Kodály
Háry János Suite; Summer Evening; Symphony in C major
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra/JoAnn Falletta
Naxos 8.574556 68:04 mins
Zoltán Kodály is best known as the creator of the Kodály method, a popular musical education tool. But he was also a prolific composer: any survey of Kodály’s orchestral music has to include the three magnificent works featured here, and given the quality of these performances from JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic, it must be hoped they’ll return to the composer for a second volume. These are early and late orchestral scores, and the album opens fittingly enough with the Háry János Suite (1926). Probably Kodály’s best-loved work– it’s a pity that the opera from which this music is drawn remains much less well known – it includes such numbers as the Viennese Musical Clock, dreamt up by the quixotic simpleton Háry Janós. Falletta draws vivid performances from her orchestra, not just in the set-piece exuberance but also the suite’s more contemplative moments.
The conductor Arturo Toscanini is the link between the other two works. It was the great Italian maestro who persuaded the Hungarian composer to dust off and reorchestrate his early tone poem Summer Evening, unheard between Kodály’s graduation concert in 1908 and the New York Philharmonic re-premiere in 1930. Modal pastoralism characterises the opening, which may – or may not – evoke the Hungarian plains; it was actually composed in the Croatian resort of Crikvenica, just down the coast from Rijeka. The Buffalo players are warm and reflective in the music, and bring neo-Classical clarity to the Symphony in C major, dedicated to the memory of Toscanini and premiered in 1961, four years after the conductor’s death. It may be structured as a symphony in three movements (Allegro; Andante moderato; Vivo), but as played with such buzzing astringency as it is here, the opening immediately signals the ever-present folk-music roots of Kodály’s art. John Allison