The final concert of the calendar year in the Faculty Artist Series of recitals at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music took place last night. The soloist was violinist Axel Strauss accompanied by pianist Ilya Poletaev. The program he offered consisted entirely of compositions by George Enescu, prepared in conjunction with a project to record all of Enescu’s works for violin and piano for Naxos. This will be a 2-CD set; and last night’s program consisted of the contents of the first disc.
The program covered the period from 1899, when Enescu was still studying at the Paris Conservatory, through 1926, the year of his Opus 25 violin sonata in A minor, which is probably his best known piece of chamber music. Enescu’s composition teachers were Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré; and his 1899 sonata in F minor (his Opus 6, which he later identified as his first original composition) clearly reflects Fauré’s influence without being unduly imitative. This is music in which much of the expression takes place through the progression of different tempi. Enescu clearly had an ear for the ways in which Fauré could evoke restlessness, playfulness, and tranquility, all through the modulation of the underlying pulse and the surface rhythmic patterns. Were he not Romanian, one might consider him a candidate for the fictitious composer Vinteuil, whose sonata plays such a critical role in Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In a similar vein Enescu’s 1903 “Impromptu Concertant” in G-flat major, which Strauss selected to begin the second half of his recital, would sound perfectly suitable in one of Proust’s extended salon scenes.
The corpus of Enescu’s compositions is relatively modest but highly diverse. One cannot say that he ever arrived at a single “voice” for his mature works. Thus, the two mature works that Strauss selected for his program reflect different such “voices.” In the first half of his program, Strauss performed a single sonata movement from 1911 that was never fleshed out into a full sonata. (Enescu called this movement a sonata “torso.”) The major work on the second half was then the Opus 25 sonata.
Both of these works explore expressiveness that extends beyond the domain of chamber music. The “torso” movement reflects an interest in orchestral composition, reflecting a time when many composers were exploring strikingly innovative approaches to instrumentation. (Recall my recent excursion into the significance of the year 1911 in music history, particularly in France.) Enescu’s “torso” is not necessarily a distillation of an entire violin concerto down to the resources of violin and piano; but its episodic structure reflects the exploratory nature that one encounters in the orchestral modernism of that year.
The Opus 25 sonata, on the other hand, is subtitled “In the Romanian Folk Character.” As with his interest in orchestral composition in 1911, this sonata is more an exploration of the sonorities of Romanian folk music than the sort of “compilation of tunes” that Enescu had provided in his two early rhapsodies (his most popular music, to his great disappointment). There is also a very jazzy element captured through the sounds of individual instruments exploring their own riffs, often with little regard to what the other instruments are doing.
Last night’s performance accorded Enescu all the respect he duly deserved. Strauss and Poletaev alternated in providing brief remarks to introduce each work on the program. (Poletaev was a bit too apologetic over Enescu not being as “modern” as his contemporaries. For my part I did not feel that apology was necessary. Each of the works on the program could stand on its own merits without worrying about whether some posterity would accord it “masterpiece” status.) Perhaps the most important aspect of the performance was the convincing case it made that this is music that deserves more than the occasional isolated listening experience. If this was intended to “advertise” the future appearance of these works on CD, then so be it. As we become more familiar with recordings of Enescu’s music, we shall then be able to appreciate better later performances of those works in concert.
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