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GEORGE ENESCU 8 2 6 0 0 1 D D C C R R H H C C

BACH 2 THE FUTURE VOL.1 RÖNTGEN: FENELLA HUMPHREYS COMPLETE TRIOS VOL.1 LENDVAI STRING TRIO “... an interesting, diverse programme ... Fenella Humphreys shapes the music “These prove to be captivating discoveries, with skill and humour ... an enjoyable full of fresh and memorable thematic and accomplished CD.” invention, performed here by the Lendvai BBC Music Magazine String Trio with great energy and musical Instrumental Choice commitment. Each work, composed in what might be termed a post-Brahmsian “... an intriguing project by violinist style, has its own distinctive merits.” Fenella Humphreys, who is BBC Music Magazine commissioning new British companion pieces to Bach’s six iconic sonatas and partitas. Here she performs the first three commissions, alongside a DANIEL ROWLAND violin spirited yet unhurried account of Bach’s E major Partita.” NATACHA KUDRITSKAYA piano The Guardian TRACK LISTING FOREWORD

GEORGE ENESCU (1881–1955)

VIOLIN SONATA No.3 IN A MINOR, Op.25 (1926) For me there is something magical about the music and the personality of George ‘DANS LE CARACTÈRE POPULAIRE ROUMAIN’ Enescu. Everything about him conjures up a sense of generosity, big-heartedness 1 i Moderato malinconico 09’15 and limitless imagination. Casals described him as “the greatest musical 2 ii Andante sostenuto e misterioso 09’41 phenomenon since Mozart”. Menuhin said, “Enescu gave me the light that has 3 iii Allegro con brio, ma non troppo mosso 07’41 guided my entire existence.” He also considered Enescu to be “the most VIOLIN SONATA No.2 IN F MINOR, Op.6 (1898) extraordinary human being, the greatest musician and the most formative 4 i Assez mouvemente 07’18 influence” he had ever experienced. Ivry Gitlis, another student of Enescu, has 5 ii Tranquillement 07’18 been, and still is, a great inspiration for me, encouraging freedom, colour, 6 iii Vif 07’41 contrast, fantasy and daring. Hearing Ivry reminisce about Enescu it seems that these are the very qualities he embodied too: a unique composer, virtuoso 7 IMPRESSIONS D’ENFANCE, Op.28 (1940) 25’02 violinist, a brilliant pianist, successful conductor and teacher of several generations of outstanding violinists, including Yehudi Menuhin, Christian Ferras, Total playing time: 73’59 Ivry Gitlis, Arthur Grumiaux and Ida Haendel. He is someone I would have very much loved to have met! The three works on this disc are all close to my heart, and show the wide scope of Enescu’s musical language. The deeply soulful, romantic second sonata has more than a few echoes of Fauré, yet is unmistakably young Enescu, written just before the astonishing Octet. This is music overflowing with emotions, passion and tenderness. The third Sonata ‘In the popular Romanian style’ is probably his most famous Produced and edited by Matthew Bennett chamber music work. The piece evokes all the elements of gypsy music, Engineered by Dave Rowell crystallised to a highly sophisticated level. The piece is a paradox in the sense Recorded on 29th–30th June and 1st July 2015 in the Music Room, Champs Hill, West Sussex, UK Cover & inlay photographs by Juuso Westerlund Executive Producer for Champs Hill Records: Alexander Van Ingen Label Manager for Champs Hill Records: Matt Buchanan PROGRAMME NOTE

