About the Composers

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Although best remembered as one of the century's great violinists, George Enescu's compositional stature is vastly underrated. His best known compositions are his Romanian Rhapsodies for orchestra. These colorful collections of Romanian folk dances include at least two tunes that Enescu learned from his first violin teacher, a gypsy fiddler who had the four-year-old Enescu learn folk tunes by ear.

The third violin sonata, while not directly quoting traditional tunes, is permeated with the inflections of Romanian folk music. In this work, he creates entirely new music from the melodic gestures and instrumental techniques of traditional Romanian music. These folk inflections include pervasive sliding from note to note, elaborate decorative filigree, intervals not commonly found in classical music, and even pitches that fall in-between the cracks of the piano keyboard. Enescu's performance indications for this sonata are extraordinarily precise, and the music for the sonata presents the forbidding impression of a highly complex work. The audible result, though, is one of a passionately rhapsodic improvisation.

The premiere of the Ravel sonata was played by none other than Enescu, who played the piece from memory after reading through it once. This mnemonic feat was witnessed by Enescu's protégé Yehudi Menuhin, then just eleven Years old. Menuhin, who in turn became Gilles' mentor, made the first recording of the Enescu sonata in 1976.

Ravel also demands unusual effects in his violin sonata, particularly in the second movement. This movement is a blues, in which the violin and the piano experience some difficulty in settling on a key. Here too, there is generous use of glissandi, perhaps in imitation of a saxophone, perhaps in tribute to jazz violinists of the period. In this performance, Gilles and Eric embellish these gestures even further. The opening pizzicato violin chords are strummed with a guitar pick, in a rhythm even sexier than Ravel dared ask for, and the violin is occasionally used for percussive effects. Some blues inflections also creep into the relentless fire-works of the final movement.

The Debussy sonata, although barely a decade older than its companions on this disc, seems to come from another musical world altogether. The delicate beauty of this piece is astounding for a work composed during the bitter tragedies of the fiata partakes neither of the wry wit of the Ravel nor of the passionate exoticism of the Enescu. That these three sonatas, each in three movements, each for trst world war and in the throes of Debussy's painful and fatal illness. This sonhe same two instruments, each written by a composer based in Paris, should be so different gives some idea of the vibrancy of Parisian musical life in the first decades of this century.

Program notes: Derek Katz