Taking risks that pay off at the Enescu Festival

Concerts at the George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest have previously alternated, more or less, between the 19th-century Roman Athenaeum and the communist-era Palace Hall. Under the artistic directorship of Cristian Măcelaru, the scope of the festival’s reach has considerably broadened both to embrace new venues and to attract new audiences. Thus, the festival schedule of five concerts on Saturday opened with a chamber recital at the concert hall attached to the National Museum of Art, which boasts a wood-panelled, shoebox space and a near-ideal acoustic to match.

Working on the Second Piano Quartet during the depths of the Second World in 1943-4, Enescu dedicated it to the memory of his composition teacher, Fauré: a telling gesture, given the subdued, flickering textures throughout the quartet’s three movements. Pianist Luiza Borac and the Giocoso String Quartet blew light and air through the winding complexities of Enescu’s musical thought, but the attempt to follow its course was compromised by several infants and toddlers, doing what infants and toddlers do. Their parents would have been better off taking them to Sunday’s family concert at the Odeon Theatre, where the Brașov Philharmonic gave a delectable account of Ravel’s complete Ma mère l’Oye, with live illustrations by Grégoire Pont.

The Giocosos had Ravel of their own to contribute to their triple-anniversary recital: an account of the String Quartet in F major, caught on the wing of the composer’s relatively youthful inspiration. The languor and reserve of the opening movement flowed naturally out of Enescu’s quartet: Fauré was Ravel’s teacher too, after all, as well as the dedicatee of the quartet. Led by the Romanian violinist Sebastian Câșleanu, the Giocosos lean towards a modern quartet sound, light on vibrato, which places a higher price on transparency than opulence. A touch more tender affection would not have gone amiss in the Lento: their approach underlined Ravel’s “intermezzo” subtitle, and brought to mind Boulez conducting Ma mère l’Oye.

Where Borac had exercised monastic restraint in the Enescu, she returned after the interval to give full value to the concertante piano writing in Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet. The slow fugue brought the tight collective identity of the Giocosos into sharp focus, as a dawn chorus of mournful birds, with barely a leaf between them in tonal colour. Without resort to high-intensity bowing or vibrato, they built the shape of the fugue inexorably, and earned themselves breadth in the coda, accompanied by Borac’s piano asking all the right, probing questions of her colleagues. The tightly wound string of the whole recital then unspooled with a vengeance in the furioso coda to the central Intermezzo. True to form, Borac and her colleagues did not seek portentous resolution in the finale but left the threads of its quizzical conclusion loose, in an authentically Shostakovichian enigma.

At the end of the day, 11 hours later, Il Giardino Armonico filled the Athenaeum with a programme of Mozart and Beethoven directed by their irrepressibly dynamic founder, Giovanni Antonini. The searing string lines, keening winds and urgent bass attack of the overture to Idomeneo straightaway established a mood of Mozart in tragic vein, which was intensified by the standalone D minor Kyrie, K314. Antonini then directed a curiously emphatic Coronation Mass, often mannered in phrase endings and exaggerated in dynamic contrasts, and sounding rather hectic in the relatively intimate (800-seater) space of the Athenaeum. I dare say a church acoustic such as the Stephansdom would have made even more of a mess of the Sanctus, the sublime suspensions of which barely registered.

Much more on Antonini’s wavelength was the Eroica Symphony, after the interval. I would say this performance left standing the one given by the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the same hall ten days earlier, but in fact it was the Giardino Armonico musicians who were standing. In number, they roughly approximated the forces who gave the symphony’s premiere at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz; and under Antonini, they recreated the shock of the new, not only in visceral attack and one-to-a-bar momentum, but in the amplitude of a symphonic dialogue outdoing all precedents, including Beethoven’s own.

These were not the musicians to underline the French influence on Beethoven's funeral march. Instead, its clipped, double-dotted pulse receded in the face of Italianate legato for the upper lines, somewhat underplaying the ceremonial aspect of the march but maximising its pathos. The coda even took on the noble, drooping character of an instrumental madrigal: moving in its way, but not necessarily more “authentic” to Beethoven’s Austro-German context than now-unfashionable alternatives exemplified by the radically emotive conducting of Furtwängler or Mengelberg.

Regardless, both sound and spirit felt true to the work, which ended in a blaze of glory some way after midnight, almost simultaneously with the audience in the Royal Albert Hall asserting a claim to be the land of hope and glory. Well, the perspective from Bucharest, and the musical riches of the Enescu Festival, tells a different story. 

Peter's press trip was funded by the George Enescu International Festival.