Changes - String Octets

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.