Suite No.1 in G minor Op.3 “Dans le style ancien”

Enescu’s violin studies began at the
Vienna Conservatoire at the age of seven, following in the footsteps of
Kreisler who had also been accepted at that young age. In Vienna he met Brahms, studied under Fuchs and
Hellmesberger while Zemlinsky and Sibelius would have been fellow-students. His
instruments were not only violin and piano but also organ and cello. Later in
life he was known to play each instrument in a string quartet. In 1895 the
fourteen-year-old violin prodigy moved to the Paris Conservatoire to study
composition. He later claimed that in
spirit, I left the Conservatoire the day I entered it; however, while
there, he had three significant teachers, Massenet, Fauré and, most
importantly, André Gédalge, who taught him counterpoint and fugue. Gédalge made
him write a different fugue on the same subject every week for a year. Despite
this intense study, Enescu consistently failed to win the Conservatoire fugue
competitions, mainly because he followed Bach instead of the Conservatoire
house style!

One of Enescu’s many friends from his
time in Paris, the composer Florent Schmitt, later described the influence on
Enescu of his key teachers: a pupil of
Fauré and Gédalge, he owes to the former his elegant melodic lines, subtle
harmonies and unexpected modulations, and to the latter the solidity of his
construction, the wonderful free-standing quality of his writing. Enescu’s
youthful love of Bach can be seen in this early piano Suite, composed when he
was only fifteen. It is an immediately attractive piece of neo-Baroque, whose
opening Prélude has a slightly crazy
Bachian quality. Gédalge’s influence shows in the magnificent three-voice fugue
that follows. The heart of the Suite is in the Adagio, a moving, meditative homage
to Bach. The work closes with a wild presto
finale.