Moldova

Hora Din Moldova Nelly Ciobanu

"Şi zi-i mai tare lăutare, să se-audă-n lumea mare..."

Eurovision wouldn't be the same if it didn't offer us at least three minutes of ethnic knees-up every year. Part of the point of the contest - albeit one of diminished significance these days - is throwing a bit of national colour at the screen and encouraging the people to dance along at home. It invariably falls to the contest's southern and eastern participants to provide such spectacle, since Western Europe fails to the see the attraction of its own folk heritage: the UK has conspicuously failed to give us any morris dancing at the contest, although Portugal came close a few years ago to gifting the audience this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgVyjZw54u4. One country who saw the benefit of showcasing their heritage on their debut, if in a rather exaggerated way, was Moldova, and they are returning to it in Moscow - in a much purer if no less manic or enjoyable form - for their fifth entry, Hora Din Moldova.

From the moment the excitable and rather stunning Nelly Ciobanu opens her mouth, you know the song she is about to sing is not going to be your run-of-the-mill Eurovision schlager, although ironically that's pretty much what Hora Din Modova is in folk terms. Similar to the Cypriot entry in Belgrade, Femme Fatale, which was essentially a cabaret take on the sirtaki, the Moldovan entry is the nation's dance tradition set to music, right down to the wailing, the men shouting, the hey-hey! bits and the sense that somewhere just off stage the homemade vodka is flowing freely. You don't need to understand it, even if they do chuck in a bit of English; you don't even need to like it, really. Provided you're in the right frame of mind, something like Hora Din Moldova should sweep you up and take you with it whether you want it to or not. And given that a lot of people who watch Eurovision do so precisely because of songs like it, I can't see it failing to qualify, for the feel-good factor alone.

The other thing the song has going for it in the 2nd semi-final is that although it forms part of a long run of upbeat numbers, it's not in direct competition with any of them: the Greek and Hungarian entries can be seen to be rivalling each other for the audience's attention, as can the straightforward ethnopop of the Azerbaijani and Albanian entries, but Hora Din Moldova stands pretty much alone. Normally at least one other Balkan [or similar] country would roll up with something alone these lines, but the nearest equivalent in Moscow is probably the Serbian song Cipela, and there's no reason the two shouldn't coexist perfectly happily in the final*. I would certainly expect Moldova to make it that far, in any case.

What happens at that point is anyone's guess, since other factors then come into play which are harder to account for. But barring a performance where the vocals don't come together or the atmosphere is just strangely flat, I can see Hora Din Moldova returning the country to the top ten, since it is personable and professional enough to get everyone up and dancing. In many ways it represents what Eurovision is meant to be about, and ought to be embraced for that reason alone.

*Although they wouldn't want to be drawn back-to-back.