Zoltan Kodaly
Choral Music

Missa brevis*
Jesus and the Traders
Evening
Matra Pictures
Niels Henrik Nielsen (organ)*,
Danish National Radio Choir/Stefan Parkman
Chandos CHAN 9754 Total time: 53:39

Summary for the Busy Executive: Danish strudel.

For most of his life, Kodaly was known as Hungary's second greatest modern
composer, after Bartok.  Since his death, he's probably slipped into third
place, after Ligeti.  The big instrumental pieces seem to go soft in the
center - the symphony, Summer Evening, the concerto for orchestra - or
never reach for anything beyond entertaining - the Peacock Variations and
the two main suites of orchestral dances.  And yet, certain pieces in his
catalogue absolutely astonish you with their power, not the least because
the "comfortable" part of his output lulls you into not expecting it.
The sonata for solo cello is probably the best in its genre since Bach.
The only other modern pieces of its type I know at the same level are
the Bartok sonata for solo violin and the two Bloch suites (again for
solo violin).  The same goes for Kodaly's duo for violin and cello, to a
slightly lesser extent, the sonata for cello and piano, the Budavari Te
Deum and Psalmus Hungaricus, and not least a tremendous body of a cappella
choral music.  Along with Poulenc, Schoenberg, Ives, Britten, Distler,
Vaughan Williams, and Holst, it ranks among the best of the century.

I first encountered Kodaly through my public-high-school choir - a group
able to get through (I won't say "triumph") the Poulenc Gloria in the year
it came out.  The Kodaly piece, "Old People," we sung in English rather
than in the original Hungarian, and it immediately impressed me not only
by its beauty, but through its range of technical challenges to the choir
- from quiet unison singing, to clear counterpoint, to huge, multi-part
block chords - all cohering within a lyric space.  I became a fan.  I found
Hungaraton LPs with such luminaries as Ferencsik, Vasarhelyi, and Lehel,
and, hearing the repertoire in the original language, discovered that the
music mirrored the text rhythms with a fidelity that rivaled Brahms.

The Chandos CD gives us some of the best of Kodaly's choral work performed
by Stefan Parkman and the Danish Radio Choir, one of the finest in the
world.  The group specializes in "hard" music, I suspect mostly because
it's run by State radio and doesn't need to depend on ticket sales for its
existence.  This holds true throughout Scandinavia, as a matter of fact.
Consequently, the Scandinavian choral standard is among the highest in the
world, and composers write up, rather than down, to it.  Much of Kodaly's
choral music nominally aims at amateurs, but the term designates a group
different today from when he wrote it, at least in the United States.  Most
of Kodaly's music lies beyond American amateur capability, mainly because
schools and churches have either eliminated choirs or pursued a disastrous
policy which substitutes tepid and treacly pop for some of the best music
in the world.

Unlike Bartok, Kodaly didn't emigrate, which put him at great risk during
the Nazi occupation of Hungary.  A leftist himself, whose nationalist
artistic goals more or less paralleled the official Communist view of art
as nation-building, he found himself the Grand Old Man of Hungarian Music,
cosseted and feted by the postwar regimes.  At any rate, much of his
activity he directed toward music education in the schools.  He developed
an extensive pedagogical method, created the repertoire to fuel it, and
received the full backing of the State.  As a result, Hungarian school
choirs could handle music of just about any level of difficulty.  I have
no idea what might have happened to them under present-day "goulash
capitalism."

The works here would challenge anybody, including thorough professionals
like Parkman and his Danes.  Missa brevis poses mainly harmonic hurdles,
imposing even with the support of an accompanying organ.  The scales are
strange (probably based on Hungarian folk modes).  There's an archaic air
to the mass, even with its mostly post-Impressionist harmonies, from the
canonic chanting of the "Kyrie" to the interplay of choir and organ in the
"Gloria," which reminds me a bit of old 18th-century Czech folk masses.
I've several recordings of the work, including one (in its orchestral
dress) led by Ferencsik with an all-Hungarian ensemble, but I've never
heard a better chorus than this - a preternaturally clean sound, no fuzz
in the chords, and everything so excitingly in tune, you begin to hear bass
fundamentals that aren't written in, all through the magic of physics.  The
performance itself kicks butt, especially in the two most interpretively
difficult movements - the "Credo" and the "Agnus Dei," long spans of music
whose architecture Parkman makes crystal clear.  It's also obvious that
Parkman naturally thinks in large spans, to the advantage of a musical work
structured cyclically.  Fragments of the "Kyrie" and "Gloria," for example,
reappear in the "Agnus Dei," and ideas from the "Credo" show up in the
"Ite, missa est," among other things.  He creates the feeling of joining
the separate movements together into one whole.  This happens most
noticeably in the "Sanctus" and "Benedictus," so that the second "Hosanna"
for once does come through as a commentary on the first.

Jezus es a kufarok (Jesus and the Traders), a pillar of 20th-century
a cappella choral music, tells the familiar story of Jesus and the
money-changers.  In addition to the harmonic complexity of the work -
indeed, this is Kodaly at his furthest out (not all that far; it's still
strongly tonal) - there is a killer fugato as well as passages of rapid
close canon, and the choir must sort it all out by itself.  I've heard lots
of performances, some by very good choirs indeed, but I've not heard anyone
but Parkman bring out the essential roughness of the fugue while keeping
the clarity of each part.  If I hadn't heard it, I wouldn't have suspected
it could be done.  Furthermore, unisons are true unisons.  There's
absolutely no detectable variance in pitch from one singer to the other -
so little, in fact, that one has a great deal of trouble telling how many
singers might be sounding at any one time.  Parkman and his ensemble raise
the bar.

Much of Kodaly's output sets individual lyric poems and lies strongly in
the tradition of Romantic secular choral music by such lights as Schubert,
Mendelssohn, and Brahms.  Evening is a gorgeous piece and, according to
the liner notes, his earliest, dating from 1904.  The wonder, peace, and
richness of the night sky, the vastness of the Hungarian plain, are all
here.  It moves mainly by chords, but what chords!  And the Danes are so in
tune, that they bring off the magic in the work, despite their relatively
lo-cal sound.

By the time of the Matra Pictures (1931, and another 20th-century choral
classic), Kodaly has refined his writing, and his idiom has turned into a
sophisticated evocation of folk music, much like, say, George Butterworth
in England.  Folk music teaches him (as it does Bartok) a greater economy
with notes and a more truly contrapuntal approach to music.  The
counterpoint, however, is highly individual, rather than what one learns
in a class - the juxtaposition of independent melodies, rather than
the rhythmic displacement and insertion of passing-notes between the
constituents of chords.  In the Matra Pictures, the counterpoint sounds
like folk descants, although one can't easily imagine folk musicians
pulling off Kodaly.  Parkman turns in a very suave - in places overly so -
performance which succeeds on its own terms.  Nevertheless, if you can find
Vasarhelyi on Hungaraton, I think you'll hear something earthier and closer
to the composer.

All in all, however, a superb disc.  Chandos engineers have provided a
bright acoustic without sacrificing the crispness of the choral sound.

Steve Schwartz