Enescu is considered to be one of the last great pedagogues born in the nineteenth century, singled out from his contemporaries by Flesch. He is equally known as a composer, conductor, violinist and pianist, and was fluent in eight languages. At seven he went to the Vienna Conservatory to study with Joseph Hellmesberger, who would smuggle him into the orchestra pit at the Vienna Opera. Here Enescu would drink in the sounds and colours of the music and observe the potential and limits of various instruments as they were played. At nine he moved into the adult violin class and graduated at twelve with the highest honours. Enescu’s interest in composition was already ripening at this time; his first four-part fugue was completed at the age of ten and his first published work, the Poème Roumain of 1897, was performed by the Colonne Orchestra while he was still a student. In the period up to 1900 he produced some 300 works and continued to write prolifically throughout his life, mostly in a neo-Romantic style but also employing some experimental techniques such as quarter-tones.

Like Flesch and Thibaud before him, Enescu became a pupil of Marsick (1848–1924) in Paris; he in turn had studied under Léonard at Liège and finished his education with Joachim, whom he greatly admired. Enescu, aged fifteen, played for Joachim himself and received a degree of encouragement which, ironically, spurred him on not to greater heights of violin playing but rather to write his Sonata No. 1, Op. 2 (1897). He persuaded Joachim to play through the work with himself at the piano, but the experiment backfired when the great violinist, horrified at what he heard, declared it to be ‘even more modern than César Franck’! Although awarded the premier prix for violin at the Paris Conservatoire, Enescu had already decided that the life of a virtuoso violinist was not for him; his desire to compose was paramount and he ‘grudged every minute’ spent playing his violin. Those who heard him play, however, often held the opposite view; in 1923 the New York Times critic promoted him as ‘first and last a musician and an interpreter, devoted to expounding music and not at all to the display of his technical powers’ and commended his ‘exquisite purity of intonation’.

In both performance and teaching Bach’s music was very dear to Enescu. Having been presented, as a child, with a complete Bach Gesellschaft edition by Queen Elisabeth, he devoted endless hours to the study of his works, finding a co-dependency between text and harmonic movement which informed his own interpretation and later brought the music to life for many of his students, some of whom vouched for his knowledge by memory of some 120 of the cantatas.

As a teacher, Enescu’s legacy is a significant one. His ethos was rather of the Auer school in that he never insisted upon a way of playing a particular passage but rather, by giving a general musical concept from which to work, encouraged performers to find their own route and bring this to maturity. His most renowned and celebrated pupil is almost universally considered to be Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he continued a fruitful relationship to the end of his career.

Enescu’s all-round musicianship extended easily into the sphere of conducting; his concert appearances for the most part exercised his practical musical proficiencies as violinist, pianist, and conductor – particularly with Menuhin with whom he regularly performed in all three capacities – as well as in the role of composer.

Although his career took him around the globe, and despite his severing of connections with Romania under the communist regime, Enescu loved his homeland and cultural roots. Much of the money so hard-earned from playing the violin under duress was used by him to buy land for a mountain retreat in Romania and to promote the education and training of young musicians.

Not an enthusiastic participant in the recording process, Enescu has left us with surprisingly little for one so prolific in his career. Nonetheless, he comes across as a vivid and personal interpreter on the violin. Significant recordings include a deeply-felt Chausson Poème from 1929 which evidences his sweet and bewitching tone, very much of the French style, with a moderately slow continuous vibrato and liberal use of portamento. Perhaps one of the most famous recordings is that of the Bach Double Concerto made with his former pupil Yehudi Menuhin in 1932 in which master and pupil are very closely matched indeed.

Enescu’s later recordings, including a 1951 performance of his Violin Sonata No. 2 – the only recording he made onto magnetic tape – and a live performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto during his last tour of the US in 1949, are, rather sadly, testimony to his waning powers. A 1943 performance of his Sonata No. 2 with Dinu Lipatti is more virile and direct with tighter vibrato and much more precise intonation, although there are noticeable difficulties in the finale of this, one of Enescu’s best-known works. Nonetheless, in all of his recordings, there is an extraordinary power and unflinching communication between performer and listener. Whilst his Bach sonatas and partitas of 1949 (comprising an extremely rare 3-LP issue by Continental) are not his best work, his 1929 performance of Handel’s Sonata in D, HWV 371 stands out in my view. Although this is unquestionably playing fundamentally different from anything Handel himself would have envisaged, the slow movement is quite extraordinarily powerful and intense: not unlike the best playing of Jenő Hubay in this respect.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)