A contest of projects to reconstruct the National Philharmonic will be announced on September 22. Minister of Culture Sergiu Prodan said the reconstruction of this building is a soul project. The new Philharmonic should be exceptional, with excellent acoustics, IPN reports.

In a year of the formation of the Government, the minister said his priority in the period was to build the ministerial team. Under the previous governments, the cultural sector, which was a component part of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research, was ignored.

“What I took over was a team consisting of six persons. Such a wide area as culture cannot work with six persons. We started to build the Ministry of Culture. We have three main divisions. We now have 35 units of personnel at the Ministry. In the last Government meeting, we managed to create five more units at the Ministry,” Sergiu Prodan stated in a program on Radio Moldova station.

The minister said that for the first time in the past 10-15 years, the state comes with a project to support theater productions and concerts on a contest basis. A sum of 15 million lei was allocated for the purpose.

“One of the most important things is to unblock investments in artistic productions. I refer to plays first of all. In the previous period, the subsidies allocated to public institutions, including theaters, covered only salaries and maintenance costs. No investments were made in new plays, decorations, costumes. With such an approach, the scale of plays leaves to be desired,” noted the official.

The Ministry’s priority is to rebuild the National Philharmonic that was destroyed by fire two years ago.

“A National Philharmonic in the Republic of Moldova is a soul project. The Philharmonic that burned, with all regret that it burned, didn’t have a hall which we would grieve for. The artists of the National Philharmonic now work in very good conditions at the Place of the Republic. The hall of the Philharmonic should actually be a musical instrument with perfect acoustics or there is no use having it. We do not need one more hall in a house of culture in central Chisinau. It should be exceptional. On September 22, we will announce a contest of ideas for building the Philharmonic,” stated Sergiu Prodan.

The National Philharmonic “Sergey Lunkhevich” was seriously damaged in a fire on September 24, 2020. As a result, the ceiling of the main hall collapsed and the building turned into ruins, with over 3,500 square meters being destroyed by the flames.