In 1900, when the two octets performed at this concert were created, the aesthetics of musical romanticism peaked in its obsession with size, burning out in long and quite violent ways in Mahler's symphonies and Strauss's symphonic poems. Enescu had just finished his studies in Paris with Massenet and, but his adolescent Octet reveals an uninterrupted link with the decadent anxiety of Vienna, the city where Enescu had previously lived as a student. The work may seem complicated at first.The parts of the octet, instead of being distinctly different from one another are intertwined in thematic kinship as one, emotionally overwhelming whole. Reinhold as a Kiev-born son of a German father and Polish mother, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, faithfully continued the tradition of Russian romanticism. Glier remained an academic classic. In his octet, sonorous folk melodies combine into a purely 19th century structural form, time running round in circles, all the time returning to the golden years of the Russian national school — the very thing music lovers love the most...