CHSA 5325 – YSAŸE / ENESCU / BACEWICZ

Ysaÿe / Enescu / Bacewicz: Works for Strings

Several common factors combine to make the ostensibly eclectic selection of composers represented on the present disc a satisfyingly appropriate collection. All three musicians, in addition to being fine composers, were virtuosic string players whose illustrious performing careers at times overshadowed the dissemination of their compositions. Furthermore, all three composer-performers hailed from the same Franco-Belgian school of string pedagogy, which was as well established in Warsaw by the turn of the twentieth century as it was in Brussels and Paris. And, as the specific works recorded here all attest, their innate understanding of the creative potential of writing for stringed instruments is not only fully reflected in the idiomatic parts they created for individual instruments, but also in a keen awareness of how multi-layered string ensembles can achieve excitingly novel textures in addition to profound depths of emotional expression.

George Enescu: Octet for Strings in C major, Op. 7

By far the highest-profile Romanian composer of his generation, George Enescu (1881 â€’ 1955) had wide-ranging, cosmopolitan musical interests. He studied at conservatoires in Paris and Vienna and spent much of his life in France; internationally lauded as a concert violinist and conductor, he made several visits to the United States from 1923 onwards, and thereafter maintained a high profile on both sides of the Atlantic. His output as a composer included three symphonies (dating from 1905, 1914, and 1918) – with a further two unfinished symphonies eventually completed posthumously by Pascal Bentoiu in the mid-1990s – and the large-scale opera Oedipe, first staged in Paris in 1936. Much of his music would remain unknown after his death, by which time the composer had tragically descended into poverty and ill-health. As Enescu lay (in a tiny basement flat in Paris) on what proved to be his death-bed, he was seemingly unaware that his eccentric aristocratic wife was allegedly already selling off his manuscripts, many of which were still incomplete. Vivid and enduring memories of his stature as a toweringly gifted all-round musician were nevertheless kept alive by his most famous violin pupil, Yehudi Menuhin, who in a glowing tribute described his teacher as ‘the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician and the most formative influence I have ever experienced’.

Enescu studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire, between 1895 and 1899, his teachers including Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré. The influence of the latter on his style was profound, and provided the basis for his later eclectic mixture of elements drawn from German and French art music, Romanian folksong, and modern neoclassical tendencies. While at the Conservatoire, Enescu also underwent formidably rigorous studies in counterpoint with André Gédalge, who reportedly made him write a different fugue on the same melody every week for a whole year. Enescu later recalled that Gédalge offered him ‘a doctrine to which I was already naturally attuned’, the Romanian composer explaining that ‘polyphony is the essential principle of my musical language’ and declaring that ‘a piece deserves to be called a musical composition only if it has a line, a melody, or, even better, melodies superimposed on one another’. In his own oeuvre Enescu expressed this belief nowhere more lavishly than in his Octet for Strings – described by his biographer Noel Malcolm as ‘his most massively contrapuntal chamber work’ – the score of which the composer appropriately dedicated to Gédalge.

Enescu completed the Octet on 5 December 1900; it was published five years later, but had to wait until 1909 for its first performance, which was given by the combined Geloso and Chailley string quartets in Paris. That the eight instrumentalists were an amalgamation of two existing quartets was merely a matter of practical convenience: the score in fact followed the example of Mendelssohn’s celebrated Octet for strings in E flat, Op. 20 (1825), in treating the ensemble more in the manner of a small string orchestra than as two distinct groups of four players. (Composers occasionally tried keeping two quartets separate in the context of an octet, notably Louis Spohr in the set of four Double Quartets which he composed between 1823 and 1847.) Mendelssohn expressed the wish that his Octet be performed in a symphonic manner, and Enescu recalled that in writing his piece he had been aware of creating something akin to a chamber work by Berlioz (a composer who, while famous for his handling of the orchestra, was notoriously uninterested in chamber music). When Enescu supplied a preface for a new edition of his Octet, in 1950, he sanctioned its performance by a full string orchestra, ‘on condition that certain singing [i.e. highly melodic] parts be entrusted to soloists’. He left it at the discretion of the conductor to decide exactly where to deploy the solo passages. The essentially symphonic nature of the piece, along with the complexity of the part-writing, meant that Enescu sometimes conducted even the original chamber version for safety’s sake, as he did in a performance in Paris on 25 May 1910 given for the Société Musicale Indépendante, which had recently been founded by Maurice Ravel and others in order to promote new music.

