Enescu: Symphony No 2, Chamber Symphony - Lintu, Tampere Philharmonic (2012)

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Enescu: Symphony No 2, Chamber Symphony - Lintu, Tampere Philharmonic (2012)

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Ondine is pleased to announce the first release of an Enescu cycle with the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of its artistic director Hannu Lintu. George Enescu is Romania’s most important composer – and one of the most neglected composers of the 20th century.

Artistic director of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra since 2009, Hannu Lintu has rapidly been creating an international career and is a sought-after conductor.

Previous work from the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, Hannu Lintu and Ondine include Rautavaara’s opera Kaivos (ODE11742) and a recording with works by young Finnish composer Uljas Pulkkis (ODE11762).

This release will be the first of an Enescu cycle with Hannu Lintu. Two more – featuring, among others, symphonies no. 1 and 3 – will follow 2013 and 2014.

Composer: George Enescu
Conductor: Hannu Lintu
Orchestra/Ensemble: Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra

Reviews: Here’s an important, adventurous release. Enescu’s Second Symphony, composed around 1912-14, received only a single performance during the composer’s lifetime. Lasting nearly an hour, it’s enormously complex and horrendously difficult to play. The idiom, ostensibly, is Richard Strauss on steroids. Enescu’s scoring is relentlessly opulent, but what makes the piece so difficult on first hearing is a combination of contrapuntal busyness and the composer’s desire to keep all aspects of the music–rhythm, tonality, timbre, dynamics–in an almost constant state of flux. Consider the opening of the finale (sound sample below), ostensibly a march, but the music never quite settles down for any length of time until the last chord, some fifteen minutes later.

This doesn’t mean that the work isn’t worth hearing. Quite the contrary. Enescu was a genius, and his tendency to over-write, evident even in his simplest pieces such as the Romanian Rhapsodies, is simply one aspect of a mind so full of ideas (and so allergic to literal repetition) that his music practically always sounds as if bursting at the seams. So the symphony takes some getting used to. It is music for the true connoisseur, and while it has been recorded a few times previously, you’d be hard pressed to find a better performance than this one. Hannu Lintu and the Tampere Philharmonic cope with the music’s challenges confidently. Most importantly, they play the music with remarkable clarity while keeping it up to tempo. The abundance of incident never sounds merely fussy, and the main melodic thread never vanishes amidst the thickets of notes.

The Chamber Symphony for 12 Instruments, a late work, couldn’t be more different. Now the melodic ideas are elusive, gnarly, almost atonal in spots, the argument highly compressed. Enescu’s love of counterpoint is still in evidence, but textures are lean, even austere. Taking only about fifteen minutes in total, the work is frankly strange, but it makes a valuable coupling in such a sympathetic performance. Ondine’s engineering is excellent in both symphonies. As I said, this isn’t music for casual listening, but it certainly belongs on the shelf of every serious collector.