Impressions d’enfance, Ensemble Raro’s and Gilles Apap’s new CD recording, is dedicated to chamber music works of George Enescu. The Piano Quintet in D is one of his earliest compositions. Written in 1896 at the age of fifteen during his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, it is certainly inspired by Brahms’s chamber works. Enescu himself confessed about Brahms’s enormous influence on his development: “the God of my youthful adoration is Brahms and I wrote my early works in the style of the immortal Johannes in an almost flagrant way”. The Quintet was premiered in 1897, in Enescu’s first recital of his own works in Paris at the age of sixteen; Massenet and Cortot were in the audience. The two charming works for piano and string trio, Aubade and Sérénade lointaine, illustrate the point that Enescu’s beloved teacher Gabriel Fauré expressed very beautifully: “the greatest technical ability is not worth anything without poetry”. Even in the cleverly constructed short piece Hommage for piano, which is based on a motive representing the letters of Fauré’s name, the poetic, dreamy quality prevails.

Enescu’s late masterpiece Impressions d’enfance for violin and piano takes us back to the occasion when three-year-old George heard a street fiddler for the very first time.