Enescu Society sample programme 3

The Enescu Society was set up in June 2007 by the Romanian Cultural Institute with the aim of promoting to UK audiences George Enescu’s outstanding but insufficiently known contribution to world music heritage.

Patron: HRH Princess Margarita of Romania President: Cristian Mandeal, conductor Executive Director: Dorian Branea, Director Romanian Cultural Institute London Artistic Director: Remus Azoitei, violinist & violin professor at the Royal Academy of Music Secretary: Magda Stroe, Deputy Director, Romanian Cultural Institute London Board members: Pascal Bentoiu, composer, musicologist & Enescu historian Serban Cantacuzino, architect Evan Dickerson, music writer & reviewer Christopher Eimer, historian and art critic Sherban Lupu, violinist & professor at the University of Illinois Andrew Popper, banker, SG Hambros Under the auspices of the Enescu Society, The Romanian Cultural Institute will organize an annual concert season, offer scholarships, support the printing of Enescu music scores, books and articles about the composer. From September 2009, the Institute awards the Enescu Society Scholarship in partnership with the Royal Academy of Music.

Details about the Enescu Society at www.icr-london.co.uk/enescu To join the Enescu Society mailing list or to become a member, please write to: The Enescu Society Romanian Cultural Institute 1 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8PH office@icr-london.co.uk

We look forward to welcoming you at the Opening of the 2010-2011 concert season with Clara Cernat and Thierry Huillet 7th October 2010

Schubert Ensemble Simon Blendis – violin Douglas Paterson – viola Jane Salmon – cello William Howard – piano

Programme F. Schubert (1797 – 1828) String Trio movement in B flat D.471 G. Enescu (1881 - 1955) Piano Quartet No.1 in D Op.16 Allegro moderato Andante mosso Vivace interval

J. Brahms (1833 - 1897) Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor Op.25 Allegro Intermezzo - Allegro (ma non troppo) Andante con moto Rondo alla Zingarese – Presto

The Schubert Ensemble has established itself over 27 years as one of the world’s leading exponents of music for piano and strings. Regularly giving over 50 concerts a year, the Ensemble has performed in over 40 different countries. In 1998, the Ensemble’s contribution to British musical life was recognized by the Royal Philharmonic Society when it presented the group with the Best Chamber Ensemble Award.

2009 saw a busy international schedule, with performances in the Czech Republic, Norway, Gibraltar, Spain, Holland, Canada and the USA, as well as appearances across the UK. The Ensemble released two new recordings for the Chandos label, of works by Martinů and Fauré, both of which have received wide critical acclaim. Its Finding Fauré Festival at London’s King’s Place was a critical and popular success, and will be followed there in June of this year with another four-day Festival, Saint-Saens’ Paris, part of which will be broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

This autumn will see the start of a three-concert series at Wigmore Hall featuring the music of George Enescu, which continues into 2011, as does their involvement with the Leeds International Concert Series, whose 201011 season has been curated by the Ensemble with a Viennese theme. The major overseas tour this year will be to China in October, the Ensemble’s first visit to this country, with concerts in the Shanghai and Beijing areas.

Alongside its busy concert schedule, the Ensemble has established a reputation for innovation in the field of new music, education and audience development. This year will see the Ensemble continue its Residency at the Birmingham Conservatoire, as well as giving workshops and masterclasses around the country. The Ensemble has built up strong relationships with many of the UK’s leading composers, and has an impressive list of over 80 commissions. In June of last year the Ensemble gave the world premiere of a piano quintet by Jonathan Dove at the Spitalfields Festival, and this year sees the premiere of a new piano quartet by Joe Cutler at the Cheltenham Festival in July.

In the recording studio the Ensemble has produced over 30 critically acclaimed CDs of works by Schubert, Schumann, Hummel, Dohnányi, Judith Weir, John Woolrich, Fauré, Korngold, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Louise Farrenc, César Franck, Elgar, Martin Butler, Piers Hellawell, Vaughan Williams and Martinů. It has appeared on TV and radio in many countries and is familiar to British audiences through regular broadcasts on BBC Radio 3.

About tonight’s programme Enescu also wrote five mature symphonies (two of them unfinished, later completed by Pascal Bentoiu), a symphonic poem Vox maris, and a lot of chamber music. Aside from works already mentioned there are two sonatas for cello and piano, two sonatas for piano, three piano suites, a piano trio, two string quartets, a piano quintet, a dectet for wind instruments and a chamber symphony for twelve solo instruments. A large number of other pieces remain unpublished or in sketch form and are performable only from manuscript.

