Bartok Violin Concerto No. 1 & Enescu Octet Vilde Frang Release date: 7 September 2018 Following her 2016 Warner Classics release of the Britten and Korngold violin concertos, praised by The Sunday Times as “A bold coupling, superbly executed”, Vilde Frang goes back several decades in musical history to make another imaginative pairing: Bartók’s Violin Concerto No 1 (composed in 1907) and a large-scale chamber piece, Enescu’s Octet for Strings (dating from 1900). As Vilde Frang explains : “Both works are firm favourites in my repertoire. I perform both quite frequently and I am excited to bring them together on a recording. Bartók arnd Enescu have a lot in common …. They were born in same year, and – according to today’s geographical borders – in the same country.” (The town in in south-east Hungary where Bartók was born is now in Romania .) “They had mutual admiration for each other and performed together in recital several times. They both also lived and died in self-imposed exile, Bartók in America, Enescu in France, but they remain two of the 20th century’s greatest nationalist composers and major contributors to their countries’ culture and art. What’s more, both the works on this album were written at a very young age – Enescu was in his late teens and Bartók was in his early twenties – and each in its own way was dismissed and neglected for decades.” Frang’s partners in the Bartók are the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and its Finnish-born music director, Mikko Franck, while in the Ensecu she collaborates with seven distinguished soloists and chamber-players: the violinists Erik Schumann, Gabriel Le Magadure and Rosanne Philippens, the viola players Lawrence Power and Lily Francis, and the cellists, Nicolas Altstaedt and Jan-Erik Gustafsson. “Chamber music is like a vitamin injection for me,” continues Vilde Frang. “It creates a healthy balance to include festivals and chamber music projects on a regular basis. My ‘desert island’ music listening choice would definitely be a chamber work of some kind, and if I could choose one single piece to play on a desert island, I would probably bring along Enescu’s Octet. “Of the two works, the Enescu Octet is the better example of nationalist style; one notices the influences of Romanian liturgical music – broadly similar to that of the Russian Church, but with greater Byzantine and Greek influences – and Romanian folk music – a composite of Arabic, Slavic and Hungarian music. Enescu described the essence of Romanian folk music as ‘dreaming ... with the special character of sadness in the midst of happiness’. “The Bartók violin concerto, meanwhile, reveals a tender, loving side of the young composer, which one might not normally associate with him. It was, in Bartók’s words, ‘a confession’ and a portrait of the prodigious violinist Stefi Geyer, with whom he was romantically involved. He dedicated the concerto to her with a poem, containing the line ‘No stars are as far apart as two human souls.’ Sadly, Geyer did not reciprocate Bartók’s feelings and she never performed the concerto.” Geyer kept the manuscript, but the concerto did not receive its premiere until 1958, two years after Geyer’s death and 13 years after Bartók’s. “Enescu is the titan of all violinists in my view,” continues Vilde Frang, “and on top of that comes my pride at sharing a birthday with him! His aristocratic playing had the kind of nobility that produces the purest accounts of Bach and Beethoven, yet there was also an edge of temperament, even wildness, which adds an allure to his playing that I find quite fascinating. “He was taught to play by roaming lăutari musicians in his home village in rural Romania, and that would forever characterise his playing. Yehudi Menuhin, who studied with him, said that: ‘For me, Enescu will remain one of the true wonders of the world … His strong roots and his noble spirit come from his own country, a country with no match in beauty.’ “Despite all this, Enescu regarded himself a composer first and foremost and considered it a kind of curse to be regarded as a violin virtuoso. He had studied composition in Paris with Fauré and Massenet, and with Boulanger and Ravel as classmates. He was also a fine cellist, although he would only play the cello publicly in a string quartet, not as a soloist. Pablo Casals proclaimed him ‘the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart’. As a conductor, he was even considered for the position of Toscanini’s successor at the New York Philharmonic. He had a voice that once enabled him to substitute a bass singer in rehearsals while conducting the third act of Wagner’s Siegfried , singing the role of Wotan from his podium. In addition he had an extraordinary memory – he could sit down at the piano and play from any point in a Beethoven symphony, Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring . Alfred Cortot even claimed that Enescu was a better pianist than he himself was! “Enescu started composing the Octet aged just 17, but it would take him a year-and-a-half of painstaking work to complete it. As he later recalled: ‘No engineer launching his first suspension bridge across a river can have agonised more than I did as I gradually filled my manuscript paper with notes!’ When he completed the work in 1900, the prestigious concert promoter Edouard Colonne agreed to programme it. Unfortunately, the players were not up to the task and, to Enescu’s bitter regret, the premiere was cancelled after five rehearsals with the excuse that the work was ‘too incomprehensibly modernistic’. The first performance finally took place nearly a decade later, in 1909, with the composer conducting. “It is symphonically-conceived work, full of fantasy – ‘as one would imagine playing chamber music by Berlioz’, according to Enescu. It offers equal challenges to all the musicians involved, both as soloists and as ensemble-players, which makes it such an adventure and so rewarding to perform. It meant the world to me to gather together some truly great and very dear colleagues of mine for this recording.” Tracklist – Bartok Violin Concerto No. 1 & Enescu Octet Béla Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 1, BB48a, Sz 36 [1] I. Andante sostenuto [2] II. Allegro giocoso George Enescu: Octet in C major, Op. 7 [3] I. Très modéré [4] II. Très fougueux [5] III. Lentement [6] IV. Mouvement de valse bien rythmée BARTOK Vilde Frang – Violin Mikko Franck – Conductor Orchestre de Radio France ENESCU Vilde Frang – violin Erik Schumann – violin Gabriel Le Magadure – violin Roseanne Philippens – violin Lawrence Power – viola Lily Francis – viola Nicolas Altstaedt – cello Jan-Erik Gustavsson – cello .