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Tom Service presents a portrait of the Romanian composer George Enescu, as his masterpiece opera Oedipe is staged for the first time at the Royal Opera House in London. Catalogued by Casals as the most gifted musical mind since Mozart, Enescu was a child prodigy equally at ease on the violin – the instrument for which he was a renowned virtuoso – and the piano. After training in Vienna and Paris, he wrote music of incredible complexity with his celebrated Romanian Rhapsodies, inspired by the folk music of his homeland, being the most accessible.  We hear about the man, the composer, the performer and the teacher – including from his most famous pupil, Yehudi Menuhin. Other contributors are Professor Erik Levi, expert on music of the 20th-Century; the Romanian violinist Remus Azoitei; Romanian musicologist Valentina Sandu Dediu; and the American conductor Lawrence Foster, former director of the Enescu Festival in Bucharest.

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Oedipe will be broadcast live on Opera on 3 on Saturday 4th June

Tom talks to composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman about Venables’s new opera 4.48 Psychosis, based on the iconic play by Sarah Kane which explores depression. It’s the first ever adaptation of her work in an opera and is premiered next week Lyric Hammersmith in London. The original play contains no characters and has no stage directions but reads as existential poetry of harrowing beauty. So how have the creative talent taken UP this challenge? What’s the musical language of this opera? And does it make room for a message beyond the frontiers of this auto-biographical piece?

Tom interviews the pianist Steven Osborne on the parallels and differences between George Crumb and Morton Feldman, two American modernist composers obsessed with new sounds and textures in music, whose music he’s just recorded for Hyperion. Osborne, not known for this kind of repertoire, explains why he was keen on comparing these two opposite approaches to music. While Feldman is interested in long, quiet music, where the production and decay of sound are what matters, Crumb goes for vibrant textures as he explores pioneering sound techniques.

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