West Meets East

"The Rāga chosen by Ravi Shankar for his piece Prabhāti for solo violin and tabla (drums) is nearly identical with the national Japanese scale. Others are equivalent to our major and harmonic minor scales, to Greek modes, to those used in Gypsy and Flamenco music and there are hundreds more, each expressing a different world of feeling and thought, of which we in the West have never even heard. I have chosen as the Western contribution to this recording the remarkable and haunting "Sonata in the Popular Romanian Style" by George Enescu. Although it is a Western composition in the purest sonata form, the piece exudes the rhapsodic and improvisatory atmosphere characteristic of the Rumanian Gypsy violinist and it is thus a rare and authentic example of improvised folk music giving birth to a composition in an evolved Western form. The Sonata on this record could only have come from the mind and heart of one born and bred of a union between the intuitive world of the East and the crystallized and consolidated world of the West." - Yehudi Menuhin