The pride which Enescu took in the strong thematic basis on which the Octet was founded is reflected in his additional note in the 1950 preface that, in order to ‘facilitate the study and execution’ of the work, he had now indicated at the bottom of each page in the score the names of the instruments which carried ‘the principal melodic line or lines’ at that particular moment. His preface also draws attention to the unusual cyclic structure of the piece. The basic formal concept – also (coincidentally) to be found in Arnold Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Op. 9 (1906) – involves the simultaneous presentation of two different structural levels: on the one hand, the entire piece can be viewed as a single sonata form, while on the other it can be interpreted as a succession of four contrasting movements akin to those of an orthodox symphony, but presented without a break. Typically for a late-romantic cyclic form, the ‘finale’ section provides the opportunity for some climactic recapitulations and superimpositions of various ideas introduced and developed earlier in the work.

Although Enescu rose splendidly to the challenges he had presented himself, the task of pulling off such a structural tour de force across a nearly forty-minute time span proved daunting. As he later recalled:

I was crushing myself with the effort of keeping aloft a piece of music in four sections, of such length that each one of them seemed about to fall apart at any moment. No engineer putting his first suspension bridge across a river can have agonised more than I did as I gradually filled my manuscript paper with notes.

Eugène Ysaÿe: Harmonies du soir (Poème No. 8), Op. 31

The Belgian composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858 â€’ 1931) was internationally recognised as the veritable doyen of violin virtuosi during Enescu’s formative years. Enescu was particularly struck by the often fierce passion with which Ysaÿe endowed his playing – and by the Belgian’s imposing stature, in which regard Ysaÿe impressed not only intellectually and emotionally, but also physically. His belief in the sustaining power of a substantial diet revealed itself on one occasion when Enescu visited his idol backstage after a performance and was told by the master: ‘if you want to play as well as I do, you must eat your food!’ Given how crucially important Ysaÿe’s influence was on the emerging string players of Enescu’s generation, it is touching to note that in 1924 Ysaÿe wrote a set of six sonatas for solo violin (Op. 27), each of which was dedicated to a leading younger player – Enescu included – and which were designed to reflect their particular characteristics. Also in 1924, Ysaÿe completed his Harmonies du soir (Harmonies of the Evening) for string quartet and string orchestra. This combination of performing forces provided an ideal opportunity to exploit the contrast between intimate quartet sonorities and the fuller sweep of massed strings, as Ralph Vaughan Williams had memorably done on multiple levels in his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910), scored for quartet plus two string orchestras of different sizes.

Ysaÿe began to compose his Harmonies in Cincinnati in 1922, at the end of his four-year tenure of the post of music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. A note on the manuscript in Ysaÿe’s hand reveals that the score had been lost for two years after being first drafted, but that it was subsequently rediscovered, which allowed Ysaÿe to complete it in 1924, in Belgium, where he had returned in increasingly failing health. The work received at least one private performance, arranged to please royalty, and possibly two. Ysaÿe noted on his manuscript that a performance took place on 29 October 1925 ‘at Her Majesty the Queen’s’, while other sources attest that the veteran members of the Ysaÿe Quartet (which Ysaÿe had founded in 1886) reconvened to play the work on 29 December that year at the Palais de Laeken, the official residence of the Belgian royal family. Thereafter, Harmonies had to wait more than half a century for its first public performance, which was mounted at the McMillin Theater, in New York, in 1979, when the string players of Columbia University were conducted by Howard Shanet. The piece was first recorded by the Fine Arts Quartet and Philharmonic Orchestra of Europe, conducted by Otis Klöber, on the Naxos label in 2012.

