George Enescu

String Octet in C major, Op. 7; Piano Quintet in D major*

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective
Elena Urioste violin; Savitri Grier violin*; Melissa White violin*; Nathan Amaral violin; Rosalind Ventris viola*; Edgar Francis viola; Laura van der Heijden cello*; Tony Rymer cello; Tom Poster piano*

Chandos CHAN 20379
Chandos.net

There are recordings that arrive with the changing season and feel exactly right for it, and Chandos's new account of Enescu's Octet for Strings, released this week and played by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, is one of them. I went in expecting a curiosity. I came out delighted.

The octet is a rarity, and rarities are so often better admired than enjoyed. Not here. The Kaleidoscope players find beautiful lines throughout the piece, and communicate its textures and dynamics with exactly the poise this ensemble has taught us to expect. The clarity of the playing is superb, the counterpoint marvellously judged, and towards the close of the first movement the strings conjure a sound that, remarkably, comes to resemble an organ. There is real virtuosic flair here, and real energy too. Every movement has its moment of exhilaration, and the intensity Kaleidoscope build into the close is the kind that holds a listener still in the chair. Light and dark are finely balanced in the phrasing, never overstated.

The disc is completed by Enescu's early Piano Quintet, and it would be easy to treat this as the makeweight. It isn't. There is glorious colour here too, at times recalling Ravel, deployed with the same brilliance the Octet showed off, and the balance between all six players is judged as finely as anything on the record. Chandos's engineers deserve real credit for a recording that lets every strand come through. The rhythmic vitality of the second movement is a particular joy, with Tom Poster's piano singing out wonderfully assured, matched at every turn by his fellow musicians. This is an album I have thoroughly enjoyed reviewing, and one I suspect I shall return to long after autumn has given way to winter.

Enescu himself was no ordinary composer. Vienna's Conservatory took him in at just seven, in October 1888, its youngest student and its first from outside Austria, and had finished with him by the age of twelve. He built a formidable parallel career too, at the podium and the fiddle: 1923 brought his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he returned often afterwards to conduct the New York Philharmonic and Paris's own Orchestre symphonique.

As a violinist he left behind a string of recordings, not least a 1949 account of Bach's solo Sonatas and Partitas that collectors still prize, and later, teaching in New York at the Mannes School, he shaped violinists as celebrated as Menuhin, Ferras, Gitlis, Grumiaux and Haendel.

He wrote the Octet at nineteen, and the sheer density of the string writing swallowed eighteen months of his time. Even then it nearly went unheard: Édouard Colonne dropped it from his programme after five rehearsals, judging it "too risky" for his audience.

History has rather proved him wrong. The Piano Quintet that closes the disc belongs to an earlier Enescu, composed some four years earlier while he was still a student in Paris; Brahms's influence sits openly on its surface, yet there is already a maturity of form and colour that belies how young its composer was. Two works, then, from opposite ends of a decade of youth, brought together by a musician who never seemed to need the years the rest of us do.