An Analytical Approach to the Fourth Symphony by George Enescu, Completed by Pascal Bentoiu
Dan Dediu
George Enescu’s Fourth Symphony in E Minor, which was completely composed in 1934 and then partially orchestrated, has been left in the manuscript for more than half a century. In 1996, after several years of deciphering, the composer Pascal Bentoiu succeeded in completing the orchestration of the symphony and offering it to the performers and the public. Enescu left 53 orchestral pages in the manuscript and ended suddenly in the first section of the second movement. Then continues with a two-staves sketch of the entire music to the end, written in ink and dated May 4, 1934, which Bentoiu reconstructed with care and complete abnegation.
One can describe the music of this symphony as a hot lava flow, which with its harmonic-melodic glow fills every corner of perception, in which the hyperpolyphony of the Octet and the Third Symphony merges and fuses in permanent transformation into a thematic amalgam. Furthermore, the article proposes and comments on a version of a formal analysis, combining several methods based on Constantin Bugeanu’s notation system.
A Forgotten Virtuoso: Mîndru Katz
Ioana Raluca Voicu-Arnăuțoiu
The paper reveals considerable hitherto unknown biographical detail on Romanian-born Mîndru Katz, a pianist with a prominent international career in the 1960s and the 1970s. Choosing not to return to Romania and resisting the apparently generous offers of the Securitate (the Romanian Secret Police), he became a nonperson in the country where he was born and where he received his musical education. Having risen to fame in the free world, he moved to Israel to be reunited with his family.
The paper also presents some of the methods used by the Securitate to keep all people, irrespective of their social or professional backgrounds, under control, and shows how their interference in Mîndru Katz’s life changed his destiny.
Though Katz died forty years ago, his piano playing is still highly rated by connoisseurs.
Costin Miereanu’s contribution to Musique en jeu
Ana Diaconu
During a very short career in Romania (aprox. 1965-1968), followed by permanent emigration in France, Costin Miereanu pled fervently for synchronizing with the universal models in his compositions and musicological writings. Miereanu kept on being an important representative of the avant-garde musicology and musical philosophy and one of the ways of doing that was by contributing with vast articles to an innovative project, which was created in Paris, in 1970. Musique en jeu was a journal which, over its nine years of existence with four annual issues (on average) of nearly 120 pages each, has captured all aspects of contemporary music, presented in an ample philosophical, aesthetic, academic, political and institutional context. Among the authors that have contributed articles to Musique en jeu there were Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dominique Jameux (Musique en jeu’s initiator and main animator) and also Costin Miereanu. I will present his contribution in four editions spanning 1973-1978, which tackled novel ideas (such as graphic scores – no. 13 – or the electronic music scores) or older subjects viewed from new perspectives (dramatic and scenographic renewal of opera – no. 22).
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