Violinist Andrei Cavassi performing at ICR London show: I played a Greek piece, not manele

The violinist Andrei Cavassi, who performed in the show given at ICR London at the beginning of March, denied that he played a manea song, explaining that it was a Greek song, Ah Kardoula Mou.

“The piece in question is called Ah Kardoula Mou, it is a Greek piece performed by Despina Vandi which later, years later, was copied and turned into a manea. We sang this song all over the world in its original version,” Andrei Cavassi said in a statement sent to the editors.

The Romanian mass media reported about the show performed at ICR London, where violinist Andrei Cavassi had an artistic performance and where the ICR London director Catinca Nistor also sang a song. Amid other controversial events, Catinca Nistor was revoked from the helm of the institute.

Initially, the press reported that Andrei performed a manea song “De ce ma minti”, but both the violinist and others explained he had performed the original song of Despina Vandi, which was also taken over by some Romanian manele singers.

Andrei Cavassi is the winner of the gold medal at the International Music Interpretation Competition in Vienna in 2020.

He was selected by PIRELLI to represent Romania along with 4 other artists from the United States, Italy, China and Brazil in the project A Beautiful Place/The Pirelli Annual Report. On the occasion of the celebration of 100 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Japan, he produced together with the Embassy of Japan the event Unplugged by Andrei Cavassi (2022).

He also performed at TIFF and the Gopo awards in 2022 and produced musical events in collaboration with Tokyo City Hall for the Olympic Games.

Andrei lived and worked as a musician in Tokyo and in the last year he gave concerts in such cities as Buenos Aires, New York, Santiago De Chile, Miami, Mykonos, Saint Tropez, Monaco, Nice, Cannes, Portofino, Ibiza, Santorini, Palma De Majorca, Monte Carlo, Corsica, Barbados, Florence, Singapore.