and soundscape through performances of works by Erik Satie, Anton Pann, George Gershwin and Agustín Lara, as well as soprano and piano lieder series commissioned especially for this tour to the Romanian composers Sabina Ulubeanu and Radu Mihalache, and inspired from Constantin Brâncuși’s work and worldview.
The soprano Rodica Vică told me how the selection of the music pieces performed as part of the BrancuSing project reflects one of Brâncuşi’s most striking features: the way he plays with the shifting boundaries between high culture and low culture.