Georges Enesco
December 18, 2008 
0 Comments
 |
| 1937 George Enesco Romanian Violinist Composer Conductor Booking Ad | |
 |
$12.49 End Date: Monday May-28-2012 18:55:51 PDT Buy It Now for only: $12.49 Buy It Now | Add to watch list |
| GEORGES ENESCO Electrecord ECD 61 RARE RUMANIA 10 EP | |
 |
$49.99 End Date: Friday Jun-1-2012 20:15:44 PDT Buy It Now for only: $49.99 Buy It Now | Add to watch list |
How do you feel about George Enesco ?
Do you appreciate him more as a composer or as a violinist?
Do you listen to his music? If yes, what pieces?
And finally, do you consider him one of the greatest composers?
I'm asking because Enesco is one of favorite composers but I think he's underrated.
Underrated, sure. He was one of the greatest in last century. Born in Rumenia in 1881, in that environment he produced the two Rhapsodies when he was about 20, then he moved to France and embraced that cultural environment in the first half of last century. His compositive production was scarce because, as you point out, he spent most of his time as a violin teacher, having Menuhin, Grumiaux and Ughi as pupils. I find his opera ’Oedipe’ (1936) by far his masterpiece and a relevant milestone of last century music. I had a chance to listen to a radio broadcast of the premiere italian performance some years ago.The G major chord closing the opera symbolizes the redemption for Oedipus and has a parallel to the final act of ‘Parsifal’; both represent a rite, not simply an opera. Enesco undertook the giant effort of fathoming the most dramatic and tragical greek myth in the spirit of fathoming the entire possibilities of modal writing in the first half of last century, with all the new tendencies and the paradoxical situation where he, Respighi and the Stravinsky of ‘A Rake’s Progress’, using strictly modality, became the revolutionaries. He remains an isolated voice, in some ways like Shostakovic did, but without all that political cumbersome involvement undermining Shosta’s credibility. Having quoted Stravinsky, his Oedipus Rex (at the beginning of the neo-classical phase, peaking with Rake’s Progress), written in 1926-27, remains below Enesco’s Oedipe: here we have the myth as a metaphor and a rite, there as a ‘divertissement’ about the archaism of mythology and a curiosity on how wild those wild guys were.
George Enesco plays Corelli Sonata
