Search - Bela Bartok, George Enescu, Peteris Plakidis :: Enescu: Impressions d'Enfance; Schulhoff, Bartok: Violin Sonatas

Kremer brings us great violin music from Eastern Europe.

Tienauhchan@hotmail.com | Dublin | 01/29/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"From the very opening solo violin passage of Enescu's IMPRESSIONS D'ENFANCE, I know once again that another great disc is to be added to my Kremer collection. George Enescu, the father of modern Romanian music, was also one of the greatest violinist of the century, and was also a pianist, organist and cellist! Devoting much of his life to education, he was a teacher of the violinist Menuhin & Grumiaux, as well as the pianist Lipatti. However his music has never gained the popularity it deserves. I have only come across his music from 2 life concerts of his violin sonatas. D'enfance, my favourate work on this disc, is a rhapsodic work for violin & piano, consisting of small pieces interconnected together. The seductive and impressionistic nature of Enescu's violin music, with touches of exotic Romanian sensuality already gives much pleasure on my first listening. Most material are probably derived from Romanian folk music (e.g. the Berceuse), as in much of Enescu 's music (unfortunately, the booklet provides mere sketches on Enescu's life as a virtuoso violinist, without any reference to the music). Many pieces are very descriptive: such as the 'Criket' and 'Bird in the Cage'. This does not mean the music is superficial; it gradually builts up into a restrained but passionate coda, a sort of yearning that is difficult to describe and is brilliantly played by Kremer. Bartok's sonata No.2, the most recorded music on this disc, is typically rustic and percussive, the most modern and discordant of all the pieces here. It is again, rather rhapsodic in nature, with a edgy, eerie quality to it, and has much reference to Hungarian folk music, especially towards the end when it becomes like a Hungarian folk dance. As mentioned before, despite the fancy cover design (with a very cute baby's foot on the CD cover) the unhelpful booklet only mentioned Schulhoff as a great virtuoso violinist and excellent pianist, and I don't even know which country he is from. His Sonata No 2. is a very passionate and intense work, with a style that has a Eastern European flavor and is in a relatively conventional form of 4 movements. Kremer, with spell-binding virtuosity & amusing wittiness, and his long-time partner, Oleg Maisenberg (an excellent pianist in his own rights) unfailingly deliver these works with abundant passion and intensity. For those who know Kremer well, don't hesitate. Get it! If you are new to early 20th century music, this is not a bad introduction. And those who has never listened to Kremer, this disc will open your ears to Kremer's magic!"

Sometimes excessive but you cannot deny the unique personali

Discophage | France | 06/06/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is great to see a violinist of the stature of Kremer tackle Enescu's "Impressions d'Enfance" (Impressions from Childhood), an incomprehensibly neglected and under-recorded masterpiece of the 20-Century repertoire for Violin and Piano, equal in stature to the composer's Third Sonata. Composed in 1940, in a time of war, and first performed by Enescu himself and Dinu Lipatti at the piano, "Impressions d'Enfance" is a nostalgic and comforting reflection of the ageing composer (he was turning 60 then) on his childhood, and especially a conjuration of his memories from the famous Gipsy fiddler Nicolas Chioru. It is a suite of 10 pieces playing without break, with evocative titles - "The Strolling Fiddler", "The Old Beggar", "Brooklet at the Far End of the Garden", "Bird in Cage and Cuckoo Clock on the Wall", Lullaby", "Cricket", "Moon through the Window Panes", "Wind in the Fireplace", "Storm Outside, in the Night", "Rising Sun"; the music is descriptive, but it is much more than that: Enesco puts to full use a wide array of incredible Gipsy-inspired violin effects, trills, sul ponticello and ricochet bowing, harmonics, ornate melismatas. Special highlights are "The Strolling fiddler", appropriately written for unaccompanied violin, first rhapsodic then finishing like a Bach sonata, the "Bird in Cage" with its incredible high-pitched trills and glissandos, the Cricket sound played with saltando bowing, the "Wind in the Fireplace" with its "quasi sul ponticello un poco flautato, non vibrato" playing. It is a journey through late afternoon, evening and night, ending with the rising morning sun in an exultant D major.



