Music in the Round 2012 May Festival - Les Nations

We are delighted to welcome back old friends the Elias String Quartet in this programme of unadulterated late Romantic excess. The influences of Wagner and Franck are never far from the surface in Chausson’s Concert, yet his own harmonic and melodic invention is ingenious.

Enescu wrote his octet at the age of nineteen. It has to rank as one of the most precocious and audacious statements in music. A comparison with the early achievements of Mendelssohn would not be out of place here; where Mendelssohn had assimilated the music of Beethoven, so Enescu had the music of Strauss and Wagner. However his own voice was already so strong that one could not mistake this piece for any of those of his predecessors.