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Changes - String Octets
Ottorino Respighi - Theo Loevendie - George Enescu

Changes - String Octets

Roctet

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917200010
barcode
Catalog number: CC 720001
Releasedate: 24-01-25
- Roctet proposes two String Octets both composed in the same year, 1900.
- The 18yo Enescu brings fragments of his Romanian background and Viennese and French musical upbringing together into a unity and thus draws us into his inner world.
- The 21yo Respighi goes the other way: he becomes the filmmaker with the dramatic flair of capturing beautiful images in music.
- Roctet has already released a Mendelssohn/Afanasyev Octets disc (CC 72822). Diapason: Roctet certainly does not play lukewarm, Lively and full of energy!
It is the year 1900: the new century has just started when two young  composers independently from each other publish new additions to the  string octet literature. The Romanian George Enescu at the tender age of eighteen already has gathered more musical experience than most musicians twice his age. As a composer he sets himself a complex and daunting task: his octet is in  four movements, yet played together they reveal a sonata form (a structure applied to the first movements of some famous symphonies), consisting of  an exposition, a development and a recapitulation. The sonata form with its statements and contrasting statements is like a dramatic monologue with arguments and counter-arguments: the young Enescu, with his formal experiment, brings fragments of his Romanian background and Viennese and French musical upbringing together into  a unity and thus draws us into his inner world.
In contrast, the twenty-one year old Ottorino Respighi rather goes the other way: he becomes the observer, the filmmaker with the dramatic flair of capturing beautiful images in music, just as he would later do with equal conviction in works like Pini di Roma or Feste romane.