Brahms and Enescu violin sonatas Wigmore Hall 2008

Remus Azoitei (violin) and Eduard Stan (piano) at Wigmore Hall, London 15 September 2008, 7.30 pm Programme George ENESCU, (1881-1955) Impressions d’enfance, op. 28 (1940) The fiddler An old beggar The stream at the bottom of the garden The caged bird and the cuckoo clock Lullaby A cricket Moonlight through the window Wind in the chimney Storm outside, in the night Sunrise Johannes BRAHMS, (1833-1897) Sonata no. 3 in D minor, op. 108 (1888) Allegro Adagio Un poco presto e con sentimento Presto agitato Interval George ENESCU Impromptu Concertant (1903) Johannes BRAHMS Scherzo from “FAE Sonata” (1853) George ENESCU Sonata no. 3 “in Romanian Folk Character”, op. 25 (1926) Moderato malinconico Andante sostenuto e misterioso Allegro con brio, ma non troppo mosso

PROGRAMME NOTES: BRAHMS AND ENESCU The richness of Vienna’s musical history is such that sometimes moments that would dominate in other less fortunate surroundings have almost been forgotten. The meeting of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and George Enescu (1881-1955) – two defining representatives of quite different cultural traditions – is one such moment, though we do not know exactly when this happened. By the time Enescu was admitted to the Vienna Conservatoire, principally to study the violin in 1888 at the age of seven, Brahms was well established in the city having lived there for twenty years and furthered his reputation as a composer. Brahms regularly conducted student orchestras and under his baton Enescu played works by Mendelssohn, Sarasate and Brahms’s own first symphony. Enescu also claimed to have received advice on playing the cadenza for Brahms’s violin concerto from the composer.

Left: George Enescu, promotional photograph. Evan Dickerson's private collection. Right: Johannes Brahms.

By the time Enescu moved to Paris in 1895 to continue his studies he had completed three overtures in Wagnerian style, a clutch of works for piano, tried his hand at string quartets and felt himself ready to compose symphonies. The first two of four ‘school’ symphonies quickly followed, clearly displaying the influence of Brahms’s mature style on the young composer.

Enescu stated when interviewed in 1951, “I passionately liked Brahms’s music; I listened with profound emotion not only because I found it admirable, but also because it evoked my homeland for me.” The inference is that he intended a homeland not defined in geography but of personal, emotional and musical connections.

Eduard Stan, tonight’s pianist, reinforces the point: “For me it is obvious that Enescu acquired his love of chamber music from Brahms, both in terms of form – sonatas, trios, piano quartets, etc. – and sonority there are many similarities at a fundamental level.” By 1940 when Enescu wrote his most complex late duo work, Impressions d’enfance, his health was declining through a combination of heart problems and the worsening of a gradually crippling spinal condition. Despite this he was forced by financial necessity to undertake engagements as a violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher when his only desire was to compose and be in Romania. But within a few years later he went into self-imposed exile in Paris due to the war.

Another poignant association, which links itself all too easily with the work, is the account left to us by Romeo Drãghici of Enescu’s final visit to his childhood home at Liveni in northern Moldavia. Drãghici recalled that, “Enescu asked to be left alone to go into the garden at the back of the house. On his return he was depressed and melancholic. … He went next to the graveyard in Dorohoi where his father lay buried, and then to his mother’s grave at Mihaileni where he was visibly shaken by emotion.”

The ten fleeting distant reminiscences of childhood that constitute Impressions d’enfance are as evocative in their imagery as they are powerful in their musical language. The fiddler, for solo violin, evokes the instinctive performance of a Moldavian street fiddler, though the thematic material is of Enescu’s creation rather than being authentic. An old beggar is touchingly characterized, the violin part being marked with indications such as ‘a little hoarsely, but soft and sad’ to bring out the quality of the beggar’s voice. The stream at the bottom of the garden is a recollection from Enescu’s childhood: he related “I can still see it – the stream which ran softly at the bottom of our garden – and sometimes it grew into a little pond which

shimmered in the light…” The caged bird and the cuckoo clock takes us into the house to capture the stark differences between their songs, with the mechanism of the cuckoo clock represented in the piano part. Lullaby presents a challenge for the players with its delicate unison scoring and exactness of tempo to produce the impression of a mother singing to her child. A cricket, for all its brevity, effectively mimics the subtle sound heard through an open window. Moonlight through the window carries the nocturnal scene further before one of the most imaginative passages of all Enescu’s writing, Wind in the chimney. This, however, is just the prelude to Storm outside, in the night which follows without a break. It gathers pace and ferocious energy before breaking into the climactic closing Sunrise, which Enescu intends not only as a literal representation but as a vision of destiny, pulling him away from his past back, to the present, and towards a future that cannot be escaped.

