Suite No.3 in D, Op.27

(Suite villageoise - “Village Suite’)

Renouveau champêtre

(“Spring in the Country”)

Gamins en plein air

(“Children out of doors”)

La vieille maison de l’enfance au soleil couchant -

Pâtre - Oiseaux migrateurs et corbeaux - Cloche vespérale

(“The old childhood house at sunset” -

“Shepherd” - “Migratory Birds and Crows” - “Vesper bell“ )

Rivière sous la lune

(“River under the moon”)

Danses rustiques

(”Rustic Dances)

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 (as Georges Enesco) he spent much of his life, his status as a composer is more widely recognised: his operatic masterpiece Oedipe, for example, was first performed in Paris in 1936 and, though little heard elsewhere, has found a regular place in the repertoire in Bucharest. 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. He was only 20 when he wrote them and not long out of the Paris Conservatoire.

Even so the Romanian Rhapsodies do represent a very 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, 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. Similarly, although he retained an apartment in Rue de Clichy in Paris until the sadly impoverished end of his life, he had a house built to his own design amid the mountain scenery at Sinaia in Romania in 1923 and he retained a deep affection for his birthplace at Liveni.

The Suite villageoise, which was completed in 1938, is a memory of the rustic Moldavia of Enescu’s childhood. The first movement, “Spring in the Country,” is based entirely on folk song, the monodic nature of which is reflected in the linear textures of the piece: the modal melodic line, elaborately decorated in places and scored in such a way as to simulate the colour of folk instruments, is always paramount, however complex the counterpoint becomes before the end. “Children out of Doors” is a scherzo of children’s games, the most prominent of which, amid the toy-trumpet and mouth-organ sounds, involves whips and spinning tops. The ending, not inappropriately, recalls the closing bars of Tuilieries (Children after Play) in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Nostalgic sunset memories of the composer’s childhood home, a white-washed single-storey building situated on the estate managed by his father, merge into sounds associated with its setting on the Moldavian plain - a shepherd’s pipe represented by a solo oboe (and calling to mind the cor anglais soliloquy at the beginning of the third act of Tristan und Isolde), migrating birds and resident crows characterised alike by buzzing discords on muted trumpets and trombones (and resembling the bleating sheep in Strauss’s Don Quixote), and vesper bells mingling with echoes of the sunset music from the first part of the movement. As the moon rises, the composer’s attention is drawn towards its reflection on the river, which flows serenely past in smoothly articulated chromatic progressions while the celesta glistens brightly on the surface.

The last movement is the folk-dance equivalent of the folk-song first movement. Its similarly humble beginnings, featuring a country fiddle and clarinet among other solo instruments, develop into a large-scale communal celebration.

Gerald Larner©