Stefan Elefteriu

Stefan Elefteriu was born in Bucharest in 1956 and began violin lessons at seven. He studied at the music high school in Galați and, from 1976, at the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory – now the National University of Music – in Bucharest, where his training covered violin, piano, composition and orchestration. Among his teachers was the composer Anatol Vieru, and he worked in the institution’s electro-acoustic studio. After graduating in 1980, he took part in some of the earliest electronic music concerts held at the Conservatory.

His interest in electronics began early. As a boy he built radio sets, amplifiers and sound generators, and by his student years he had a home electronics workshop with self-built mixers and oscillators, and tape recorders adapted into four-track machines. In Communist-era Romania, where professional Western-made electronic instruments were extremely difficult to obtain, he made his own. These included a synthesiser reverse-engineered from a friend’s Korg MS-10, and an electric violin, inspired by Jean-Luc Ponty, whose pickup drove Moog-style filter and envelope modules. With Blitz, the rock band he formed in 1977 and whose members included Dan Bittman, he was among the first Romanian musicians to bring synthesisers into rock.

On stage with Blitz and the electric violin, 1978

On leaving the Conservatory, Elefteriu spent three years working in recording and mixing at the Romanian National Television studios, then joined the orchestra of the Romanian National Opera as a violinist. Running a private business was technically illegal under Communist rule, but through the 1980s he used his home studio to produce original music for more than sixty short and feature-length documentary and animated films, mainly for the AnimaFilm national animation company. Among these was The Son of the Stars (1987), restored in 4K and reissued in 2023 in the United States. In the years after 1989 he left the Opera to work full-time in his private studio.

In 1994 he founded Sound Expert Studio in Bucharest, which became one of the leading production and post-production facilities for film music and sound in post-Communist Romania. Since then he has written scores for feature films, documentaries and television, including: Dinu Tănase’s Damen Tango; a series of documentaries with Laurențiu Damian; the drama In the Family, co-produced with Fremantle Media; or the long-running sitcom Zanies, for Prima TV. His film music has twice won the Romanian Filmmakers’ Union (UCIN) award for best original score: for a feature in 2004 and a documentary in 2009. In 2007 the National Film Centre and AnimaFilm presented him with an Honorary Lifetime Award for services to Romanian animation.

Alongside his screen work, Elefteriu has built a personal catalogue of albums. Ready for You (1997) was one of the first Romanian pop albums in English. Missing Lands (2001), recorded with the American singer Diann Sorrell, was released in Germany and Luxembourg. With Outer Space - Beyond Time (2013) and Quantum Gates (2020), both featuring the soprano Aryna, he moved towards a larger-scale fusion of space rock and progressive rock with electro-symphonic, cinematic writing. As a producer, arranger and orchestrator he has also worked with artists including Florin Chilian and the jazz singer Teodora Enache.

Elefteriu sits on the board of the Union of Composers and Musicologists of Romania, and is a member of the Romanian Filmmakers’ Union. He is listed in the standard reference works on Romanian music, cinema and electronic music.

The Kingdom, released in 2026 by Woburn Records in London, draws these threads together: classical counterpoint and orchestral thinking, decades of writing for the screen, a long engagement with electronic sound, and a lifelong fascination with Britain. The album was mastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road Studios.