Throughout his life Enescu combined composition with multiple performing careers across that took him across Europe and the USA. As a violinist he was renowned for his performances of Bach’s concertos and solo music. The concertos by Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart were central to his repertoire, though the cadenzas he wrote for them remain scandalously underused by today’s violinists. Chausson’s Poeme and Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole largely owe their place in the modern repertoire to Enescu’s early advocacy.

As a pianist and conductor Enescu often played his own music or that of other Romanian composers such as Constantin Silvestri, Dinu Lipatti, Mihail Jora, Ionel Perlea and Marţian Negrea. Many of them were winners of the Enescu Prize, which he established in 1921. Outside Romania Enescu conducted orchestras such as the Lamoureaux, Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, the Philadelphia and the New York Philharmonic, where in 1938 was considered a potential successor to Arturo Toscanini. His violin pupils included Guila Bustabo, Christian Ferras, Ivry Gitlis, Arthur Grumiaux, Ida Haendel, Yehudi Menuhin, Ginette Neveu and Ion Voicu, amongst others.

From a very early age Enescu was highly appreciated and became close to the Royal House of Romania. Several of his early songs are settings of texts in German written by Carmen Sylva, the pen name used by Queen Elizabeth of Romania. She gave him the use of a private study in Peleş Castle at Sinaia and, for this 17th birthday, a near complete edition of the Bach-Gesellshaft – most of which Enescu committed to memory. For much of his life, Enescu was devoted to Maria Rosetti (Princess Cantacuzino through her first marriage). Enescu married her in 1939.

He lived in France and in Romania but after World War II and the Soviet occupation, Enescu remained in Paris, where he died in 1955. Enescu is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Today, Bucharest has a museum in his memory; likewise, the Bucharest Philharmonic, and the bi-annual George Enescu Festival, are named and held in his honour. Through the Enescu Society, the Romanian Cultural Institute aims to make Enescu’s outstanding music better known to wider audiences in the UK.

Schubert took the decision to leave the teaching position he held at his father’s school in June 1816 and to earn his living as an artist. He moved into the Viennese apartments of his devoted friend Franz von Schober, and celebrated his new freedom by composing incessantly, rising shortly after dawn - sometimes he slept with his glasses on so as not to waste time getting started in the morning - pouring out music until early afternoon and then spending the evening haunting the cafés of Grinzing or making music with friends. These convivial soirées, which became known as ‘Schubertiads’, became more frequent and were the principal means by which Schubert’s works became known to Vienna’s musical cognoscenti. It was for one of these occasions that the B-flat major string trio was begun in September 1816, however only the first movement was completed. An Andante second movement ends abruptly after thirty-nine bars. The torso movement displays Schubert’s thorough grounding in the sonata form and the idioms of Haydn and Mozart. Its opens with a bright main theme buoyed up on a rustling accompaniment. A violin-cello duet supported by the reiterated notes of the viola leads to the subsidiary subject, a melody initiated by an ascending arpeggio in the violin which is balanced by quick, descending scale motifs shared by all the instruments. A few shadows pass across the music as the exposition closes, and serve as the expressive bridge to the development section, which is more serious in character than that which surrounds it.

The recapitulation returns the themes and mood of the opening. Schubert’s only completed string trio, also in B-flat (D. 581), dates from exactly a year later, September 1817.

Enescu attempted writing a piano quartet in 1893, aged twelve, when the young violinist and composer was already a well-established student at the Vienna Conservatoire. His first mature and complete piano quartet, op.16, only followed in 1909 by which time Enescu had transferred to Paris to continue his studies. An early performance was given at Ravel’s newlyestablished Société Indépendante Musicale on 18 May 1910 with Enescu at the piano. The piano quartet is lengthy work that has sometimes been criticised for not deliberately advancing Enescu’s compositional style, but its generosity of expression, thematic material and warm mood peppered with purposeful contrasts offer ample compensations to the listener and makes it deserving of a far wider audience. Throughout, one senses Enescu the composer-architect at work, concerning himself with structural balance and sonata form as integral elements that build and shape his musical edifice.

Unsurprisingly, given his Parisian surroundings, various French influences are to be detected.

The opening Allegro moderato at times can sound rather like Chausson, given that the piano part is filled out with tremolo and arpeggio figures, and the movement’s lengthy, inexorablefugal elaboration owes much to Fauré, but the unison opening strikingly gives prominence to Enescu’s Romanian musical roots; recall similarly narrative passages in the Octet or First

Orchestral Suite, for example. The closing coda is noteworthy also for the intricacy of its construction. The second movement is sparsely scored, as befits the marking Andante Mesto, mesto meaning ‘sad’; Enescu heightens the effect through rhythmic ambiguity. Fauré again casts a shadow, but discernibly with an Enescuvian turn of phrase, thus bringing matters to a head before subsiding. The closing Vivace brings welcome humour to the proceedings; the strings are once again in unison whist the piano makes pointedly abrupt contributions to impart a Bachian feel momentarily. The middle section contrasts at length through its lyricism, before elements from both sections are woven together by way of conclusion.

