Oana Cătălina Chițu

Oana Cătălina Chiţu grew up in the backwaters of Romania in rural surroundings and she sang in the church choir of her home village as a child, already learning guitar in her early years. She arrived in Berlin in the 1990s and studied piano, jazz and opera singing. In 2000, she formed the Balkan band 'Romenca' with the accordion player Dejan Jovanovic. Her yearning for the elegant Romanian tangos from the mid-war era, forgotten in the modern Romania, finally urged her to give all of those old tango melodies their rightful place and bring them into the present. In 2007, supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin, Oana Cătălina Chiţu brought her musical and theatrical performance "Bucharest Tango" to the stage. Oana Cătălina Chiţu interprets the texts, which mainly deal with love and were mostly written for the tango stars by male composers, with the same sensitivity as the songs of the unforgotten Maria Tanase. Chiţu has been a great admirer of Tanase for a long time and her songs have been part of Chiţu's repertoire for years. Oana Cătălina Chiţu, now resident in Berlin, and her virtuoso Eastern-European Balkan tango orchestra bring the Tanase songs back to life with a suggestive potency and lend the rather melancholic tangos a different emotional nuance. Chiţus' musicians combine tango hits with Jazz, Sinti Swing and Flamenco, take a look at the period between the Wars without a false sense of nostalgia and open the doors to tangos and songs from Bucharest, the grubby Paris of the East, which were up until now only known to insiders.