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By the time Enescu composed the Symphony No.1 in E flat major, Op.13, (1905) his art had matured deeply. If his music now at times referred to his Romanian origins (perhaps as a reaction to the peripatetic career as virtuoso violinist and conductor upon which he had embarked after graduating from the Paris Conservatoire), he achieved maturity in his original Concert Symphony for cello and Orchestra and the Romanian Rhapsodies, Op.11.

The first movement is a vast sweep of surging music, carring all before it as in Beethoven's Eroica or Schumann's Rhenish symphonies - also in E flat, also in 3/4 meter. There is a freshness and irresistible quality in this dynamic score and approach to tonality which is original but never obtuse. Ideas pour from Enescu's pen, yet analysis shows their organic unity: the mysterious colouring that ushers in the second subject group is but a darker mirror of thrilling opening. The attentive listener will have no difficulty in following this enthralling movement on its sonata-style progress.

The second movement opens with a falling three-note motif, prefacing an ominous texture that sees a winding theme emerge on the strings in A flat minor, around which the three-note figure weaves a close tampestry. A new theme, on the woodwind, is initially not so fully worked-out; it is combined with elements of the first theme, but the music builds to a passionate and extended passage before dying away in a warmly enveloping B major.

The finale is the most complex - if the shortest - of the symphony's three movements, falling into an original structure which is best termed a sonata-rondo of quicksilver character. With such rich material Enescu concentrates his development into brief episodes, each one subtly moving towards the concluding, yet sudden, E flat major bars.

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