A Survey of Enescu Symphony Cycles

► An Index of ionarts Discographies

Continuing my discographies, while in the middle of a massive update of the Bach Organ Cycle Survey, I thought I'd squeeze in one with the symphonies of George Enescu, not the least because on the outset it appeared to be a bit of a quicky, with seemingly just five (?) sets out there. Even cursory research revealed this to be an illusion. There are, from what I’ve found out so far, eight cycles, and who knows what might yet turn up, with the help of the readers.

It is prompted, quite obviously, by the appearance of the most recent set, which Cristian Măcelaru managed to have appear on DG. (Quite neat, how DG likes to add nifty off-the-beaten-path cycles to their catalogue, like Franz Schmidt with Paavo Järvi or Carl Nielsen with Fabio Luisi, so long as they don't have to pay for it.)

As always, every such discographic post, even one of such limited scope as this one, is also a plea to generously inclined readers with more information and knowledge of the subject than I have to lend a helping hand correcting my mistakes or filling data-lacunae. I am explicitly grateful for any such pointers, hinters, and corrections and apologize for any bloomers. (Preferably on Twitter, where I'll read the comment much sooner than here, but either works!) Where good reviews have appeared by serious reviewers, links are included.

Now what’s in a symphony cycle? That’s often a question, when it comes to these recorded surveys, be it in Schubert (1-7, 9 or more?), Bruckner (1-9 or all 11?), Mahler (Lied von der Erde or not? Blumine?). In Enescu, too, it’s far less straightforward than the obvious answer – Symphonies One through Three – might seem. There are, after all, two more symphonies that Enescu never finished but which have since been presented in performing versions by composer and musicologist Pascal Bentoiu. To convolute things further, there are four “Study Symphonies”, a Symphonia concertante (for Cello and Orchestra), a Symphonic Suite for Orchestra (the Poème Roumain), and the great symphonic poem Vox maris for tenor, three-part choir and orchestra.

Among other orchestral works that are popularly (if that’s the right word) coupled with the symphonies, are his other orchestral works. They include primarily the two Romanian Rhapsodies, of which the first might be his most popular works, three Orchestral Suites, the Overture on Popular Romanian Themes, two Intermezzi for strings, “Three Overtures for orchestra”, the Tragic Overture, the Triumphal Overture, a Sonata for Orchestra, the Andantino from an orchestral suite, “Four Divertissements for orchestra”, a Pastorale-Fantaisie for orchestra, the symphonic poem Isis (also completed by Pascal Bentoiu), and the Suite chatelaine for orchestra (completed by Remus Georgescu).

The three numbered, completed works appear to be just scratching the surface of the deep Enescu-waters. For the purposes of this survey, however, Nos. 1 to 3 is what counts and will be considered complete. Boni and links to other works are, however, included at the end of it.

The fact that much of Enescu’s music can appear as episodic is, in part, probably as possibly an outcome of our own lack of familiarity with these works and Enescu’s idiom, as of the performances themselves. Enescu needs attention, more often than he demands it. As such, the listening experience either requires more concentration and commitment from the listener than listening to yet another performance of La Mer, or greater exposure. But like other Surprised-by-Beauty composers (Martinů comes to mind), Enescu pays back that investment – and more consistently than some. Dip your ears – maybe start with the Third Symphony or Vox maris, among the orchestral works; the First Rhapsody is almost too easy to like, do that a few times, and see where it takes you if you haven’t arrived yet.

Orchestra names: Usually, I use standardized English names for orchestras, but sometiemes I like the original, because it is pithier. Or I use both, to confuse people. In any case, the George Enescu State Philhamonic Bucharest Filarmonica George Enescu (GESP) is the Filarmonica George Enescu in Romanian. The Orchestra Națională Radio used to be Orchestra of The Romanian Radio and Television and, in English, is now the Romanian Radio National Orchestra (or National Radio Orchestra of Romania, RRNO). For the Iași “Moldova” Philharmonic Orchestra (also: Moldova Philharmonic or Philharmonia Moldova) I used its Romanian name: Filarmonica Moldova Iași, which strikes me as less clunky. Ditto the Timisoara Banatul Philharmonic Orchestra, which is either refered to here as the Filarmonica Banatul (din Timișoara) or more simply as the Bantul PO.
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Downsized Mozart in Mary Zimmerman's 'Matchbox Magic Flute' at STC

Russell Mernagh (Monostatos), Dave Belden (violinist), and Emily Rohm (Queen of the Night) in The Matchbox Magic Flute.
Photo: Liz Lauren

Mary Zimmerman is known for her adaptations of classic works, like her transformation of Ovid's Metamorphoses currently showing in a new production at Folger Theatre. This year the American director took on Mozart's late Singspiel masterpiece, which she titled The Matchbox Magic Flute, premiered in February at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where she is resident director. This charming but decidedly non-operatic production closes out the season at Shakespeare Theatre Company, seen Saturday night at the Klein Theatre in downtown Washington.

