Phoenix or for a short time Sfinții is a Romanian rock band formed in 1962 in Timișoara by guitarists Nicu Covaci and Kamocsa Béla. Guitarist Claudiu Rotaru, vocalist Florin "Moni" Bordeianu and drummer Ioan "Pilu" Ștefanovici completed the early lineup. The group became famous in Romania in the 1970s when it started fusing their 1960s rock and roll sound with traditional folk music, thus pioneering the "ethno rock" subgenre.
Romania has a multicultural music environment which includes active ethnic music scenes. Traditional Romanian folk music remains popular, and some folk musicians have come to national fame.
Nicolae "Nicu" Covaci was a Romanian guitarist, painter, and music composer. He is best known as the leader and founding member of rock and cult band Phoenix, for which he was the lead vocalist and guitar player, with more than 60 years of activity.
Octavian Goga was a Romanian far-right politician, poet, playwright, journalist, and translator.
Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist. He is considered one of the greatest philosophers and poets of Romania, and a prominent philosopher of the twentieth century who due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding his career is barely known to the outside world.
In Romanian mythology, Meșterul Manole was the chief architect of the Curtea de Argeș Monastery in Wallachia. The myth of the cathedral's construction is expressed in the folk poem Monastirea Argeșului.
Mircea Baniciu is a Romanian musician, singer, and songwriter. Originally known as the lead singer of the Romanian rock group Transsylvania Phoenix, Baniciu quit the group when they illegally fled Romania for West Germany in 1977, continuing his career as a successful solo singer throughout the 1980s before forming a folk supergroup in 1992 with fellow musicians Mircea Vintilă, Vlady Cnejevici, and Florian Pittiș, with whom he had successfully toured Romania during the 1990s.
Ovidiu Lipan 'Țăndărică' is a Romanian drummer.
Costin Petrescu is an architect, graphic artist, percussionist and Romanian-French composer.
Romanian rock is a genre of popular music in Romania. It was influenced by changes in Romanian politics to such an extreme, that both the themes and styles of musicians, and the tastes and interests of listeners, changed dramatically with every major event in Romania's internal politics.
The Romanian National Opera, Cluj-Napoca is one of the national opera and ballet companies of Romania. The Opera shares the same building with the National Theatre in Cluj-Napoca.
Eugen Gondi is a Romanian-born jazz drummer.
Florin Barbu is a bass player. Florin played in Romanian bands Arca, Timpuri Noi, Proconsul, Blazzaj, Partizan and Cargo. Florin Barbu was awarded with Cultural Merit Order, as Knight. In 2017 he became Honorary Citizen of Timișoara.
Alfred Mendelsohn was a Romanian composer.
Mircea Streinul was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian prose writer and poet.
Silviu Stănculescu was a Romanian stage and screen actor. He appeared in more than forty films from 1960 to 1998.
Aurel Cosma was a Romanian lawyer and politician. A leader of the National Party in Timișoara before World War I, Cosma was a representative of the Banat in the Great National Assembly of Alba Iulia that voted for the Union of Transylvania with Romania on 1 December 1918.
Pasărea Rock is a Romanian rock supergroup formed in February 2014, in Bucharest, Romania by three former members of the legendary band Transsylvania Phoenix: Mircea Baniciu, Josef Kappl (bass), and Ovidiu Lipan (drums). The first line-up included another Transsylvania Phoenix member — Cristi Gram on lead guitar — along with Vlady Cnejevici on keyboards and Teo Boar on guitar. Later, they were replaced by Sorin Voinea (keyboards) and Nicu Patoi.
Béla Kamocsa „Kamo" was a Romanian instrumentalist, musician and singer of Hungarian ethnicity. He interpreted rock, blues and jazz music. He is best known for being a founding member (1962) of Romanian band Phoenix, in which he was a member until 1971. In 1982, he establishes Bega Blues Band, one of the first Romanian bands dedicated to blues music. He spends the rest of his career as part of this band.
