Suite No.1, Op.9

Prélude à l’unisson

Menuet lent

Intermède

Finale

George Enescu is best known in this country as the violin teacher of Yehudi Menuhin and as the composer of two delightful and highly colourful Romanian Rhapsodies. In Romania, where he was born (in a town now called George Enescu), and in France, where he spent much of his life, his status as a composer is more widely recognised. His operatic masterpiece Oedipe, which was first performed in Paris in 1936 and has long had a regular place in the repertoire in Bucharest, was not heard in Britain until Christian Mandeal conducted a concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival last year. But even in his lifetime, and even in France and Romania, George Enescu was associated above all with his two Romanian Rhapsodies - a situation which he resented, not so much because he had unwisely signed away the rights to them as because, as time went on, they became less and less representative of the composer he really was.

Even so, the Romanian Rhapsodies do represent a fundamentally important aspect of Enescu’s creative personality. For all his love of Brahms and Wagner, for all his admiration for Richard Strauss, for all the technical and aesthetic sophistication he had learned as a pupil of Gédalge, Massenet and Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire, he remained firmly attached to his Romanian roots and to a folk-music culture uniquely derived from a variety of Hungarian, Slav, Gypsy, and Arabian sources.

The Suite No.1 was written only a year or so later than the two Romanian Rhapsodies and first performed with them in a concert Enescu conducted in Bucharest in 1903. While it was clearly intended to represent a different, Western-European side of him, some of its material derives from the same sources. There is nothing in the Rhapsodies either as serious or as daring as the Prélude à l’unisson - a surely unprecedented monody for violins in unison, a long-sustained melodic line with scarcely any harmony and no other colouring until the masterfully timed entry of timpani about two thirds of the way through. On the other hand, without the example of the Romanian doina, a meditative kind of folk song with an extended and flexible line, he would probably never have thought of it.

Strangely enough, in his review of the first Paris performance of the Suite No.1 in 1904 Enescu’s composition teacher Gabriel Fauré made no mention of the Prélude à l’unisson. Perhaps he had a private word with him about what he might well have thought an extreme reliance on unadorned melodic line. He did, however, approve of the Menuet lent, which sounds like a neo-classical pastiche to begin with but which develops well beyond that: as Fauré remarked, it is “very originally thought out and generally expressive.” The Intermède is an intimate, sometimes rather Fauré-like interlude before the Finale which Fauré welcomed as “as a sort of tarantella with changing rhythms, full of life, brilliance and colour.”