Customer Reviews

George Enescu: Octet Op. 7; Quintet Op. 29

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George Enescu said of the octet, featured on this disc, that it was more like architectual design than composing. This can be heard in the connections he makes between the movements, which, although in a traditional 4-movement form, is really more like a single sonata form spread across those movements. The resulting unity is astonishing. The main theme is expressed in many ways through call-and-answer interactions between the string players, making it easy to get lost in the delightful playfulness of the piece. The result of eight parts in this octet is a little like the effects of multiple concussions to the head. Instead of 2+2=4, and 4+4=8, it sounds more like 2+2=7 or 8, and 2+2+2+2=not being able to count at all. This is one of the first major works he composed after his student years, and it is one of his first major successes. A great one.

The quintet is a later work, and a little bit more difficult to understand. Listeners will hear most readily the impressionistic influence, but there is much more to it than that. Like the octet, the quintet does not show as strong an influence of folk music as some of the composer's popular work does, but rather an incredibly detailed design. Many reviewers struggle to thoroughly describe this music. If you listen, you'll know why; it doesn't fit any preconceptions. One reviewer coined the term "Romantic Impressionism" to describe it. The Amazon reviewer sums it up as "Red Meat Faure." I like both, but hope listeners will agree with me that these descriptions indicate an inadequacy on our part. Just listen to it, and come to know it as the true Enescu, and nothing else. This is music that we should be judging other compositions by, not vice-versa. I agree with another reviewer in advocacy of repeat listenings to this work. Its not just pretty, not just interesting, it is profound.

Both of the works are beautiful, charming, charicteristic of the composer, and performed as such by Gidon Kremer and his fellow musicians. I wouldn't be the first in saying that anything he records will be worth listening to, and this is another case of his work shedding light on an unfairly neglected composer. This is recommended without reservation, but don't stop here. Enescu was a true master musician--his knowledge coming from all spheres of music: composing, performing (piano and violin), conducting, and teaching. Because his work was so spread out, he wasn't as prolific as many, but the works he left us should be cherished as much as any from the last century. Truly, his musical thoughts are as profound, if not moreso, than those of Stravinsky, Sibelius, Shostakovich, or Britten, to name a few. If you're unfamiliar with him, Kremer's disc is a great place to start.

George Enescu is a composer on the fringes of the repertoire. He is well-known for his Rumanian Dance for orchestra, but the rest of his music, much of which is completely different, is on the obscure side. This was actually the first recording of the Piano Quintet; there is now a second one available cheaply on Naxos, coupled with the Piano Quartet No. 2.

This recording is simply magic. I have no other way to describe it. It will take even the most expert listener many listenings, and a lot of time, to understand the extent to which Enescu's genius is brought across in this recording. You could listen to the Quintet a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times and still get new things out of it. And Kremer's ensemble, together with fantastic Lithuanian pianist Andrius Zlabys, play with a heartfelt, divinely rarefied warmth.

So my recommendation: pony up the extra money and buy this recording over the Naxos, sight unseen. You will not be disappointed.

The Piano Quintet, Op. 29 is simple astounding. Black tears; this Quintet is the "tear-stained flower of the poet's mind." Here, one is not asked to listen to melody, but rather a cascade of threads of melody woven together in the subconscience. This is impressionism in its most quintessential form. I highly recommend this recording for its addition of this marvelous Piano Quintet - a gem of the modern world.

I purchased this recording mainly for the Octet, which is probably one of the great unknown chamber works out there. I found the performance of the octet a bit cold and calculated overall, and Kremer's tempos are extremely conservative in the work's very difficult second movement. I still prefer the account by Academy of St. Martin in the Fields on Chandos, which is far more rich and interesting overall.
The Piano Quintet I'd never heard, but is characteristically lush and exquisite.

Enescu's octet, written in 1900 when he was 19, is an amazing piece of music that anticipated avantgarde authors (world music' included) without loosing romantic touch; during the reharsal some musicians told about it: "This piece is tremendously good: by the side it is more tremendous than good".
Wonderful interpretation of Ghidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, very rich in contrasts and able to underline the subtle play to alternate moments of lights and shadows.
Unmissable for great music' lovers.

The Octet is fairly well known, although I note that another reviewer called it 'one of the great unknown chamber works out there.' Live performances are few because it is difficult getting two string quartets together to play the thing; and when they do get together they typically play everyone's favorite octet, the Mendelssohn. Still this one ought to be played more often, and I think Kremer and his group are to be commended for recording it, if only because some people will buy it because of Gidon Kremer's fame.

As for the Quintet, I'm still making up my mind about it. It's a first recording and I'd certainly never heard it before. I've listened to it four times now and it's beginning to make sense to me. What I miss is the almost decadent lushness of the Octet. There is a good deal more propulsion in this piece, and often in the service of wisps of invention that appear, disappear, are replaced never to be heard again. It's a little like overhearing a distant conversation whose gist is just out of reach. I kept thinking that it was impressionistic *and* expressionistic at the same time--whole tone bits collide with quartal harmonies in a dreamlike miasma. It's growing on me.

The performances are slightly cool, slightly astringent. This minimizes the lushness of the writing, but it brings out the drama inherent in Enescu's very personal style.

Or, more appropriately, why have I been covering my ears? I listen to a lot of music, as you'll see from my reviews, but I can't remember ever paying any attention to Romanian composer George Enescu (1881-1955) before this CD. I must have heard the Romanian Rhapsodies on the radio some time, and I thought I had a recording of his string quartets, but I can't find it. Only an enthusiastic amazon review of those quartets, by the insightful medievalist Miles Blizard, prompted me to order this performance of Ensescu's Octet for strings, written in 1900, and his Quintet for strings and piano, written forty years later.

If you are a listener with a stubborn prejudice that music should be enjoyable, you WILL want to discover at least these two pieces. The Octet is a large-hearted composition, pulsing with rhythm and sonority, thirty-seven minutes of energy without the grandiosity of Stravinsky or Orff. It's a texture of sounds more felt by the ears than merely heard. Enescu studied with Gabriel Faure and venerated Brahms; both influences can be heard in this octet. The CD notes suggest that Romanian folk music also underlies much of Enescu's music, but since I have no first-hand knowledge of Romanian folk music, frankly I can't hear the connection. Perhaps that's just as well; it seems that music critics have 'bagged' Enescu as a nationalist composer who waivered between Romanticism and modernism. That judgement, based on this CD alone, was and is rubbish. Enescu is as rigorously a 20th C modernist as Janacek, Bartok, or Pettersson. The Octet is a youthful masterpiece, written when Enescu was nineteen, that conveys to me a huge joie de vivre in the most stringent impressionist musical vocabulary.

The Quintet is a far more complex, multi-faceted work, a fusion of Enescu's impressionism with enormous architectural structuralism as earnest as anything by Elliot Carter. I hasten to say that Enescu is vibrant and emotively generous, where Carter can be stingy with acoustic pleasures. The piano is the Promethean fire-bringer in this quintet, a bold explorer of tonalities and timbres stalking across a landscape of majestic string topography. This is a very large-hearted piece of music that I'm sure will grow more and more interesting as I get to know it better. The notes declare that this recording of the Quintet is the first ever. Pianist Andrius Zlabys has set the bar very high for anyone who wants to put another musical stamp on it. The violins, violas and cellos of the Kremerata Baltica, led by the well-known fiddler Gidon Kremer, perform with utter technical authority. Now I can hardly wait for that CD of the quartets that I ordered to arrive!