Kodaly: Orchestral and Choral Works. Children's Choirs, Budapest Festival Orchestra/Ivan Fischer (Philips)
Kodaly, the great educationalist, would surely have appreciated finding some of his choral works in performances by children's choirs interspersed in a collection of his major orchestral works. Choral and orchestral works alike borrow from the fount of Hungarian folk music. Fischer and his orchestra delight in minutely-nuanced shaping of the vividly-coloured Dances of Galanta and Dances of Marosszek. To the Hary Janos Suite, with what must surely be the most famous sneeze perpetuated in music, they have added some further excerpts from one of the most popular operas in Hungary - it's based on a real-life tall-tale teller. And the singing of the choirs from Budapest and Kecskemet is confident, open, true.
Michael Dervan
Reger: Piano Trios. Genberg Trio (Koch Schwann)
Max Reger, composer of insistently and weightily chromatic, black-on-the-page organ works, courts rejection as a German too quintessentially earnest for his own good. He once wrote to Busoni, saying: "You'll probably be rather surprised at the `turgidity' in my works; one always wants to do too much at first. But I was always in earnest!" The first of the trios here, for violin, viola, and piano, dates from 1894 and spreads chromatic tentacles through a world that otherwise echoes Brahms. The conventionally-scored second trio - Op 102 of 1907 (when Reger was still only 34) - shows in its scherzo a fantastical and still under-appreciated side to a composer who in real life had a sense of humour both lively and vivid. An interesting insight into the fate of the German piano trio after Brahms.
Michael Dervan
Klaus Egge: Piano Works. Torleif Torgersen (Simax)
Norway achieved independence in 1905. In the early decades of the century, the country's music and musical life experienced some of the same pressures of nationalism that were felt here in Ireland. Fartein Valen was one of the men who brought back dangerous ideas from abroad, and passed them on to his pupil, Klaus Egge (1906-1979). Egge, argues Morten Eide Pederson's sleeve note, came from a background rich in folk-fiddling, and thus arrived at the folk/classical divide from the opposite direction to Grieg - it was the art music Egge found exotic. His piano music, all of it written by 1955, charts the increasing sublimation of his folk inspiration, the connection becoming more one of the spirit than the letter. Two sonatas, in sterling performances, stand as major markers of the shift in position.
Michael Dervan