George Enescu International Festival
George Enescu International Festival
George Enescu International Festival – the greatest international cultural event organised in Romania and one of the most important of its kind worldwide – announces an exceptional musical programme, sustained by 4,700 international and Romanian artists for a total duration of 4 weeks, between August 28 and September 26. All measures will be in place to reduce potential health risks for audiences, artists, organizers, and journalists.
The greatest orchestras and the best international soloists will perform prestigious works of the repertoire, from classical to contemporary, grand-scale symphonic concerts, chamber music, and opera concerts.
The 25th edition of the George Enescu International Festival – a hot spot for classical music that animates the Romanian capital every two years and attracts music lovers from all over the world – will also celebrate the 140th anniversary of the birth of composer and violinist George Enescu.
The Festival offers its audiences the most comprehensive programme of works by Enescu in its history – 42 pieces, with all 5 of the symphonies included.
The 2021 Enescu Festival will undergo a series of transformations and adjustments, to handle the challenges posed by the pandemic. First of all, the 66 concerts will be grouped into four series:
Great Orchestras of the World (concerts to take place at the Grand Palace Hall)
Concerts and Recitals (at the Romanian Athenaeum, in the afternoons)
Music of the 21st Century (at the Radio Hall)
Enescu and His Contemporaries (morning concerts, at the Auditorium Hall)
Featured soloists programmed to appear at the Festival include:
Maxim Vengerov; Patricia Kopatchinskaja; American cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who is on her first visit to Romania, together with her chamber orchestra The Trondheim Soloists; brothers Renaud Capuçon (violin) and Gautier Capuçon (cello); violinists Leonidas Kavakos and Dmitry Sitkovetsky; countertenor Philippe Jaroussky; mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and soprano Sonya Yoncheva; pianists of the highest esteem, who have honoured the Festival’s stages before: Martha Argerich, Jean Yves Thibaudet, Yuja Wang, Khatia Buniatishvili, Maria João Pires, Kirill Gerstein.
About the George Enescu International Festival
The George Enescu Festival (also known as George Enescu International Festival and Competition), held in honor of the celebrated Romanian composer George Enescu, is the biggest classical music festival and classical international competition held in Romania and one of the biggest in Eastern Europe.
Enescu's close associate George Georgescu organized the first festival in 1958; highlights included a performance of Bach's Concerto for Two Violins with Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh as soloists and a staging of Enescu's sole opera, Œdipe, with Constantin Silvestri conducting.
The official opening day of the Enescu Festival took place on 4 September 1958, merely three years after George Enescu's death. Among the music world's personalities that were present for this first edition of the festival were performers such as David Oistrah, Halina Czerny-Stefanka, Nadia Boulanger, Monique Haas, Iacov Zak and Claudio Arrau, and conductors such as Sir John Barbirolli, Carlo Felice Cillario and Carlo Zecchi. On 22 September of the same year, the national premiere of George Enescu's lyrical tragedy "Oedipe" took place, starring a young David Ohanesian in the lead role. This role was going to mark out the rest of his career as a soloist (conductor: Constantin Silvestri, Directed by Jean Ranzescu, Scenery: Roland Laub).
Violinist, teacher, conductor and composer, worldwide known for his lush opera composition Oedipe, George Enescu presented his first work as a composer with the Collonne Orchestra in Paris, 1898; he also performed as a conductor at prestigious Carnegie Hall (NY). Enescu was also the teacher of one of the greatest violinists of the past century – Lord Yehudi Menuhin. Their bond was so strong that in 1995, Menuhin accepted the invitation to come to Romania to open the George Enescu International Festival. Menuhin also accepted to be the President of Honor of the Enescu Festival in 1998, though his schedule as a soloist was full up to 2003.
Today, an average of around 20 works by Romanian composer George Enescu are interpreted in the Enescu Festival each edition. The 2015 edition of the Enescu Festival (30 August – 20 September 2015 Bucharest) brings on stage interpretations from Enescu's works by record-breaking German violinist David Garrett, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Pulitzer Prize for Music), or Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta. Highlights of this edition of the Festival also include violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, Berliner Philharmoniker, London Symphony Orchestra and Royal Liverpool Symphony Orchestra.
The concerts are held in three different venues in Bucharest, Iași and Sibiu. The 2007 presentations ended with a performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana before an audience of over 4,000 at the Sala Palatului.
The competition portion of the Festival lasts about a week, and it consists of three different categories: composition (118 participants in 2007), piano (44 in 2007), and violin (41 in 2007), each a record number of participants.
In the 2005 and 2007 presentations a daily open-air concert was added to the festival program. It is known as the Festival Piazza and features 3½ hours of classical music, in addition to movies about the life of George Enescu.