Listeners hoping to see Mozart's classic as it is staged in an opera theater will likely be disappointed. Zimmerman has cut the work down to theatrical size, an approach implied by the word added to its title, an allusion to the tiny toy cars. Everything about the production is "miniaturized," as the director put it in her program note. The set is a theater within the theater, an evocation of the small but ornate theaters of the European nobility, with a constricted stage, antique footlights, and tiny jewel-like loges. Mozart's silhouette fills a coat of arms at the top of the proscenium arch (set design by Todd Rosenthal). The fairytale costumes, props, and stage effects (costumes by Ana Kuzmanić) are reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's movie adaptation, Trollflöjten, filmed in a sound stage replica of the Drottningholms Slottsteater outside Stockholm.

Zimmerman adapted the libretto in her own English translation, deleting a lot of spoken dialogue and updating and shortening most of what remains. She has also excised about an hour's worth of Mozart's score, including the entire overture and most of the music for the priests in Act II, like the chorus "O Isis und Osiris." Of Mozart's colorful orchestration, only a flute, a violin, a cello, and a percussionist remain (marimba, timpani, tambourine, other drums), with the rest absorbed into the piano played by Laura Bergquist (music adapted and directed by Amanda Dehnert and Andre Pluess). Some of the most striking musical effects remain, with Bergquist turning to play the celesta for Papageno's magic bells. The birdcatcher played his characteristic whistle on stage, and at one point an accordion was added to the mix. The pit musicians also wear costumes, gowns and black fezzes, and flutist, cellist, and violinist all take the stage for certain major solos.

Reese Parish (the Spirit, center) and Cast in The Matchbox Magic Flute. Photo: Liz Lauren

Zimmerman has cast mostly singing actors, who do their best with Mozart's sometimes daunting vocal writing, aided by the small instrumental accompaniment and generous amplification. What this approach lost in vocal thrill, it gained in liveliness of action and comic timing. Soprano Emily Rohm got most of the Queen of the Night's notes off the top of the staff, her scenery-chewing acting style suiting the dramatic lighting and costuming for the character. (Her entrance for the Act II showpiece, "Der Hölle Rache," spinning while suspended over the stage, took the cake.) Marlene Fernandez nailed Pamina's high notes with a light tone, adding a music theater belt to the low range. Likewise, Billy Rude's tall and handsome Tamino took advantage of a pretty head voice as much as possible. Bass Keanon Kyles felt light in the bottom register for Sarastro, but he gave the role considerable dignity otherwise.

One delightful addition was the character of the Spirit, played and sung by Reese Parish. Her airy soprano suited the top part of the Three Spirits, but her balletic movements throughout the evening added a whimsical air to the proceedings, especially as she carried humorous signs at moments of transition to guide the audience. Reducing the cast to ten roles meant some double-casting, with the trio of the Queen's ladies (Tina Muñoz Pandya, Lauren Molina, and Monica West) among the several actors who took on more than one part (the two other Boys, the speakers in the temple, the animals summoned by the magic flute). Particularly charming were the nerdy Papageno of Shawn Pfautsch, played with improvisatory flourish and decent singing, matched by the manic Papagena of Lauren Molina, in one of those double-castings.

The Matchbox Magic Flute runs through June 16. shakespearetheatre.org

Trans-Continental Myths in Folger's African-centered "Metamorphoses"

Miss Kitty as the Water Nymph in Metamorphoses, Folger Theatre. Photo: Brittany Diliberto

Mythology may be rooted in national or ethnic identity, but the virtues or foibles of human nature it references make it universal. Folger Theatre's new production of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, seen Thursday evening at the newly renovated and reopened Folger Shakespeare Library, brought this point home. Director Psalmayene 24 has adapted the play, a selection of stories from Ovid's epic-like poem of the same name premiered in 2001, for an all-black cast. The latter is a first for the Folger, a fitting way to rebaptize the Elizabethan theater at the end of the company's first season since the lengthy renovation of the building began in 2020.

While the stories remain the familiar Greco-Roman ones, the production refracts the frame of telling through the experience of African-Americans. Zimmerman anchored her play on stories connected to the theme of water, with stage directions referring to an on-stage pool of water. Psalmayene 24 did without the on-stage water, initially for practical reasons in the newly reopened theater, transforming the pool into a remarkable character called the Water Nymph. Played with chimerical grace by Miss Kitty, the character opens the play in a costume recalling the tradition of African masquerade, the ritualized evocation of an ancestor or other powerful spirit (costumes designed by Mika Eubanks). Rattles on her wrists recall the rustle of water, and her movements in colored light or with aquatic-hued fabric suggest the ocean or a pool at different times. The presence of her unmasked face, covered with makeup calling to mind scarification practices or religious designs, is a perennial reminder of African origins.