Brahms began work on his first two piano quartets sometime around 185758. It was not until July 1861, however, that Brahms sent Clara Schumann a first draft of both works. Her letters to Brahms often took issue with his works in a most direct manner, and the first piano quartet did not escape criticism, “There is much in the (first) movement that I like, and much that I care for less. The first part seems to me too little g minor and too much D major, and I think that owing to the lack of the former it loses in clarity.”

The first public performance took place in Hamburg on November 16, 1861, with Clara Schumann at the piano. Her diary reveals as much concern over the quartet as though it had been her husband’s. “I was frightfully nervous about the Quartet, which I have so much at heart. The fiddlers scratched away or slept, although I put my whole heart into it. The last movement took the audience by storm.” A cool press reception meant that it was not until the following year that it was accorded critical support in Vienna, when Brahms performed it with the Hellmesberger String Quartet. Incidentally, the leader, Joseph Hellmesberger, was director of the Vienna Conservatoire during Enescu’s time there.

The first movement’s opening subject is only four bars long, of which the first bar conveys the seeds of tragedy with its sense of yearning and resignation.

The second theme is more lyrical and tender. In the development section, the tragic atmosphere returns and in the coda it rises to an almost painful level before softly dying away. Brahms originally called the Intermezzo, allegro ma non troppo, a scherzo but the mood of the music, despite the pulsing triplets in the cello, is too mysterious and sad for such a characterisation.

The muted strings begin alone and present the first theme before the piano joins in. There is a contrasting trio after which the entire first section is repeated but this time with a coda. In the Andante con moto Brahms’ ideas almost demand an orchestral-sized palette, such is the enormous structure of form and sound that he creates. Of particular note is the very interesting animoto middle section which has a martial quality to it. The Rondo all Zingarese has made the greatest impression upon both audiences and players alike. The opening theme is a lively dance, a gypsy Csardas.

Development of a new idea is followed by a return to the principal subject and an episode of distinctly rustic character. A quieter section provides a brief respite before the subject returns and the movement sizzles its way to a brilliant and dizzying end.

Evan Dickerson

George Enescu (1881 – 1955) George Enescu is widely regarded as the greatest Romanian composer. The sheer range of his musical talents however threatened to overshadow his compositional achievements during his lifetime. He was a magnificent concert violinist, an insightful pianist, a conductor of depth and subtlety, not to mention being a fascinating teacher and an esteemed musicologist. He was a tireless organizer of Romanian musical life. Just some of the spectacular tasks he took on included the forming of a Philharmonic Orchestra, founding the Romanian National Opera in Bucharest and the Union of Composers in Romania.

Enescu was born in the village of Liveni, in northern Moldavia on 19 August 1881. A child prodigy, he wrote his first composition at the age of five. Shortly thereafter, his father presented him to the violinist and composer Eduard Caudella, who advised that Enescu should study in Vienna. At the age of seven he entered the Conservatoire there as only the second pupil ever to be admitted below the age of ten; the first was the violinist Fritz Kreisler.

Enescu’s violin tutors included Joseph Hellmesberger Jr., Robert Fuchs and Sigismond Bachrich. Enescu graduated before his 13th birthday with the silver medal of the Conservatoire. In his Viennese concerts Enescu played works by Mendelssohn, Sarasate and Brahms, from whom he is supposed to have received advice on playing the composer’s violin concerto.

From 1895 to 1898 Enescu continued his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where his main teachers included Martin Marsick (violin), André Gédalge (counterpoint and fugue), and Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré for composition. From this period come a host of songs, works for the violin, piano, several overtures, and four ‘school’ symphonies which weigh heavy under the dual influences of Brahms and Wagner, and his opus 1, the orchestral Poème Roumain.

By his own admission, Enescu’s first mature works are the 2nd Sonata for piano and violin and the Octet for strings. Enescu was not yet 18 years old when he wrote the sonata and had not reached his 19th birthday when he completed the octet in 1900. The year before Enescu had secured the first prize in the Conservatoire’s violin competition with a performance of SaintSaëns’ third concerto.

Many of Enescu’s works bear the influence of Romanian folk music, though it is wholly inappropriate to colour him as just a folkloric composer. These include two Romanian Rhapsodies (1901–1902), the mighty opera Oedipe (1910-1931), the third violin sonata (1926), the third orchestral suite (1938) and the suite Impressions d’Enfance (1940) for violin and piano.