As expected, Kremer contributes a great reading, full of excesses but marked by a unique personality. His Fiddler plays - not inappropriately - with exaggerated and schmaltzy glissandos, and so does his Old Beggar. His Brooklet is even more evocative and poetic than Kavakos' on ECM (a very fine reading in its own right: Ravel: Sonate posthume; Tzigane; Enescu: Impressions d'enfance; Sonata No. 3), thanks to the greater character Kremer gives to his harmonics playing and to the beautifully hazy, watery ripples that Maisenberg conjures. Like Kavakos, Kremer plays his Cricket not only saltando as instructed by the composer (and as do both Philippe Graffin - In The Shade of Forests: The Bohemian World of Debussy, Enescu & Ravel - and Mihaela Martin - Enescu: Impressions) but with a pinched sound as well, lending it again unique character. Kremer's readiness to uglify his tone, conjuring eerie and frightening sounds, imparts his Wind in the Fireplace with unequalled evocative and terrifying power; the ensuing Storm may not be as agitated as the others, but Kremer is marvellously alive to the sudden shifts in dynamics. Throughout he displays admirable attention to the myriad details of dynamics and tempo changes. Only in the final sunrise do I find him a little short of the piece's spirit of exultation, because of a slightly too languid tempo and, at the beginning, a tone just a little too big to conjure the purity asked for by Enescu.



Kremer has long been an advocate of Schulhoff's music. In its outer movements (both built upon the same theme), the Sonata from 1927 has the forward-moving impetus, robust rhythms and grating harmonies of similar works by Hindemith, Bartok, Roussel and Villa Lobos. The sunny optimism of the first movement recalls again Roussel or Villa Lobos, while the violin's whimsicality in the third movement brings to mind Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale. The second movement I find to be the most interesting one, a sombre and impassioned dirge that, again, Villa Lobos might have written (I've been listening to the latter's String Quartets). What the Sonata lacks, perhaps, is the unique and unmistakable personality of Bartok, Hindemith or Stravinsky, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.



Kremer had already recorded Bartok's two Violin and Piano Sonatas for Hungaroton as early as 1974 (you won't know from the CD reissue, which only gives a copyright date of 1986: Bartók: Sonatas for Violin and Piano). The two partners' view of the Second Sonata was more open to the composition's dreamy quality than to its fierceness. Kremer was surprisingly subdued, but he had in Yuri Smirnov a subtle an lithe pianist, very alert to the scores' precise details of articulation and phrasing. Kremer re-recorded the First with Martha Argerich in 1990 (Violin Sonatas / Theme & Variations (Messiaen)), and this new Second now completes the cycle. From the first bars one notices a new vehemence abetted by a vivid recording, very expansive tempos and an atmosphere that, in the first movement, is alternately brooding and dreamy and suffused with a pent-up menace that is rarely allowed to burst out, and at times even laid-back in the second movement, but with a fine build-up of tension leading to the desperate utterance of the theme upon its reappearance at the end of Sonata (10:29). Maisenberg is a powerful pianist (at 9:04 in the second movement you are directly projected in the sound world of the two first Piano Concertos) with also plenty of snap in the second movement. Much in evidence also are again Kremer's rich coloristic resources (witness the harmonics starting at 1:33 in the first movement or the struck strings "battuto" at 0:50 in the second movement) and eagerness to take risks, sometimes again at the point of bad taste (the schmaltzy accents at 1:47 in the second movement, sounding like a drunkard barfing). There is apparently an editing error at 00:30 in the second movement, with the first pizzicato C left out - apologies for sounding pedantic here.



In sum, you can sometimes question Kremer's "good taste", but certainly not his unique personality.



The disc's presentation is hip and hollow. Absolutely no indication on the front cover, just a funny photo of a child's feet (a reference to Enescu's Childhood Impression, I surmise). Do the PR's really think they are going to sell to the pop market? Scanty and uninformative liner notes. No information on the compositions or composers, just short contemporary statements about the three composers/performers performing style - and nothing on the bonus, Plakidis' "Two Grasshoper Dances", naïve folk melodies (the first peppered with sardonic harmonics) excerpted from Kremer's disc "From my Home" (From My Home: Music from the Baltic Countries).

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