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Written in fRoots issue 256, 2004
 

MUZSIKÁS AND MÁRTA SEBESTYÉN
A Zeneakadémián – Live At Liszt Academy
Muzsikás MU-005 (2003)

In Hungary not only is it well known that the country has a huge store of traditional music, but that music is held in high artistic esteem, and instruction in traditional instruments and techniques is available in the country’s educational system. These three facts are in large part a legacy of the work of the two famous Hungarian composers and meticulous folk music collectors during the early 20th century, Bartók and Kodály.
      Most of the members of Muzsikás benefited from Kodály’s musical education method, and as they moved deep into the study and playing of traditional music it was Bartók and Kodály’s huge collections that provided material and encouraged them to go out and learn from living traditional musicians around Hungary, where they found many of the same melodies still being played.
      In 1999 the band made an album drawing together Bartók’s classical compositions, particularly his powerful, wild violin duets, and the traditional melodies that inspired them. The same year they also began a series of annual concerts at Budapest’s music school, the Liszt Academy, drawing together the two sides of Bartók and Kodály’s work, collection and composition by alternating between the composed works and the traditional tunes and songs that lie behind and within them.
This new CD is a compilation of recordings made at those concerts. Each show had guests from both the classical and traditional village sides; the recordings on the album consist mainly of the folk material rather than the classical works and feature cimbalom player Toni Árpád from Marosszék in Transylvania and, from the 2003 show, the fifty-member women’s choir Pro Musica of Nyireghyháza.
      The quality of the playing of the four band members and Sebestyén’s singing is, as usual, just right, full of spirit and understanding, and they integrate seamlessly with Árpád’s robust, choppy style on the two tracks involving him. The choir, with none of the arch plumminess than can afflict classically-trained choirs, perform three Kodály works and one of Bartók’s which sit between the band’s items perfectly naturally. One of them, Kodály’s Mountain Nights, segues beautifully into Sebestyén’s still, calm singing of a kyrie from the Hungarian village of Lészped in Moldavia, and then into the Transylvanian Jewish The Rooster Is Crowing and on into the choir’s rendering of Kodály’s In The Green Wood.
      Muzsikás and Sebestyén have taken the ‘Bartók and Kodály sources’ idea into collaboration concerts elsewhere in the world, and are clearly doing great good in raising respect across the classical/folk divide. Perhaps there’s a lesson there…
      UK distribution is by International Records, whose mail order wing, specialising in east European folk, Gypsy and jazz music, is PassiOn Music, www.passiondiscs.co.uk.


© 2004 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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