22 minutes
As well as collecting original musical manuscripts by other composers, Johannes Brahms (b. Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; d. Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897) was an avid collector of folk song. He began at 15, jotting down melodies from various countries, and by his death had amassed a substantial collection—acquired for artistic rather than scholarly reasons. Hungarian music fascinated him most, a passion that began in his late teens while performing with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. Brahms devised his own accompaniments to Reményi’s Hungarian tunes, an experience that left a lasting imprint. In 1869, he published the first two volumes of his Hungarian Dances (eventually numbering 21), with the rest following a decade later—all initially for piano duet. Countless arrangements quickly emerged, a few by Brahms himself. Their original melodies came from varied sources, both known and unknown: rural folk tradition, urban popular song, and composed music.
For a decade after the Second World War, Polish and other Eastern Bloc composers were subject to guidelines that restricted their creative wishes. Folk music fell within the parameters of accessible, nationalist, ‘socialist realist’ music, together with scores for film, radio and publishing productions. Witold Lutosławski (b. Warsaw, Poland, January 25, 1913; d. Warsaw, February 9, 1994) described his five Dance Preludes of 1954 as his ‘farewell to folklore’. In the cultural thaw that followed, Lutosławski ventured into a more progressive style. Originally scored for clarinet and piano, the exuberance and vitality of the music quickly made the Dance Preludes among his most played works. He later developed them further with arrangements for clarinet and chamber orchestra, and then as a nonet.
As a Hungarian who had grown up in a region kept isolated from mainstream Europe by the ruling Habsburgs, Béla Bartók (b. Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary [now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania], March 25, 1881; d. New York, September 26, 1945) was among the first to recognize the true potential of his country’s folk music. He transcribed his first folk songs in what was then Northern Hungary in 1904. Two years later, he began collecting Slovak folk music, and by 1908 had expanded his efforts to Romanian traditions, eventually amassing a collection of more than 3,500 Romanian melodies. His orchestral Six Romanian Folk Dances (1915) quickly became one of his most popular works. Its original title, Romanian Folk Dances from Hungary, was abandoned after World War I, when the Treaty of Trianon redrew Transylvania’s borders. As was his practice, Bartók scrupulously identifies the type and origin of each folk melody in the score.
Tonight’s pianist Shai Wosner (b. Israel, April 25, 1976) promises to have a surprise in store for us with his Bulgarian Gigue (after J.S. Bach).
— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca