When Jazz Met the Sunset in the Moldovan Hills

One of the pleasures of starting a new life in another country is discovering things that you simply did not know were there.

Not the obvious attractions that appear on every tourist website, but the smaller experiences that gradually become part of your own relationship with the country.

On Saturday, 1 August 2026, we had one of those experiences.

We went to Jazz la Apus — Jazz at Sunset — at Hill&Valley, in Teleșeu, in the Orhei District of Moldova.

The concept was wonderfully simple: put a jazz band on a hill, open the landscape in front of the audience, let the sun gradually disappear behind the Moldovan countryside, and allow the music and the surroundings to do the rest.

It worked.

In fact, by the time we left, we had already reached a very simple conclusion:

we need to come back next year.

We arrived ridiculously early

Our first mistake turned out to be one of the best parts of the day.

We arrived about three hours before the concert.

At first, this seemed excessive. Three hours is a considerable amount of time to wait for a concert, particularly when you have driven somewhere specifically to hear the music.

But in this case there was a perfectly logical explanation.

The official programme opened the venue at 16:00, while the Misha Grossu Band concert itself was scheduled for 19:00. The organisers had deliberately created those hours before the performance so that people could walk around, have something to eat or drink and enjoy the countryside.

We had effectively arrived when the gates opened.

And instead of having three hours to kill, we discovered that we had three hours to explore.

Discovering Hill&Valley

Hill&Valley is in the countryside near Teleșeu, in Orhei District, roughly twenty kilometres north of Chișinău.

The location is important because this is not simply a conventional concert venue that happens to have been built outside the city.

The landscape is part of the event.

We had enough time to walk around properly, look at the surroundings and understand why somebody had decided that this particular place should host an open-air concert.

There is a sense of space that is difficult to reproduce inside a city. Hills roll away from the property and the land opens into the valley below. Rather than being enclosed by buildings, the horizon becomes part of what you are looking at.

And because we were so early, we could enjoy all of this before the concert became the centre of attention.

Sometimes arriving too early is not wasted time. It gives you access to the parts of an experience that disappear once the main event begins.

An unexpected conversation about Brazil

Arriving early produced another unexpected bonus.

We had the opportunity to talk to the musicians.

The concert that evening was being performed by Misha Grossu Band. Misha Grossu is a Moldovan accordionist, and that immediately gave us something rather more interesting to discuss than the usual polite conversation before a performance.

I spent many years of my life in Brazil, and Brazilian music remains an important part of my cultural reference point. So our conversation eventually moved towards Brazilian musicians.

I mentioned Hermeto Pascoal.

And, to my considerable surprise, Misha knew exactly who I was talking about.

That immediately changed the conversation.

Hermeto is not simply a mainstream international name that everyone recognises. He occupies a very particular place in Brazilian instrumental music: composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist and one of those musicians whose approach to sound seems almost unconstrained by conventional definitions of an instrument.

Then there was Mestrinho, another name closely associated with the accordion and with Brazilian musical traditions.

Finding myself standing in the Moldovan countryside, before a jazz concert, discussing musicians such as Hermeto Pascoal and Mestrinho with a Moldovan accordionist was not something I had expected when we left Chișinău that afternoon.

But that is precisely why I remember the conversation.

Music has a wonderful ability to make geography temporarily irrelevant. Brazil and Moldova suddenly did not seem particularly far apart.

It was a very pleasant conversation and one of those small personal encounters that could never have happened if we had calculated our arrival perfectly and appeared five minutes before the performance.

Then the hill became the concert hall

Eventually, 19:00 approached and the reason everyone had travelled there took over.

The stage was positioned against an extraordinary natural backdrop.

We were effectively sitting near the top of a hill, looking across the valley while the band played in front of us.

There was no theatre wall behind the musicians. No elaborate indoor scenery was necessary.

The scenery was Moldova.

As the concert progressed, the light began to change.

That is the cleverness of the entire Jazz la Apus concept. The sunset is not merely something that happens to coincide with the concert. It becomes part of the performance.

The band plays while the afternoon gradually becomes evening. The colours across the valley change. The sun drops lower. The landscape that was clearly visible when the concert began slowly becomes softer.

Music and place begin to work together.

It was beautiful.

Jazz without the jazz-club walls

I have always associated jazz with relatively intimate environments: clubs, theatres, concert halls, perhaps a table, subdued lighting and musicians physically close to the audience.

Here the intimacy came from something completely different.

There was enormous physical space around us, but the environment still felt relaxed and personal.

The accordion is also an interesting instrument around which to build a jazz ensemble. It can sound completely at home in folk music, tango, French music, Balkan traditions and many other musical forms, but it can also become a remarkably expressive jazz instrument.

Misha's own repertoire reflects that versatility, moving between jazz and broader European and Balkan musical influences.

That perhaps explains why our earlier conversation about Brazil had felt so natural. The accordion has travelled extraordinarily well across cultures.

In Brazil, particularly in the Northeast, it became fundamental to musical traditions such as forró and baião. Across Europe it developed entirely different associations. In jazz it acquires yet another vocabulary.

And on this particular evening it was being played on a Moldovan hill while the sun disappeared across the valley.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

The Moldova I am beginning to discover

There was another reason the evening stayed with me.

Since moving here, I have been gradually discovering a Moldova that is difficult to understand simply by reading about the country.

A country's quality of life is not defined only by salaries, roads, government statistics, property prices or the other measurements normally used when countries are compared.

Those things matter, of course.

But life is also made from Saturday afternoons.

It is made from finding a concert twenty kilometres outside the capital, driving into the countryside, discovering a beautiful place you did not previously know, meeting someone interesting, eating and drinking something local, listening to music and watching the sun go down.

Those things rarely appear in spreadsheets comparing countries.

Yet when you actually live somewhere, they matter enormously.

A country gradually becomes home through ordinary experiences: places you want to revisit, people you remember meeting, and evenings that become part of your own history there.

For us, Jazz la Apus became one of those evenings.

It was already the third edition

Only afterwards did I look more carefully into the history of the event.

The 2026 concert was actually the third edition of Jazz la Apus.

Hill&Valley and Misha Grossu Band had already established the format during the previous two summers. Contemporary reports from the first edition in 2024 describe more than 300 people attending, and the event returned in 2025 before being organised again this year.

So what felt to us like a discovery was already becoming a small Moldovan summer tradition.

I hope it continues.

There is considerable value in events of this scale. They do not need tens of thousands of people or enormous stages. In some ways, making them much larger could destroy exactly what makes them attractive.

The location, the relatively informal atmosphere and the relationship between the music and the landscape are the point.

We will arrive early again

By the end of the evening, we were very glad we had gone.

We had arrived three hours too early.

That gave us time to explore Hill&Valley.

It gave us the chance to talk to the musicians and led to the completely unexpected pleasure of discussing Hermeto Pascoal and Mestrinho in the Moldovan countryside.

Then we listened to jazz while looking over an entire valley as the sun went down in front of us.

It was not complicated.

It did not need to be.

Good music, an extraordinary setting, a summer evening and good company were quite sufficient.

We drove back with the pleasant feeling that we had discovered something we wanted to make part of our life here.

If there is a fourth Jazz la Apus in 2027, we intend to be there.

And perhaps next time arriving three hours early will be deliberate.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This article is based on my original ideas, experience, analysis and conclusions. Artificial intelligence tools were subsequently used as editorial and research assistants to review grammar and wording, improve structure and presentation, organise some arguments into clearer logical sections, and research and verify contextual information about the event and musicians.

Where relevant, factual references were checked against the sources listed below. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.