Horo Staccato

Grigoraș Dinicu wrote Hora staccato in 1906 as his graduation piece at the Bucharest Conservatory, where the faculty had been reluctant to let him play a lăutar-style number until he presented it as his own composition. He came from a family of Roma musicians and spent his career between the conservatory tradition and the restaurant orchestras of Bucharest. The piece is a hora — a Romanian round dance — written almost entirely in up-bow staccato at speed. Jascha Heifetz's arrangement of 1932 turned it into an international encore, and it is usually played in his version.