Psalmayene 24 has a strong background in dance, which has a powerful role in the story-telling of this production (choreography by Tony Thomas). The opening sequence is a dumbshow, with the rest of the cast costumed in colorful outfits and vocalizing without words: they dance joyfully, seem to be captured and transported over the sea, sold into slavery, and then killed one by one. (The director writes of the brutal beating and subsequent death of Tyre Nichols, by five black police officers in Memphis in 2023, as a motivating factor in creating the production.) Against this backdrop, the Ovid stories take on new meanings.

Photo: Brittany Diliberto

The adaptation, enlivened with dance and music, is an ensemble affair: the program bills the actors equally, listing them in alphabetical order and not even identifying all of the roles they play. Jon Hudson Odom had hilarious turns as Midas, a clueless billionaire cursed for his unchecked greed (one of many parts of the play that resonated in our age); Orpheus, a strutting James Brown-like figure; and Apollo, the absent father to Edwin Brown's impetuous Phaeton. Zimmerman enhances Ovid's version of the Orpheus tale by quoting Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes." in Stephen Mitchell's translation: the poem added depth to the Eurydice of Billie Krishawn. As so often in Greek mythology, the gods are like people but even more bratty and irresponsible, ready to punish mortals for the sins they themselves commit with impunity: Gerrad Alex Taylor gave Bacchus the breezy air of a player, while Yesenia Iglesias brought animal terror to the character of Hunger.

The performance also offered a first glance of the renovated Folger Library. You now enter by ramps leading downward on the east and west sides, rather than through the old doorway on East Capitol Street. These new paths lead through garden spaces to the interior, an expansion opening up new exhibit and public spaces below ground. Although that means that patrons now have to go down a level, only then to have to up again to the Elizabethan theater, which has not been altered, the redesign does alleviate the crowding in the small room leading into the theater. The Folger Library will open completely to the public on June 21.

Metamorphoses runs through June 16. folger.edu

Remembering John Browning: A Short Portrait

S.Barber, Piano Concerto, Sy.1 J.Browning, L.Slatkin, St. Louis SO RCA

S.Prokofiev, Piano Concertos J.Browning, E.Leinsdorf, Boston SO RCA

S.Barber, Complete Songs C.Studer, T.Hampson, Emerson SQ4t, J.Browning DG

The Complete RCA Album Collection, John Browning Sony/RCA

Born on this day, May 23rd, in 1933, in Denver, pianist John Browning was a student of the famed Rosina Lhévinne, who taught the cream of the pianistic crop at the Institute of Musical Art (the Juilliard School) in New York. He was a direct contemporary of a North American group of pianists that might be dubbed the ‘Tragic Five’, namely Julius Katchen (1926), Byron Janis, Leon Fleisher, and Gary Graffman (all 1928), and his classmate Van Cliburn (1934). These pianists all started with the very highest hopes and for one reason or other had their careers prematurely ended, curtailed, or fizzle. John Browning's career, too, took a dip – caused by the strain of too many concerts and a subsequent decline in pianistic standards – when it should have been at its peak, but perhaps not sufficiently to make it a ‘Tragic Six’. By the time he played his last recital, at the National Gallery of Arts in 2002, which included a memorable Sonata in E-flat Minor by Samuel Barber, I attended ignorant of who he really was. Those in the know valued him for his “unremitting application and vast reserve of talent… [and] invariable dignity, without recourse to ballyhoo and banality.” (LA Times)

John Browning’s career was jumpstarted when he won the Steinway Centennial Award in 1954 and the Leventritt Competition the next year, then taking the second prize behind Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1956, the prize won by fellow Americans Leon Fleisher before him and Malcolm Frager after him. That same year he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos, which is where Samuel Barber heard him play and was much impressed with his great technique. So impressed, indeed, that Barber wrote difficulties into his piano concerto, with Browning in mind, that were beyond what was humanly possible to play. Browning, in an interview with NPR, recalled Barber taking him to Vladimir Horowitz, to have a look at the score. Horowitz browsed through it and said: “The young man iz right, this iz impossible to play”—whereupon Barber toned the demands down a little.

John Browning’s recitals notably included much Bach and Scarlatti, composers that were not then considered repertoire staples and probably still weren't, even after the landmark recordings of Gould’s Goldberg Variations (1955) and Horowitz’s Scarlatti (1964). But he will be foremost remembered as a champion of Barber. Browning premiered Barber’s piano concerto under Erich Leinsdorf in 1962, and for his second recording of the Piano Concerto, with Leonard Slatkin, he won his first Grammy. Recording the complete solo works of Barber garnered him his second Grammy. In his surprisingly small discography, much of which is hiding on minor labels, his Prokofiev Concertos with Erich Leinsdorf on RCA also stand out. John Browning died on January 26th, 2003, of heart failure.

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