George Enescu’s Symphony No. 2 was performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra with great success on their concert tour of Romania in 2011, at the Enescu Festival in Bucharest among other venues. Born in Romania but spending much of his life in France, Enescu was at once a composer, violinist, conductor and highly influential teacher. Of his three completed symphonies, the second was written in 1914. In accordance with the progressive spirit of the age, the influence of Richard Strauss’s Elektra and Salome is keenly felt, with added wild instrumentation and chromatics. However, it is also true that a more “Oriental” composition style renders it less rigorous than the music of the German Strauss. The first part of the concert features the beautiful Piano Concerto in B-flat major by Johannes Brahms, a work seldom heard due perhaps to the extraordinary difficulty of its performance. Its overarching character and the density and complexity of its musical message, added to the fact that it contains four movements, might more reasonably earn it a place in the symphonic repertoire. Some liken it to an autobiography: The first movement is full of the freshness of youth, which is then broken by the diabolical scherzo with its parade of Baroque elements. This is followed by a comfortingly toned third movement with its beautiful cello solo, before the work closes with a dancing movement rich in Hungarian-styled rhythms. Denis Kozhukhin, a former student of Dimitri Bashkirov, won the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels in 2010 and performed with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Budapest in the same year. Born in 1986, it appears that his repertoire as a pianist knows no bounds when it comes to difficulty.

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