The Gore Brothers - THE GORE BROTHERS (2007)

Romica Puceanu's career undoubtedly began with the help of the Gore Brothers - whose name had been legendary in Bucharest since the thirties. At that time Aurel and Victor Gore's father, Gore Ionescu, played his violin in exclusive Bucharest restaurants and his traditional style was so well known, that until his death in the middle of the nineteen-fifties, he was regularly asked to come and make recordings in the Bucharest Folklore Archive. Victor Gore, who was born in 1931, learned to play the accordion, and his brother Aurel, who was three years older, learned to play the violin. When their father died they took his first name as their stage name. Nobody who wanted to celebrate an old-style wedding got past the Gore "Firm" until Aurel Gore's death shortly before the revolution in December 1989. Apart from being a virtuoso accordion player, Victor Gore was also well-known as a singer. "We were born for the music, my father always played real "Lautari music", he was an extraordinary person, who performed with the masters in restaurants such as the 'Pescarus' or in the 'Constantin Tanase' revue theatre", Victor Gore recalls. The Taraful Fratii Gore have sold thousands of records in Romania up to the present day, but the brothers never achieved great wealth. Victor Gore lives today in a small two-room apartment in the Berceni district of Bucharest and relives his memories of the golden years of the old Lautari generation, as the fan letters piled up at Electrecord pleading for the next Gore record. "We played our music throughout the land, we were even invited to play in Sofia. But the best weddings were those of the flower-selling Gypsies in Bucharest.", relates Victor Gore. "We always had a good timbalist with us, usually Marin Marangros, and of course a cobza*, played by Maslina Vetoi, a musician who had also performed with my father. When we played slow, sad songs the gypsies wept, nobody could eat a thing!".

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