Kodaly, the Other Hungarian

Inevitably, Bela Bartok’s is the name mentioned first when discussing Hungarian compos ers of the 20th Century. Zoltan Kodaly, his friend, colleague and contemporary--although he outlived Bartok by 22 years--is usually “the other guy.” Outside Hungary, at any rate.

While there can be little doubt that Bartok was the innovative genius, Kodaly is hardly any less important as a national father figure--he showed equal contempt for fascism and communism, surviving and prevailing over both regimes--and as an ethnologist and educator. The so-called Kodaly Method, which promotes universal musical literacy through group singing, has found wide acceptance in many countries.

Kodaly’s assimilable, tuneful and superbly crafted compositions are paradoxically much less familiar than Bartok’s more abstruse, dissonant ones. Kodaly (1882-1967), the younger man by one year, was a populist, like the Copland of the ballets, a situation that confounds the programming mavens: Do you put him on pops programs or is he too “foreign” for that? Then again, is he too easy for “serious” programs?

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The result is that we rarely hear Kodaly’s orchestral music in concert at all, while his much less audience-friendly chamber music is neglected perhaps because it isn’t by Bartok. The world seems capable of embracing only one Hungarian composer at a time.

And so, the Lord created recordings, with some of the best ones of Kodaly’s music being of very recent vintage, a list headed by a collection of his major orchestral works on a small, classy Danish label, Kontrapunkt (32153/4, two CDs).

The set offers polished and quite stunningly idiomatic performances from an expatriate Hungarian conductor named Janos Furst, who directs the Helsinki Philharmonic--not normally a glamour ensemble but giving a convincing impression of one during these rewarding two hours.

Furst and his sensitive engineers see to it that the scores make their pungent rhythmic points and that Kodaly’s colorful orchestration is not only clearly but realistically projected.

The most familiar work is the composer’s own enduringly clever suite from his folk opera “Hary Janos,” and it is given its due here. Even more impressive, however, is the stirring and neglected (by conductors and by the big labels) “Peacock” Variations, which hasn’t sounded this sumptuous since the memorable mid-1960s edition by the London Symphony conducted by the tragically short-lived Istvan Kertesz.

Lovely and lovable as well is the present version of the Dances From Galanta (1933), its melting clarinet solos played with soaring grace and dollops of authentic Magyar rubato by the Finnish orchestra’s uncredited principal.

The present artists also offer eloquent readings of the sweetly beguiling “Summer Evening,” begun in 1906 but not reaching its final form until 1930, when the composer dedicated it to Arturo Toscanini, and the rather wan, three-movement Symphony, started in the 1920s and not completed until 1961, again dedicated to Toscanini, this time in memoriam .

K odaly’s chamber works tend to be tough nuts, although still a long way from Bartok’s in terms of dissonance and rhythmic complexity. The most ambitious of them is the First String Quartet, completed in 1909--at the height of his folk-music collecting partnership with Bartok--and rarely heard, even on recordings.

One strike against it is its three-quarter-hour length. But granting the excesses of youth and the lingering Romantic notion that bigger is better, it remains a fascinating, often gorgeous beast, shot through with Eastern exoticism and the Debussy-like shimmer found in the roughly contemporaneous “Bluebeard’s Castle” by Bartok.

The Second Quartet, written nearly a decade later, is briefer, darker emotionally and more consistent in its working of the folk idiom into a coherent structure, if not quite as charmingly effusive as its predecessor.

Both are presented with rhythmic punch and lyric expansiveness by the excellent Copenhagen-based Kontra Quartet, comprising a Hungarian first violinist and three Danes (BIS 564).*