Something for Thursday

I found this by sheer serendipity. I looked about YouTube for a performance of one of my favorite classical music works, and sure enough, I found one…but with a difference.

George Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody #1 has been a cherished work for me ever since I played an arrangement of it at the summer music camp I used to work at during my college years. It’s as good a “gateway” piece of classical music I’ve ever heard; by “gateway piece”, I mean a work that is particularly adequate to show people who are generally nervous around classical music that there’s nothing whatsoever to be nervous about. It’s just music, folks. You listen to it, same as any other music. With the Romanian Rhapsody, it sounds like a collection of folk tunes because that’s exactly what it is, and nothing more — albeit a collection of folk tunes assembled by a very gifted composer. It’s also one of the finer orchestral showpieces I’ve ever heard, which is what makes this performance interesting: it’s not an orchestral performance. The piece has been transcribed for string quintet, and that’s what we have here. And it’s still wonderful (even if they do take a couple of cuts in the allegro section):

By way of comparison, here’s the orchestral version (with some nice photos of Romania):

One of the tricks that Enescu employs throughout this work, incidentally, is that he often starts each melody on a beat that is either earlier or later than the ear expects. It’s a simple enough trick, but one that keeps the listener guessing even in the course of listening to a succession of what are basically drinking songs. I suppose this is, in a way, the Romanian equivalent of Rhapsody in Blue.

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