Gabi was born in 1938, one of twelve children left to violinist Dumitru Lunca to raise by himself when his wife died when Gabi was three. It was music that rescued her from a life of poverty as in the mid-fifties she entered and won a singing competition beating out fifty other entries. With her winner's certificate in hand, she presented herself at the headquarters of Romanian State Radio, and was rewarded for her daring with her first recording the same year. While she had a slight hitch in her career in the shape of an early bad marriage, she soon moved full time to Bucharest and never looked back. She retired from public life in 1990, as the constant demands of performing were getting too much for her husband and herself.
During her heyday she was referred to as "Tziganca de matase", the silken gypsy woman. Listening to her sing, you can guess at least one reason for that title. Her smooth, velvety voice caresses lyrics and she appears almost effortless in her delivery. Even the slight tremor, or strain that one occasionally hears in her voice, is more indicative of being caught up in the passion of the moment rather than an effort to reach a note. According to the extensive liner notes included in the disc, the type of music she sang was meant to lift the weight of sadness from the listener's soul.
They were songs of the quiet yearning that's caused by homesickness, or missing one's mother or sweetheart. In the wrong hands I'm sure this type of material could be deadly. Sickeningly sentimental saccharine, it would make your teeth hurt just to listen to it. Fortunately Gabi's voice has a quality that makes her sound so genuine, one can't help but feel the passion she sings with, even though you don't understand a word she says. It was this passion, and the intensity of her delivery, that made me think of Edith Piaf and the French chanteuse tradition.
Although Gabi Lunca grew up listening to Romanian radio and singers whose music was predominately of gypsy origins, she was also part of a generation of singers who inherited the legacy of a culture that had been heavily influenced by France. Perhaps it's because of the similarities in the cadences of the two languages, Romanian and French, that I was so forcefully reminded of Piaf when I first heard Lunca, but I also think it was something deeper. Both women had an almost instinctual understanding of how to communicate emotion to their audience in such a way that no one listening could doubt their sincerity.
Article comments
1 - amba
Piaf? Hmmmmm. I think of her as the Romanian Billie Holiday.