When extolling the virtues of contrapuntal writing, Enescu declared: ‘I’m not a person for pretty successions of chords... Harmonic progressions only amount to a sort of elementary improvisation’. Although Ysaÿe includes finely crafted contrapuntal writing in his Harmonies du soir – notably a prolonged and intense fugato section initiated by the quartet of soloists – and at one point divides his ensemble into fourteen independent parts, his work is also saturated throughout with highly perfumed chromatic harmonies of a kind which were anathema to Enescu. In fact, Ysaÿe’s music in places comes close to teetering on the edge of a harmonic instability so disconcerting that it has sometimes been directly compared to Schoenberg’s 1899 string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, another chamber work which was later arranged for string orchestra in order to enhance its sonorous and expressive depths.

GraÅ¼yna Bacewicz: Concerto for String Orchestra

At one point in the magnificent Concerto for String Orchestra by the Polish-Lithuanian composer GraÅ¼yna Bacewicz (1909 â€’ 1969), the music eclipses even Ysaÿe’s most ambitious string textures by being divided into no fewer than seventeen parts. The work’s brilliantly idiomatic and often viscerally exciting string writing reflects the composer’s own virtuosity as a violinist: Bacewicz had studied under Józef JarzÄ™bski, at the National Conservatory in Warsaw, from where she graduated in 1932 in composition and violin; she was also a formidable pianist (as was Enescu). She became popularly known as the ‘First Lady of Polish Music’, and the widespread respect and affection in which she was held by musical communities both at home and abroad came in spite of the then-common gender bias, and the further complication that her work had to be carried out under the watchful gaze of a Communist government notorious for its interference in, and potential censorship of, artistic endeavours. Her fellow Polish composer Bernadetta Matuszczak recalled:

GraÅ¼yna opened the way for women composers... It was difficult for her, but she won; with her great talent, she became famous... Afterwards, we had an open path, and nobody was surprised: ‘My God, a woman composer again!’ Bacewicz had already been there, so the next one also had a right to exist.

The Concerto was part of an extensive output of music for strings by Bacewicz, which included no fewer than seven violin concertos, two cello concertos, a viola concerto, five sonatas for violin and piano, seven string quartets, a quartet for four cellos, and a highly regarded pedagogical quartet for four violins. Composed in 1948, the Concerto was first heard, privately, in the following year at the Congress of the Polish Composers’ Union, which subsequently hosted the first public performance, on 18 June 1950, given as part of the organisation’s General Meeting, on which occasion it was performed by the strings of the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg. The piece was recognised in the same year by being bestowed with a (Third Class!) State Award, a mode of recognition which inevitably suggests parallels with the Stalin Prizes so nervously coveted in the Soviet Union at the time.

Witold LutosÅ‚awski, perhaps the best known of twentieth-century Polish composers, was a great admirer of the piece. Recalling her achievements in a tribute published after the death of Bacewicz, he declared that the work was ‘probably the highlight of that “no-nonsense” period in GraÅ¼yna’s oeuvre which encyclopaedias simplistically refer to as “neoclassical”’. When the work was first performed in the UK, in 1996, The Times also commented on the music’s ‘neo-classical energy’. But this neoclassicism was a short-lived phase in Bacewicz’s career, which was marked by an invigorating stylistic eclecticism and an occasional desire to experiment with more novel compositional techniques. The composer’s friend Stefan Kisielewski aptly summarised the Concerto’s more general appeal in a review published in 1950, albeit including some not entirely plausible allusions to baroque music and showing a tendency towards what is these days referred to as unconscious gender bias:

It can be said in all honesty that the honour of Polish composers was saved this time by a woman... Her ‘Concerto for String Orchestra’, written with panache and energy, full of smooth invention and brilliant instrumentation ideas, finally stirred us from our lethargy. The piece draws on some Bach or Handel – a modern ‘Brandenburg Concerto’, as it were. We finally got a ‘red-blooded piece’ of wholesome and delicious music written with a creative power that is truly virile.