The Enescu Festival Online continues between April 19 and 22 with a duo recital given by violinist Midori and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in a dialogue of great subtlety and depth.
Performed on the Romanian Athenaeum stage in the 2019 George Enescu International Festival, the program includes four violin sonatas: Robert Schumann’s First Sonata in A minor Op. 105, Sonata No. 1 in A major Op. 13 by Gabriel Fauré, Sonata in G minor L 140 by Claude Debussy and George Enescu’s Third Sonata in A minor, “dans le caractère populaire roumain”. The recital offers a new opportunity to listen to Enescu’s music alongside that of other great composers of his time and to get a feel for how the composer managed to perfectly integrate the “Romanian character” into the European sounds of the epoch. Enescu’s music had also accompanied Midori and Thibaudet in their first joint US tour, which came to an end last year on April 15, in California.
The Japanese-born American violinist, Midori, is a visionary artist, activist, and educator whose unique career has transcended traditional boundaries through her relentless drive to explore and build connections between music and the human experience.
A leading concert violinist for over 30 years, Midori regularly transfixes audiences around the world, bringing together graceful precision and intimate expression. She has performed with, among many others, the symphony orchestras of London, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, the Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphonieorchester, the Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. She has collaborated with such outstanding musicians as Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Christoph Eschenbach, Mariss Jansons, Paavo Järvi, Yo-Yo Ma, Susanna Mälkki, Menahem Pressler and Mstislav Rostropovich.
French musician Jean-Yves Thibaudet is a versatile and nuanced pianist, whose repertoire covers classical music and opera, as well as jazz and film music. He recorded as soloist the soundtracks of several Oscar-worthy films such as Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Wakefield.
As a soloist, his repertoire includes works by Beethoven, Liszt, Grieg, Saint-Saëns, Khachaturian, Gershwin, and contemporary composers such as Qigang Chen and James MacMillan. For more than three decades, Jean-Yves Thibaudet has performed worldwide, recorded more than 50 albums, and built a reputation as one of today’s finest pianists. From the start of his career, he delighted in music beyond the standard repertoire, from jazz to opera, which he transcribed himself to play on the piano. His profound professional friendships crisscross the globe and have led to spontaneous and fruitful collaborations in film, fashion, and visual arts. Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s ties to Romania begin with his childhood summers spent here, after his father – who personally knew and admired Enescu – had served as Ambassador of France during World War II. At the beginning of March 2020, the pianist has been designated by the Embassy of France in Romania as a Special Representative for promoting the French Creative and Cultural Industries in Romania, a project established following the success of the prior year’s France-Romania Cultural Season.