Brahms’s third violin sonata is the only one written in four movements. Completed during his summer holiday in 1888 at Lake Thun north of the Swiss Alps, the work is dedicated to the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. As with the earlier sonatas Brahms sets the atmosphere in the opening bars, finding an almost symphonic sense of scale combined with the heroic passion of his youthful piano sonatas. The violin part opens with a sinuous theme, the full intensity of which is only suggested at first. A seeming lack of natural rhythm is further heightened by the sforzandos on the weak beats and the piano’s right hand syncopation. The heart of the movement is the development section, which is built entirely over a pedalled fifth which seems in constant contrast to the shifting harmonics played over it. The second movement Adagio in D major provides the only escape from minor keys but maintains its intensity by largely confining itself to the lower and middle registers. The third movement is more openly playful and nervous, despite its brevity. The final Presto agitato gives the work a sense of balance, as it counterpoints the passion of the first movement by presenting an argument of conflicting emotions, with the exuberant first theme neatly foiled by the more tranquil material of the second theme. Schoenberg later credited this movement as being the inspiration for him to invent the twelve-tone system, such is the feeling of free association between the thematic material.

The Impromptu Concertant is one of several short concert pieces that Enescu wrote for a variety of instruments throughout his life. Dating from 1903, the effusiveness of Enescu’s youthful style is undeniably a major feature of the piece. That it was published posthumously in 1958 also tells us something of Enescu’s self-criticism regarding even the smallest elements of his oeuvre. The character of this spontaneous work is captured in the eloquent instruction that prefaces the music, “chaleureux et mouvementé”, with tenderness and moving. Its two connected and distinctive parts enable audiences to appreciate the main influences on Enescu’s compositional development. The first part finds both instruments intertwining their lines in a very Viennese manner that reminds at times of Richard Strauss’s lyricism whilst maintaining a sense of airy freedom. The second part is one of passionate expression for the violin against an accompaniment that draws upon Fauré without negating the influence of Brahms in the prominence given to its chord-based construction. It is known that Brahms destroyed at least three outlines for violin sonatas before completing the three that finally came into being.

The Scherzo from the “F.A.E.” sonata is a survivor from his early attempts at grappling with the form. Rather unusually Brahms wrote the Scherzo in 1853 as a contribution towards a collaborative sonata with the composer Robert Schumann and his pupil Albert Dietrich providing the other movements. It was Schumann who suggested it be dedicated to the violinist Joseph Joachim. As a further source of amusement the composers kept their identities hidden from Joachim until after he had played through the work, which he did in the Schumann household with Clara Schumann at the piano, and guessed their identities without any

difficulty. The work was unpublished in its entirety during the composers' lifetimes, though Schumann incorporated his two movements into his third violin sonata. Joachim retained the original manuscript, from which he allowed just Brahms’s scherzo to be published in 1906.

This is the only part to have maintained its place in the regular repertoire. As a side note of interest, all three composers wrote a concerto dedicated to Joachim. “F.A.E.” refers to Joachim’s overtly Romantic personal motto, “Frei aber Einsam” (Free but alone), indicating the solitary lifestyle of the virtuoso artist. Dietrich and Schumann both used the notes F, A and E as integral elements of their themes, but Brahms cast his Scherzo in the somewhat removed key of C minor which lends the writing a sense of uncertainty before leading to a coda in C major, which in turn references A minor, the key of the other movements.

Enescu’s third violin sonata is one of his best-known works. As the subtitle “in Romanian Folk Character” indicates, the work provides a unique distillation of Romanian folk music.

Enescu was clear about the specific use of the word ‘character’: “I don’t use the word ‘style’ because that implies something made or artificial, whereas ‘character’ suggests something given and natural. The use of folk material does not ensure authentic folk character, it contributes to it when done with the spirit of the people … and in this way Romanian composers will be able to write authentic music but achieve it through different and personal means.” Rather more personally he stated, “I was born rooted in the earth, in ground full of tales and legends. My whole life took place under the influence of my childhood gods.” The music reflects both Romania’s history and geographic location as a meeting point between East and West, with the absorption over many years of ingredients from the Hungarian, Slavic, Arabic and Jewish traditions as well as native folk forms. Yehudi Menuhin, Enescu’s pupil, referred to the sonata’s sense of “nostalgia, yearning, resignation and intense sadness”, though its bitter-sweet tinge is best captured in the Romanian word dor. The first movement, marked Moderato malinconico, immediately brings to mind the spirit of a Romanian doina, through the use of parlando rubato playing which imitates free recitative. Here, as elsewhere, this is achieved by a veritable minefield of markings in the score that the players have to negotiate: precise fingerings, several flavours of glissandi, varied harmonics and minute tempo changes every bar or two. The pianist Alfred Cortot, who accompanied Enescu in the sonata, characterised the second movement as “evoking the sounds of mysterious summer nights in Romania; down below, the silent, endless, neglected plains; above, stars leading into the infinite…” Indeed, aside from Bartók’s use of night music in his chamber and orchestral works, this is the most stunning example of musical imagination that exists in the duo repertoire. The closing movement builds into a wild dance full of rhapsodic reminiscences further heightened and tinged by the doina form before reaching an exultant end.

Programme notes © Evan Dickerson