Founded in 1989 by pianist Anda Anastasescu the London Schubert Players chamber orchestra has been greeted worldwide with enthusiasm and critical acclaim. They are celebrating George
Enescu’s 125th anniversary with the great composer’s Octet for Strings – an unsurpassed and emotional 20th century masterpiece – and presenting the UK Premières of Anatol Vieru’s  pastoral Clarinet Quintet and his extraordinary Eratosthenes Sieve – a piece of musical Theatre  of the Absurd, well known on the Continent and combining music with speech using quotations  from Eugen Ionescu’s play ‘The Chairs’. The effervescent and carnival-like Septet by Saint- Saëns, written during his turbulent year of 1881 when he ‘disappeared’ leaving his wife without any warning, starts this unusual programme.

Enescu said ‘Music should go from heart to heart’ and the Octet is testimony to his Credo. The 17 years-old Enescu, a larger-than-life figure with exceptional gifts for melodic invention and counterpoint, produces an unsurpassed alchemy of timbres with only eight string instruments and reaches for the sublime with his long, sensual melodic lines soaring to heights of nobility. His love for Wagner is evident, as is his love for Romania in the references to his country’s traditional music. By birth, Enescu inherited the rich folk tradition of the Danube basin with its sensual feeling for colour and sound, which in the words of Yehudi Menuhin – Enescu’s pupil for many years – ‘comes only to the born and indigenous musician; and nowhere in the world is there a stronger sense of belonging to the earth’.