The opening of this album reflects my initiation to Romania and its musical landscape. It was as a teenager that I first experienced George Enescu’s «Romanian Rhapsody No. 1», at the Enescu Festival in Bucharest no less - an unforgettable whirlwind of joyous tunes arranged in perfect chaos, bouncing off a kaleidoscope of folk colours. Discovering the solo piano version by the composer himself years later, I dived straight in and realised I was missing a third hand. Enescu had squeezed almost all the parts of a symphony orchestra into the ‘reduced’ score and the challenge was to arrange it in a way to make it humanly playable on the piano. Teo Gheorghiu