Every year it is a pleasant surprise which masterpieces violinist and artistic director Janine Jansen has selected for the opening concert. During this first evening of the International Chamber Music Festival Utrecht, she introduces the team of befriended top international musicians she has invited for the festival, which is why she often chooses chamber music in large instrumentation. This year, she combines Brahms’ First Piano Trio with Enescu’s Octet for eight strings.
Piano trio in a new guise
When Johannes Brahms published his First Piano Trio in 1854 he was twenty years old and had just become acquainted with Robert and Clara Schumann, the famous musical couple who would play a major role in his career and private life. Robert Schumann was so impressed by his young friend that he published an article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in which he announced Brahms as his successor, describing him as ‘destined to give an ideal expression to time’. Possibly the young Brahms was a little intimidated by these words of praise, because even before his First Piano Trio appeared in print, he had his reservations and wanted to delay its publication, he confessed to his friend and mentor, the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim.
Clara Schumann, with whom Brahms would maintain an intimate friendship throughout his life, regularly advised Brahms and as a virtuoso concert pianist, she performed many of his compositions. It was her who persuaded Brahms to publish the piano trio after all. Despite the successful reception, Brahms himself had his doubts about this voluminous and impetuous youthful work. When his new publisher Fritz over thirty years later, Fritz Simrock gave him the chance to revise his First Piano Trio, he seized it with both hands. Initially, he did not intend to change much and he jokingly said: ‘I didn’t give it a new wig, I just combed the hair a little and modelled it’. To Clara, he wrote: ‘It won’t be as wild as it was, but whether it gets any better?’
Yet he would eventually revise the trio so drastically, one could almost speak of a new trio. He shortened it considerably, rewrote many passages and of the first movement for instance, he would only reuse the beautiful opening melody. In fact, only the compelling and playful Scherzo remained unchanged. Both the early and late versions are still
in circulation, although musicians, like tonight, usually opt for the shortened revised version, partly because of its convincing Hungarian-tinged final movement.
Masterpiece by multi-talented composer
Although Felix Mendelssohn's 1825 string octet is probably the most popular work for this particular instrumentation, George Enescu's 1900 Octet is also among the great favourites. Like Mendelssohn, Enescu wrote it before the age of 20. It is an impressive, lavish composition in which all eight strings do the talking. Sometimes all at the same time in exactly the same rhythm, sometimes split into small groups and often right through each other.
Although Enescu is mainly remembered today as a Romanian-French violin virtuoso, in reality he was much more than that. He saw himself primarily as a composer, but he was also successful as a violinist, pianist and conductor. Enescu grew up in Romania, received his first violin lessons from a gypsy as a four-year-old boy, composed at age five and was accepted at the conservatory in Vienna at age seven, where he had composition lessons from the renowned Robert Fuchs. As a boy of eight, he left for Paris, where he had composition lessons with Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet and the fugue specialist André Gédalge. At eighteen, Enescu wrote a masterpiece in a style completely his own: his Octet for strings, dedicated to his proud teacher Gédalge. It is an energetic work in which he combined rousing Romanian melodies with French-tinged elegant passages and complex fugues.
