Biography
About
Composer, solo double bassist, and musical director. Born in Bucharest. Lives and works in Manchester.
Michael Cretu began the double bass at twelve. At nineteen he joined the Romanian National Radio Symphony Orchestra. He studied at George Enescu Music School in Bucharest, then won a scholarship for postgraduate study with Duncan McTier at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
He is an internationally recognised musician and composer, an associate and artist in residence at the University of Salford, and founder and musical director of the Manchester International Roots Orchestra, set up with Community Arts North West and RNCM.
Alongside solo and chamber work he plays in a contemporary jazz trio with Ed Barnwell on piano and Myke Wilson on drums. He has performed as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player and jazz musician across Europe and South America.
A family of musicians
The Cretu family has made music since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the mid-1700s, during Ottoman rule of the Romanian principalities, family musicians belonged to the monastery of Bistrița. They were later settled at Odaia Vizirului, by the Danube, and there is strong evidence they became musicians in residence to the court.
In 1848 Petrea Cretu, a violinist and singer, moved to Brăila. In 1884 he was among the first folk musicians to speak and play at the Bucharest Philharmonic. Michael’s father, Dumitru Cretu, was a pianist. His uncle, Johnny Răducanu (Răducan Cretu), is considered the father of Romanian jazz. An annual festival in Brăila still carries his name.
That inheritance — Roma, Romanian and Jewish strands, folk music and the concert hall in the same house — is the ground of Michael’s writing. He has said that Romanian folk song holds together the east and west of the old Roman world: the language given by Rome, and the long reach of Byzantium, the Orthodox Church, and the Ottoman empire.