George Enescu photographed in his Paris apartment, 1954 (photograph via Royal Opera House Covent Garden/Flickr)

Bucharest is a fascinating mixture of quaint little Orthodox churches, grand nineteenth-century buildings in varying states of repair, superbly renovated mansions abutted by one completely derelict ones, and various communist-era monstrosities dominated by Nicolae Ceausescu’s egomaniacal folly, the Palace of the Parliament, the world’s second largest building after the Pentagon. The festival venues reflect this disparity. The smaller recitals are held in an unpretentious but effective little hall behind the former royal palace, now the National Museum of Art. More major recitals and small orchestral concerts occur in the Romanian Atheneum, a wonderfully over-the-top 1888 confection loosely modelled on the Pantheon. The major concerts are condemned to be performed in the Grand Palace Hall, a vast communist-era bunker originally designed for party conferences.

Although there appeared to be a smattering of foreign visitors, the audience is local, to a much larger degree than at other festivals. Encouragingly, the age range is much wider than one sees elsewhere, with many more people in their twenties and thirties, and lots of parents and grandparents with eager, attentive children.

As well as being a composer, the polymath Enescu was a virtuoso violinist, pianist, conductor, and pedagogue. The festival was inaugurated a mere three years after his death in 1955 with the support of his most famous pupil, Yehudi Menuhin, and included such famous names as David Oistrakh, Claudio Arrau, and Sir John Barbirolli. It was originally conceived as a means of promoting his music. Most performers still include some of his work in their programs. The admittedly superficial reaction of this audience member, for whom his music was a complete unknown, is that he is at his best in his smaller scale works, his chamber and piano music. The large-scale orchestral pieces have a jackdaw quality in which various influences coexist without much of an overarching structure. Effects without a cause.

In such a wide-ranging program there are bound to be some disappointments, but they were few. Surprisingly, they included some of the most renowned names. The Berlin Philharmonic opened the festival under their new chief conductor, Kiril Petrenko. The first impression is that this is not a marriage made in heaven. They cantered through a superficial rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth, their Tchaikovsky Five was overly emotional to an almost vulgar degree, and not even the foot-stamping bravado of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja saved the Schoenberg concerto from atonal aridity. The London Symphony under Giandrea Noseda were not in much better shape. The formidable pianist Denis Matsuev helped to power them through a decent version of Prokofiev’s Second Concerto, but their performance of Britten’s Sea Interludes was strangely unidiomatic. Worst of all was Evgeny Kissin. The superstar pianist is apparently performing the Liszt Second Concerto so frequently this season that he could play it in his sleep, and that is what he appeared to be doing on the evening of September 6. A perfunctory run through of this short work was briskly followed by a couple of out-of-the-box encores, then the maestro disappeared to collect his salary and move on to the next venue.

The successes on the other hand were far too many to list here, so what follows is a highlight of the highlights of the first half of the festival, which is all this writer managed to attend.

It is one of the great pleasures of occasions like this to come into contact with excellent performers of whom one has never heard, to go to a concert or a recital with no great expectations and come out on a high. The young group the Monte Piano Trio provided such an experience. They made a good case for Enescu’s second piano trio and Serenade Lointaine, but it was their performance of Steuermann’s transcription of Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht that blew this listener away. Later, the equally young pianist Charles-Richard Hamelin, no relation to the better known Marc-André who is appearing in the second half of the festival, managed the same effect. Slouching on to the stage, looking as though he had just stumbled out of bed and grabbed whatever clothing was available, he delivered a performance of rare sensibility, musical understanding, and, when necessary, power.

Of the orchestras one could make a case for Staatskapelle Dresden, the Berlin Radio Orchestra, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment being the stars, but none of the others with the exception of the fore-mentioned two disappointed. The Dresden band played Brahms’s Second and Fourth Symphonies to the manner born, and the other two orchestras, as we shall see, were also superb in home territory.

The Staatskapelle Dresden performing at the Enescu Festival (photograph by Alex Damian)

Jurowski has obviously chosen to concentrate on vocal works this season. The German soprano Diana Damrau gave an intelligently programmed and sung recital, but her somewhat reticent stage manner contrasted with the extremely confident Joyce Di Donato, who had the audience eating out of her hand before she had even sung a note and had them baying for more at the end of her superbly presented performance.

Opera in concert was a major feature of the first part of the festival. On one memorable occasion, we went straight from an afternoon performance of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle to an evening showing of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Both performances included visual effects, which worked better for the Bartók. The walls of the Atheneum oozed blood as Cristian Mandeal led the Polish National Radio Orchestra, mezzo Alison Cook, and the Australian baritone Derek Walton through a superbly creepy traversal of the score.

One of the benefits of being an artistic director is that you get to perform exactly what you want with your preferred performers. Strauss’s convoluted opera Die Frau ohne Schatten is obviously a favourite of Jurowski, and he cast it from strength. The Berlin Radio Orchestra were in sumptuous form, and not even the rather ineffective visuals (Hugo von Hoffmansthal meets Monty Python) detracted from the overwhelming effect.

Conductor Vladimir Jurowski attending the Enescu Festival (photograph by Andrei Gîndac)

Just in case attendees of the Festival didn’t feel there was enough on offer, there was also an optional late-night series. It was on occasion possible to go from an 11.00 am recital to a 4.00 pm afternoon performance followed by the main 7.30 showing and rounded off by a 10.30 late-night special. This is not a festival for the faint-hearted.

For those with the stamina, the late-night series included superb performances of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and Orfeo ed Eurydice. Some early music orchestras can seem rather precious and bloodless, but not the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Under conductor Laurence Cummings, they tore into the stormy opening of Iphigénie with a vigour that had the audience on the edge of their seats from the start. The supporting singers were all fine, but the night was dominated, as it should be, by Anna Catarina Antonacci’s eponymous heroine sung, with an almost Callas-like potency. If Iphigénie was good, the following night’s Orfeo was sublime. Orchestra, chorus, and soloists were in inspired form. At the centre of the performance, Iestyn Davies’ Orfeo bid fair to be, for this audience member, the performance of the festival. The Welsh countertenor may be slight of figure, but he commanded the stage and his singing had a plangent intensity that recalled Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at their peak.

Perhaps the summation of what this Festival represents occurred on Sunday September 8, when Elizabeth Leonskaja’s afternoon performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano concerto was followed by an evening outing of the Rachmaninoff Third played by the young rising star Yuja Wang. The seventy-three-year old Leonskaja, winner of the 1964 Enescu Piano Competition, played the Beethoven with such an assured majesty, backed by a lifetime’s experience, that her few inaccuracies became irrelevant. On the other hand, Wang’s dazzling virtuosity and innate musicianship overrode her somewhat self-indulgent tempi.

Covering the old and the new, keeping in touch with tradition while looking to the future, the Enescu Festival is an extraordinary celebration of the power of music.

The George Enescu Festival is running from August 31 to September 22 2019. Performances attended: 31 August to 10 September 2019.