When Dona Dumitru Siminica sang drinking songs, laments or love songs in the Bucharest garden café "La Chirigiu" or in the luxurious Opera restaurant, the tables filled with guests almost as quickly as the glasses with tuica or wine and the patron's till with Lei. Dona Dumitru Siminica sang songs which offered consolation to the lonely, tended the wounds of the lovesick, and prepared those newly-infatuated for the end of their love. Siminica had a disturbing, androgynous falsetto voice and a large number of female fans who hung on to every word uttered by the man in the bespoke suit with the immaculate hairstyle and carefully clipped moustache for nights on end. The third CD of our series 'Sounds From A Bygone Age' contains recordings of the most exposed singer of the muzica lautareasca. It was a sensation that a few records of urbane music with Gypsy lyrics found their way into shops in Romania in the seventies. For his best recordings Dona Dumitru Siminica assembled a Lautari dream team around himself. Faramita Lambru, Maria Tanase's favourite accompanist, played classics with Dona Dumitru Siminica such as "Afara e intuneric" and "La salul cel negru", which are released outside Romania for the first time on this CD. His sudden death in the eighties did not make the headlines in the Romanian party-controlled press. There are no written documents, no interviews, and no books about this extraordinary singer. Nothing can tell us more about the phenomenon of Dona Dumitru Siminica than his recordings, which bring back the sound of old Bucharest before it is completely forgotten.

When Dona Dumitru Siminica sang drinking songs, laments or love songs in the Bucharest garden café "La Chirigiu" or in the luxurious Opera restaurant, the tables filled with guests almost as quickly as the glasses with tuica or wine and the patron's till with Lei. Dona Dumitru Siminica sang songs which offered consolation to the lonely, tended the wounds of the lovesick, and prepared those newly-infatuated for the end of their love. Siminica had a disturbing, androgynous falsetto voice and a large number of female fans who hung on to every word uttered by the man in the bespoke suit with the immaculate hairstyle and carefully clipped moustache for nights on end. The third CD of our series 'Sounds From A Bygone Age' contains recordings of the most exposed singer of the muzica lautareasca. It was a sensation that a few records of urbane music with Gypsy lyrics found their way into shops in Romania in the seventies. For his best recordings Dona Dumitru Siminica assembled a Lautari dream team around himself. Faramita Lambru, Maria Tanase's favourite accompanist, played classics with Dona Dumitru Siminica such as "Afara e intuneric" and "La salul cel negru", which are released outside Romania for the first time on this CD. His sudden death in the eighties did not make the headlines in the Romanian party-controlled press. There are no written documents, no interviews, and no books about this extraordinary singer. Nothing can tell us more about the phenomenon of Dona Dumitru Siminica than his recordings, which bring back the sound of old Bucharest before it is completely forgotten.