Album insights
George Enescu, the Romanian composer (1881–1955), ranks among the most overlooked figures in modern music. His exceptional late chamber music works, starting with the third Violin Sonata, showcase passages of remarkable originality, intricate beauty, and strong expressiveness. Despite his profound talents, much of Enescu's music remains largely unfamiliar outside Romania. Only his early and atypical "Romanian Rhapsodies" have frequently graced concert halls, leading to incomplete assessments of his genius akin to judging Ravel solely based on his Bolero.
Several distinct factors contribute to Enescu's neglect. His diverse talents, known best as a conductor in America and as a violin virtuoso in Europe, often obscured his calling as a composer. Apart from his deep roots in Romanian music, Enescu was also steeped in French and German traditions, leading to a unique sense of national identity. Unaffiliated with any composers' movements, he followed a solitary compositional path. Unfortunately, after his death, the communist government dubiously hailed him as a national folk composer, further diminishing his reputation in Europe. Today, in the Western world, Enescu's multifaceted and rich creative legacy is only beginning to be appreciated.
Born into a wealthy bourgeois family in northeastern Romania near the Ukrainian border, Enescu displayed prodigious talent in violin and composition at an early age. Entering the Vienna Conservatory at seven, he encountered Brahms, forming a lifelong admiration for his music. Enrolling at the Paris Conservatory in 1895, he studied under Massenet and Fauré, befriending Ravel and Alfred Cortot. While gaining recognition in Romania, Paris remained his main residence until World War I, with periodic visits to his homeland where he served as the royal family's court musician. Notable works during this period include his 1st Symphony (1905), with the 2nd and 3rd Symphonies composed during the war.
Working intermittently on his opera Œdipus from 1910, Enescu completed the full piano draft in 1922, later orchestrating it into a complex conducting score. By 1931, the culmination was ready for its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1936. The interwar years saw Enescu's peak as a virtuoso in Europe and America, highly sought after as a teacher although he rarely took students regularly, except for famous violinists like Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Grumiaux, and others. Weathering World War II in his homeland, Enescu penned some of his finest chamber music amidst the communist regime's tightening grip, eventually leading to his exile in 1946.
Enescu crafted his second Violin Sonata while still at the Paris Conservatory in April 1899. Despite its student origins, the influence of Gabriel Fauré, his composition teacher, is evident in this work. Compared to his earlier Violin Sonata, this piece marks a stylistic leap forward, written in a more unabashedly classical style reminiscent of Schumann, Brahms, and Saint-Saëns. From Fauré, Enescu adopted musical fluidity, complexity, and elegant understatement. Dedicating the Sonata to French violinist Jacques Thibaud, Enescu was captivated by Thibaud's passionate finesse, seeking to capture that fleeting musical quality in his own works.
Detailing the creation of his Sonata, Enescu described a theme that came to him at 14, lingering for three years until he wrote the Sonata within fourteen days at 17. Characterized by a mysterious, harmonically suggestive theme that permeates the Sonata, this work showcases Enescu's holistic approach, intertwining themes and exploring complex relationships within the composition. Marked by love for harmonically ambiguous tonalities transitioning between major and minor keys, Enescu's incorporation of thematic variations sought to capture the essence of Romanian folklore within a newly invented musical language.
Enescu's diverse techniques, including the use of quarter notes to undermine tonal settings and heterophony to layer different versions of the same musical content, are prominently displayed in the third Violin Sonata. Rather than directly quoting folk melodies, Enescu devised an entirely original folklore language, infusing deeply Romanian atmospheres and melodic hues into his fabric of creation. With a meticulous notation of ornamentation, vibrato degrees, and varied dynamics, the Sonata overflowed with expressive intensity, offering interpretive freedom amid its detailed instructions. Enescu's fusion of imitative violin and piano techniques emulated traditional Romanian folk violinists, culminating in evocative musical storytelling transcending direct imitation.