Dan Dediu (1967), rector of the National University of Music Bucharest, is one of the busiest Romanian composers of our day. His works have been awarded prizes at numerous competitions in Romania and abroad, including Hungary. Composed in 2012, the orchestral rhapsody Frenesia 2 is a metaphor of Romanian musical culture, with brilliant orchestration, melding vivid and powerful melodic inspiration with spontaneity and vigorous musical thought. Dediu borrows the main themes of his work from Romanian folk music, including a Moldavian hora, two Transylvanian Christmas tunes, as well as Wallachian and Dobrujan dances. In keeping with the genre, the rhapsody is governed by two contrasting atmospheres involving bright, short and fast passage in the high register, and a nostalgic and elegiac, deep passage. The two are not, however, separated into slow and fast movements, but are usually present together. Combined, the two motifs create simultaneously present extremes of expression through a constellation of joy and sorrow, laughter and crying, creating, to quote the composer, “an ironic rhapsody with a guilty conscience”.