Enescu Festival, Great Concert Hall, Bucharest

The home crowd goes mad for Enescu

Menuhin's mentor, Debussy's disciple and Stravinsky's contemporary, George Enescu (as Martin Anderson pointed out last month) is one music's unsung giants. Except, that is, in Paris, where he studied and worked, and in his native Romania.

Every third summer, Bucharest – except for a post-1989 lull, immediately after the Revolution – goes Enescu-mad. The composer glowers down from massive sepia hoardings which blossom all over the city, and orchestras jet in from Paris, London, Birmingham, Hamburg and Milan, giving the Romanian capital the feel of Florence or Salzburg. Bucharest arrives noisily and late for concerts, but it applauds as lustily as London's Prommers. The hall was packed to choking point for the CBSO's Enescu programme – his slightly unwieldy Third Symphony, beautifully shaped and structured by Sakari Oramo and the entire Birmingham team plus the added forces of the Romanian Academic Radio Choir.

Besides an International Competition for violin, keyboard and voice, the centrepiece of this year's festival was a staging of Enescu's masterpiece, Oedipe: one of those operatic feasts neo-Romantics dream of, coeval with Szymanowski's King Roger, steeped in Debussy and Schreker, and blessed dramatically with a striking French libretto by the composer and Edmond Fleg, which draws on all three parts of Sophocles' trilogy. It sports huge choruses ideal for WNO or Covent Garden, plus as many male roles as Billy Budd, which place the female roles – Jocasta, awesomely delivered by the magnificent Slovenian-born Marjana Lipovsek, the unseen Sphinx (again sung by Lipovsek), Merope (the lucid Ecaterina Tutu) and Antigone (Celia Costea) in marked relief.

The Bucharest production, shared with Vienna and Berlin, was by Gotz Friedrich (assisted by Saskia Kuhlmann): intelligent moves and tableaux revealed the hallmarks of Friedrich at his acutest and best. Enescu's use of a Prologue to depict Oedipus's birth further tautens the story, enabling key characters – Laius (Vladimir Popescu Deveselu), the already doom-laden Tiresias (the wonderful Alexandru Moisiuc) and the High Priest (another fine bass, Dan Dumitrescu) to be introduced. The end is anticipated by the graphic opening: the young Jocasta hangs from a quasi-umbilical scarlet halter. So, too, at the end, Oedipus (the impressive Finn Esa Ruuttunen) strips and walks, as if baby-naked, unaided into the light.

Despite a (literally) halting performance initially, Ruuttenen emerged as a magnificent Oedipus in the Sphinx encounter and the Plague scene, outstanding at the climactic realisation, the usurpation of Creon (Polish baritone Adam Kruzel), and the Athenian resolution scene with Theseus (the pleasing young Beijing-trained You Chen). Cardiff's 2001 winner, the tenor Marius Brenciu, furnished a cameo as the Cithaeron shepherd; his Corinthian opposite number, Phorbas, (the Hungarian Peter Koves) was terrific.

If Friedrich's staging was as resplendent as Pountney's Dalibor (Scottish Opera) and Greek Passion (Covent Garden), and as gripping, the playing under Cristian Mandeal – familiar in Britain from his Hallé Orchestra connections – hit a real high. The strings, especially the lower ones, began awfully; thereafter they shone, with a wonderful acidity as the action tensioned. Oboes and flute especially – Enescu makes unnerving use of both – were superb; so was the percussion, including (if my ears served me) a chilling use of celesta. One marvelled at Enescu's masterly pacing control of the events' grisly unfolding. To improve on the already perfect seems like hubris, but this was Sophocles-plus.