Dances of reinvention: Măcelaru and the ONF at the Enescu Festival

In their second night at the George Enescu International Festival, the Orchestre National de France under Cristian Măcelaru turned what might have seemed a stylistic jumble into an evening of surprising coherence. A potential patchwork of references to folklore, jazz or waltz traditions became a narrative of music’s capacity to continually reinvent itself.

Long identified with Beethoven and the Austro-German canon, Rudolf Buchbinder ventured into the realm of Gershwin with the Piano Concerto in F. He brought weight and clarity to the score, chiselling the syncopations into sharply defined lines. The first movement balanced rhythmic bite with structural poise, while in the Adagio his restrained lyricism allowed the blues-tinged trumpet solos to glow against translucent string textures. The finale, propelled more by tension than by jazzy abandon, showed how Gershwin’s score can withstand, and even benefit from, a classical approach. Măcelaru and the ONF matched him alertly, percussion taut, brass snappy, strings lush. However, at times, the orchestra overwhelmed the piano in the Palace Hall’s improved yet still problematic acoustics.

As an encore, Buchbinder offered Alfred Grünfeld’s Soirée de Vienne, a paraphrase on motives from Strauss’ Die Fledermaus, whose improvisatory flair and light-footed dance character fitted well into the evening’s larger arc.

Opening the programme, Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody no. 2 is often overshadowed by its more extroverted A major companion. Măcelaru, himself Romanian and a dedicated champion of Enescu’s music, treated the score not as a pastoral divertissement but as a work of subtle colours and carefully shaded textures, thus revealing an unexpected intimacy. The woodwinds spun their modal inflections with restraint, and the strings offered long, diaphanous lines that hinted at an elegiac character beneath the surface. Too rarely heard outside the composer’s homeland, the piece left an impression of refinement and seriousness, though at the expense of some of its native spontaneity.

The concert’s second half, devoted to Ravel, offered its own rarity: the Trio in A minor in an orchestration by Yan Pascal Tortelier, effective but obviously less inventive than Ravel’s subtle transformations of chamber textures. Măcelaru treated the score with precision and lift. The Basque rhythms of the first movement and the sharp-edged sonorities of the Pantoum retained an intimacy reminiscent of the original dialogue between violin, cello and piano. The slow Passacaille, sombre and unyielding, emerged as the centrepiece, with the lower-voiced instruments lending a restrained gravity that underlined its tragic weight. The finale, with its whirling textures, built in intensity until it almost seemed to prepare the ground for the violent brilliance of La Valse.

Ravel’s premonitory vision of a world collapsing, captured in the whirl of a waltz, so close and yet so far from Die Fledermaus, was the final scheduled work for the evening. Măcelaru paced the introduction with a sense of mystery, basses and muted horns murmuring as fragments of waltz melody surfaced and retreated. When the full dance emerged, it glittered with seductive brilliance but never quite reassured. As the music spun faster and more violently, Măcelaru kept textures taut, so that the final collapse arrived with implacable force. The ONF responded with playing of sheen and bite, strings luxuriant in their sweeping arcs, winds sharply characterised, brass and percussion emphatic without brashness.

Not wishing to end on a pessimistic note, Măcelaru and his musicians added yet another dance: the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, full of exoticism, hypnotic rhythms and unrestrained exuberance.