‘Let our life be like this music!’

For a while it was my habit to comb through the several junkshops in the town where I live in search of LPs. I looked out for classical music in particular, as I found that a pittance spent on a couple of records was a good, low-risk way of finding out whether or not I liked this or that piece by such and such a composer. Mostly, there was a fairly uniform distribution of unadventurous selections by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mozart - but there were also a few surprises to be had. One such was a concentration of music with a Romanian theme in one of the junkshops, perhaps the town’s smallest, which was, and still is, shoehorned into a couple of street-level rooms in an apartment-complex on Amiralitetsgatan (Admiralty Street). Their shelves carried several discs of Romanian folk music, a generous selection of the works of Georghe Zamfir (pan-flautist extraordinaire), and a couple of LPs with miscellaneous works by the Romanian-born composer George Enescu.

One of the LPs I bought there was a 1971 10-inch 33 on the Electrecord label featuring what are, apparently, Enescu’s most popular works: his two Romanian Rhapsodies. It wasn’t until I’d taken this record home that I noticed the inscription on the back of the sleeve: ‘Let our life be like this music! / 13 Oct. 1972 / Ariana.’

I was touched by this sentiment, and couldn’t help but wonder what the record’s history may have been: imagining, for instance, that it could have been a gift between young lovers fleeing from Ceaucescu’s regime and beginning a new life in Sweden… (although in that case, why would the inscription be in English?) Whatever the truth of the tale, I hope things went well for Ariana, that her life, and that of the record’s recipient, were as rhapsodic as she had wished them, and that the fact of the record’s languishing unwanted in a junkshop in an out-of-the-way Swedish town, thirty years after its purchase, is no indication of a thwarted dream.

Another of the records I bought from that same store featured some performances by the renowned violist Yuri Bashmet, including just one short composition of Enescu’s, a Konzertstück for viola & piano, which had been, if the scratching on the disc was anything to go by, the only track on it that its original owner had ever played.

For me, though, the main attraction on this record was the fabulous rendition of German-born composer Paul Hindemith’s 1919 Sonata op. 11/4 for viola and piano. This is a plaintive piece, in which a large measure of emotive late-romanticism is tempered with just a dash of astringent modernism: it has been a firm favourite of mine ever since. To listen to a sample of another fine performance of this sonata, click here.

In my subsequent, rather haphazard exploration of Hindemith’s oeuvre, there have been more misses, alas, than hits, as much of his later work has what strikes me as a rather hard-edged & angular feel about it that can be hard to like. Having said that, if the sample above is to your taste, you may also enjoy his 2nd piano sonata, and, perhaps, his 3rd string quartet.