George Enescu (1881–1955) is today most widely celebrated as one of the world’s greatest violinists of his generation, a fine conductor and by far the most that it is extremely densely annotated; there are endless small details one has to significant composer of his native Romania. Certainly many great musicians who negotiate in order to sound completely improvisatory. One needs an accountant’s knew him – including his pupils and protégés Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Grumiaux attention to detail coupled with the fiery, limitless abandon of a gypsy! and Ivry Gitlis, and colleagues such as Alfred Cortot – held him in the highest esteem. Yet even today his music, apart from his exuberant Romanian Rhapsody Impressions I find to be a uniquely touching piece: the memories of an older man No.1 for orchestra (1901), is scarcely known by the wider public. His one major describing his childhood in a remote Romanian village. It’s in essence a day in this opera, Oedipe (1921–32), though recorded and since accorded increased respect, child’s life: the street fiddler, the slightly scary beggar, the garden stream, remains rarely staged; and his extensive work for solo violin (though – perhaps birdsong... Then it’s time to sleep, and after his mother sings a touching lullaby and significantly – not including a concerto) is only beginning to catch the attention the moon shines behind the curtains a tremendous storm builds up: "le vent dans la of a new generation of soloists. cheminée’”. The sunrise after this is a magical moment of great beauty, and builds up to a gloriously incandescent culmination. In adult life George Enescu liked to describe himself as a ‘son of the soil’, yet his father was in fact an estate administrator and in his own right a modest land It has been a great joy recording with Natacha these pieces that I love at Champs owner – therefore a man of some importance to the local community in Liveni Hill, the perfect place for music to fly freely. Warmest thanks to those who made it where the future composer was born. Nonetheless, Enescu’s earliest musical possible. experiences were close to the local peasantry: among his childhood memories was listening aged three to a gypsy band playing on panpipes, violins, a cimbalom and a double bass; and hiding in an orchard to listen to an old gardener play a flute. In Romania, masters of improvisation and ornamentation in instrumental music were known as ‘lautari’ – literally ‘fiddlers’ but a title which applied to any professional folk musicians with such skills – quite often but not invariably gypsy musicians. It was from such a musician, known as Lau Chioru (‘Squinting Nick’), that Enescu first learned to play violin at the age of four. Such was his innate talent that his parents soon took him to audition with the violin professor and director of the Conservatoire at Iasi (capital of Moldavia) Eduard Caudella. The good professor recommended that Enescu should learn to read music; Enescu overnight national fame and the patronage of the Queen of Romania. In the accordingly was taken home to learn this skill, and he almost immediately started meantime a theme had been germinating in Enescu’s mind, one which first to compose. Taken back to Caudella when he was seven, the professor – highly occurred to him – he later said – “At the age of 14, when I was walking by myself impressed by the youth’s burgeoning talent – now recommended that Enescu should in Prince Maurouzi’s garden… I carried it inside me for three years; then, at 17, I enter the Vienna Conservatoire. This he did that very year, on 5 October 1888. wrote my Second Violin Sonata in the space of a fortnight.” The success of his Enescu continued to compose, and while in Vienna fell under the spell of both Poème had no doubt galvanised his confidence, and his Violin Sonata in F minor Wagner and Brahms. He saw no paradox in admiring both composers, and once was the most distinctive work he had ever composed till then, in terms of its explained: “Wagner and Brahms were not at all antithetical as people have made character and its lean, purposeful sense of unity, being largely derived from its them out to be. They were opposed to each other much more by reason of policy long opening theme. than musically.” The prospect of studying under Massenet then brought him to Paris In three movements, it begins with that sombre and mysterious theme, played in early in 1895. Though the Paris Conservatoire was then still under the directorship unison by violin and piano. As the music progresses and blossoms, one may of Ambroise Thomas, whose stifling academicism was to inspire much rebellion from perhaps hear the influence here of Fauré, and there of Chausson in the music’s Paris’s more able musicians, Enescu appreciated the teaching and encouragement he moments of harmonic poignancy; but Enescu’s delivery is far more forthright than received from both Massenet and his successor, Fauré. Enescu also received a solid the sensibility of either of those French composers. The second movement, also in grounding in counterpoint from the lesser-known but much admired teacher André F minor, is more straightforwardly songful in a melancholic manner: there is a Gédalge (who also taught Ravel, Koechlin and Schmitt, as well as, some time after central section in which the melody undergoes a dreamy variation, with perhaps a Enescu’s graduation, Ibert, Honegger and Milhaud). Enescu found Gédalge’s hint of the twin influences of Brahms and Wagner which had been so crucial to the methods very much in accord with his natural inclination, and was later to state: young Enescu. The former mood returns, though with the violin now muted and “Harmonic progressions only amount to a sort of elementary improvisation. entering a more shadowy realm with a scurrying tremolo. The movement ends as if However short it is, a piece deserves to be called a musical composition only if it with a question, which links straight into the finale. In that movement the has a line, a melody, or, even better, melodies superimposed on one another.” strongest influence appears to be Fauré, its scherzando mood built on quirky, In April 1899, Enescu composed his Second Violin Sonata. By then he had achieved elliptical harmonies. In true cyclic style the Sonata’s opening theme reappears, an compositional fame with his Poème Roumain, completed in 1897 and which had impassioned statement in the midst of so much light-hearted banter; and later still enjoyed remarkable success when premiered by the Colonne Orchestra in Paris. It the second movement’s melancholic song also appears. The general mood, though, caused an even greater sensation when played in Bucharest, securing Enescu is playful and merry, with an appropriate final pay-off. Asked once to describe the essential character of Romanian music, Enescu replied: recalls Enescu’s own childhood; as the twelfth and only surviving child, he had “Dreaming. And a tendency, even in fast sections, towards melancholy, towards been cosseted by his mother who had prevented him from playing with other minor keys.” It was above all the doina – a slow and melancholic song or children. So the memories evoked by this suite are those of a solitary child, who instrumental melody found particularly in Romania – which inspired some of hears a gypsy musician, encounters a beggar, a caged bird and a cuckoo clock, and Enescu’s most characteristic music, including his Third Violin Sonata. Enescu such living creatures or natural phenomena he might encounter in the family’s composed this in August through to November 1926, and described the Sonata on garden. There’s even an eerie evocation of the wind howling in the chimney. All of its title page as “dans le caractère populaire roumain”. In an interview two years this is woven into music which is not merely evocative, but haunting, disturbing later, Enescu emphasized the difference between ‘style’ and ‘character’ and why he and strange, until dawn the next morning brings the suite to a joyous conclusion. opted for the latter description: “I don’t use the word ‘style’ because that implies something made or artificial, whereas ‘character suggests something given, existing g Daniel Jaffé from the beginning.” Enescu was particularly wary of using genuine folk themes in sophisticated music for the concert hall, describing the result as “diamonds set in concrete”. Rather, he in effect invented his own folk language, having deeply absorbed the peasant and gypsy music of his native country. This influence can be not only heard in the exotic inflections and character of the music, but may also be witnessed in Enescu’s meticulous notation of the violin part – generally inspired by the improvisatory style of Romanian fiddlers – indicating which part of the bow the player should use, degrees of vibrato and exactly how to execute the many ornaments in the violin’s music. Meanwhile the piano is often imitating instruments such as the cimbalom, or such natural sounds as bird song or the chirping of crickets. Enescu brought this imitative art to a new level 14 years later with Impressions d’enfance – truly an artful evocation of a child’s perspective on a world that appears intriguing, magical and sometimes threatening. The suite, very specifically, DANIEL ROWLAND

