Getting to Know Cristian Măcelaru
Music Director Designate Cristian Măcelaru will be introduced to CSO audiences in a series of articles in Fanfare Magazine. Follow along as the story of the CSO’s 14th Music Director unfolds.
by James M. Keller
Cristian Mӑcelaru overlooking Green Lake at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Credit: Tyler Secor
When Cristian Măcelaru was named the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director last April, his calendar for the 2024–25 season was already bursting at the seams. That was to be expected with a fast-rising star conductor who already serves as music director of the Orchestre National de France (ONF), is in his final year as chief conductor of the WDR Sinfonieorchester and oversees the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California as well as the George Enescu Festival and Competition in his native Romania—and is in demand as a guest conductor for leading orchestras everywhere.
Nonetheless, as Music Director Designate this season, Măcelaru (you may call him “Cristi”) will be introduced to CSO audiences when he conducts the Orchestra for a week in February, as well as through a series of articles in Fanfare Magazine.
When Fanfare Magazine spoke with Cristi for this first installment, in early August, he was shuttling between orchestra rehearsals and masterclasses at Cabrillo. A week earlier, he had led the ONF at the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, and he was gratified to recently learn that his newest recording with that orchestra (on Deutsche Grammophon) had just been named Orchestral Choice of the Month by BBC Music Magazine.
Cristian Mӑcelaru conducting the Orchestre National de France during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Credit: Orchestre National de France.
How did this 44-year-old conductor get to where he is? Talent, of course, and hard work, but also an origin story so astonishing that a Hollywood producer ought to snap it up.
It starts in 1980 in Timișoara, a good-sized city in the Banat region of western Romania. “The Banat region is a beautiful representation of the multicultural, diverse experience,” Cristi says. “Three distinct ethnicities have co-existed there over hundreds of years: a strong Hungarian presence, a strong German presence and the Romanian presence. They have found a way to maintain peace and respect for each other. If you go to Timișoara, there is the Romanian National Theatre, there’s the German National Theatre and there’s the Hungarian National Theatre. Each is independently administered, and each has its separate entrance—three sets of doors. But once you step through the door, it’s the same hallway, the same lobby. The separate doors are literally just a façade. That impression is significant for me. I grew up with all these people, and then people from smaller ethnicities—Russian, Serbian, Croatian—so it is an unbelievable melting pot.”
This spirit of diversity became central to his outlook. Today, his children attend a school in Paris that was founded on the idea that multicultural exposure promotes world peace. It admits only students of broad cultural backgrounds—from families like his. “I’m Romanian (now a naturalized American citizen), my wife is American, we’ve lived in Germany and the U.S. and now in France, we’ve been immigrants, we speak a few languages. All of this led to a deeper understanding of how peace can come about.”
Romania in the 1980s was grim. Nicolae Ceaușescu wielded iron-fisted power as General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party until he was executed in 1989. People were imprisoned on whims. The economy was in shambles. Cristi was young enough to be shielded from much of the unpleasantness. “I do remember many aspects of those years, though not the pain and difficulty. My strongest general memory is that absolutely anything you would need to get done—going to the grocery store, to the motor vehicles department, anything—you had to wait in an insanely long line. The line to buy bread would be three hours; you had to plan your entire day around it.”
He knew first-hand about that, because buying bread was often his job within the family—and it was a large family since he is the youngest of 10 children.
Music reigned at home. His father had studied accordion and also played piano. His mother, a trained flutist, taught music theory. All the kids learned instruments. “In order from oldest to youngest, we played cello, violin, trombone, French horn, violin, flute, violin, viola, violin, and then I played violin. We had seven rooms in which we could practice. We’re not talking bedrooms, but rather seven places where you could close the door, including bathrooms, hallways, the kitchen. We had a schedule on the fridge.”
A frame from a December 1992 home movie of Cristian Mӑcelaru, age 12, recorded in his parents’ home in Timișoara, Romania.
At night, his father, having worked multiple jobs during the day, would write arrangements for the family to play in their daily concerts. Cristi learned to read and write musical notes a year before he learned the alphabet. “I say my first language was music, because it really was.”
He was admitted to the city’s specialized music school, where he skipped classes to hide in the auditorium when the Banatul Philharmonic rehearsed there. “I remember listening to Dvořák’s Ninth [which Cristi will conduct in his CSO debut as Music Director Designate Feb. 8–9] from underneath a chair. I was completely blown away by the finale and thought this must surely be the greatest thing ever written. Well, I wasn’t very wrong.”
