George Enescu: String Octet, Piano Quintet

The Romanian composer George Enescu was a child prodigy and in October 1888, aged seven, become the youngest student ever admitted to the Vienna Conservatory (and the first non-Austrian), from which he graduated at the age of twelve. In addition to his career as a composer, Enescu was also an acclaimed conductor and violinist. He made his American début in 1923 conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, and frequently conducted both the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre symphonique de Paris.

Enescu made numerous recordings as a violinist, of his own works and those of others: his 1949 recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas was very highly regarded, and as a teacher (at the Mannes School of Music, in New York) his students included Yehudi Menuhin, Christian Ferras, Ivry Gitlis, Arthur Grumiaux, and Ida Haendel, among many others). Enescu composed his Octet for Strings at the age of nineteen, taking a year and a half to complete it, owing to the complexity of the string writing. The first performance was cancelled when, after five rehearsals, the impresario Édouard Colonne removed it from the programme as ‘too risky’.

The performers have chosen to complete the album with the early Piano Quintet, which Enescu composed some four years before the Octet, during his time at the Paris Conservatoire. The work shows his reverence for his hero Brahms throughout, but also demonstrates his extraordinary command of form and texture at such an early age.