Enescu: Piano Music Vol. 2

Album review

The selections on Luiza Borac's second volume of George Enescu's piano music show how versatile a composer he was. Like many of his contemporaries, such as Ravel and Stravinsky, he absorbed and adapted a variety of traditional forms and of compositional styles to create a diverse, if small, body of works that deserves greater attention outside of his homeland. The Prelude and Fugue are neo-Baroque in form and even in articulation, but translucent harmonies suffuse the music. In the Prelude this is done mainly through the use of long, sustained pedal tones over which the hands play repetitive figures in scalar motion. The Fugue's legato subject gently swings and almost sings, like a Bach Sicilienne. The Nocturne has the ABA structure of most traditional nocturnes, but it is a 20-minute behemoth with a stormy central section that calls for strength and virtuosity in between outer sections made up of improvisation-like, meditative ideas that send ripples into the ether. The Scherzo's humor is even more devilishly Lisztian in its outer sections than the Nocturne's middle, whereas its middle is more light-filled. The brief Pièce sur le nom de Fauré has a novel origin, explained in the notes, but even though it is based on a specific series of notes repeated several times, it also has those translucent colors of the Prelude and the Nocturne. The Piano Sonatas No. 1 and No. 3 (there never was a Sonata No. 2), are where Enescu's love of Romanian folk music is most evident, and yet it is so carefully blended in that it is only revealed by the occasional skipping rhythm or an ornament or snippet of song-like melody. The sonatas are very similar in nature to the Nocturne: meandering in tonality, musing, and seemingly improvised. Sonata No. 1 is unsettled and atmospheric, using the different tonalities as much as tempo and articulation to generate emotion. The movements of Sonata No. 3 seem to be an inversion of those of No. 1. The outer movements are animated, while the middle movement is meditative. It also has a brighter outlook, with fanciful, little ornaments that suggest bird song and a glorious finale. In all of these Borac sounds completely at ease with the music, no matter how technically challenging it can be. She is attuned to all the variations of its changeability, no matter how small, never forceably or artifically applying the minutest alterations of colors and dynamics. There does, however, seem to be a little more room in Enescu's music to play with rubato without losing momentum or emoting too much. What's missing from the recording is a warmer or less flattened sound, which would make Borac's performance in the grander moments of Enescu's writing more spellbinding to hear.
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