In the 1990s, Romania gained international notoriety for the deplorable condition of its orphanages, which led to a surge in adoptions by families overseas. The government decreed that adoptive families would have to spend two or three weeks in Romania to absorb something of the culture before heading home, and usually these people stayed with Romanian families.
Cristi, who was obsessed with speaking English, loved having Americans constantly around the Mӑcelaru home. In 1996, a family from Grand Rapids, Michigan stayed with the Mӑcelarus. “They were adopting a son who was 16, exactly my age. This is a pretty significant challenge, to adopt someone at the age of 16!” Before they left, they told Cristi about a famous music camp in Michigan—Interlochen—and volunteered that if he could get admitted, they would pay for his airfare, which would have exceeded his family’s resources by an unimaginable degree.
They had Interlochen send him materials and an application. “I devoured this magazine,” he said. “I looked at the pictures and thought this must be the greatest place on the planet. Every kid looked so happy and it was in a beautiful setting.” He filled out the attached application, assembled the required transcripts and recommendations, and made an audition videotape, borrowing what seemed to be the only American-compatible VCR machine in town.
He heard nothing. Then in December, a letter arrived from Interlochen offering him a full scholarship to attend “the academy.” Confused, he asked his Grand Rapids friends about it, and they discovered that he had sent in the wrong application. Instead of applying to the summer camp, which admits 3,000 young musicians, he had applied to Interlochen’s year-round boarding-school program, which accepts only 250.
His parents said they would let him go if he could get a visa, but they knew full well that getting a visa would be almost impossible.
“I got up at 5:00 in the morning and waited in line at the embassy for the doors to open at 9,” he recalls. “I had my letter of admission, all the documents. But even though my expenses would be covered, I had to show proof that I had personal assets that could cover that amount, which I certainly didn’t. My parents didn’t even have a bank account.”
He went to his interview all the same, and was processed by an older woman who reviewed his materials but, as expected, pointed out that his family could not show that they could support him while he was in the United States. “She looked at me and she smiled, and she said, ‘You know, my kids went to Interlochen. I know this place, and I know what it is. What you have here is not enough to give you a visa, but I will overlook it—and she gave me the visa, which she shouldn’t have. So that September I arrived at Interlochen. As soon as I arrived, I sent applications to all my friends. About 15 of them applied and many of them received full scholarships to come—but when they went to the embassy, they were all denied visas.”
One year at Interlochen turned into two. He was primarily a violin student, but at some point he took a conducting class, reputed to be “an easy credit.” He asked the directors of Interlochen’s orchestra and band for pointers and ended up conducting the orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Marche slave (“my symphonic debut,” he notes) and the wind ensemble in Holst’s Suite in E-flat.
Cristian Mӑcelaru outside the cabin where he had his first conducting class at Interlochen Arts Academy. Credit: Tyler Secor
Then he was off to the University of Miami for college as a violin major. On his first day there he responded to an ad for substitute players at the Miami Symphony Orchestra. At his audition he played the Sibelius Violin Concerto and some Bach, after which the committee asked him to sight-read Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol. He didn’t tell them that he had just played it at Interlochen and knew it by heart. It turned out that the orchestra’s concertmaster had unexpectedly died the week before, and they offered him the job. He took it, becoming, at age 19, the orchestra’s youngest-ever concertmaster.
After college he headed to Rice University in Houston for a master’s degree in violin. At Interlochen he had met conductor Larry Rachleff, who taught conducting at Rice, and Rachleff referred him to violinist Sergiu Luca. They both became formative mentors to Cristi.
One thing led to another. He received the prestigious Solti Conducting Award in 2014, and the same year he was named conductor-in-residence at The Philadelphia Orchestra. He first conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 2015, the WDR Sinfonieorchester in 2017 and the ONF in 2019—and now he is music director of them all.
When he became artistic director of the Enescu Music Festival in 2023, he decided on a theme for his first year’s programming: Generosity Through Music. “If I were to start listing all the mentors who gave so much of themselves to put me on the right path, it would be a very long list of people,” he says. “For that 2023 festival, I used a quotation from Enescu himself, which was ‘In the area of the arts, nothing can truly be yours if you don’t give it away’—the idea that in the process of sharing the music you create the art, that it requires sharing for the art to be created.”
James M. Keller, in his 25th season as program annotator of the San Francisco Symphony, was formerly program annotator of the New York Philharmonic and is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press).