Dutch/English violinist Daniel Rowland’s playing has been acclaimed as “wonderful, ravishing in its finesse” by The Guardian, “totally and truly charismatic” by Beeld, while The Glasgow Herald praised his “astonishing sound and uniquely single minded intensity". Daniel has established himself on the international scene as a highly versatile, charismatic and adventurous performer, with a broad repertoire from Vivaldi to Ferneyhough. He has performed concertos by composers including Mozart, Elgar, Korngold, Berg, Prokoffief, Schnittke, Glass, Saariaho and Ferneyhough with orchestras from Tromso to Cape Town. As a soloist he has performed last season the Korngold Concerto with HET Symfonieorkest (Enschede), The Vivaldi/Piazzolla Eight Seasons with both the Ulster Orchestra and the Arcos Orchestra (New York) and the Philip Glass Concerto with the Joensuu Symphony Orchestra (Finland). A passionate chamber musician, Daniel has performed with artists as diverse as Ivry Gitlis, Heinz Holliger, Gilles Apap, Marcelo Nisinman, Martin Frost, Elvis Costello and Lars Vogt. He is a frequent guest at many of the foremost international chamber music festivals, such as Kuhmo, Risor, Osnabrück and Sonoro. The Stift International Music Festival in Holland, of which he is founder and artistic director, saw its 11th edition in August 2015. Daniel is the first violin of the renowned Brodsky Quartet with whom he has z c recorded many CDs for Chandos, and has formed an acclaimed recital duo with o r o pianist Natacha Kudritskaya. As well as this present recording the duo have B s z recorded Les Années folles (Paris between the wars) for Gutman records. Daniel is a l a

B also a founding member of the contemporary tango quintet ChamberJam Europe, y b

described by Süddeutsche Zeitung as ”a group with the power of dynamite”. h p a r g o t o h p Daniel is professor of violin at the Royal College of Music in London, he is also in demand as a soloist/director, and as guest concertmaster with the BBCSO, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Daniel plays on a Lorenzo Storioni violin, Cremona 1776. Daniel was born in London, and started his violin lessons in Enschede after his parents moved to Twente in the eastern Netherlands. He studied with Jan Repko, Davina van Wely, Herman Krebbers, Viktor Liberman and Igor Oistrakh. Meeting Ivry Gitlis in 1995 was an important musical impulse, and led initially to lessons in Paris and later to musical collaborations. Various successes at competitions include first prize at the 1995 Oskar Back competition at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. d n u l r e t s e W o s u u J y b h p a r g o t o h p s r P F i B i F t h b R i C N A S c N f P U w d w a N I n n n i i r n h o r o y o s a e l e i a t u a a A g n k i a a a a g

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