Record Review Podcast

Each week Andrew recommends recordings of music by a Proms composer whose music deserves to be heard more often. This week's Proms Composer, Zoltán Kodály, was a Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist. In the early 1900s he visited remote villages to notate the folk music of Hungary and the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Slovakia and Romania. Kodaly and his friend Bela Bartok recorded the songs on phonograph cylinders. His work is an attractive mixture of late-romantic, impressionistic and modernist musical styles inflected with folk idioms. His most famous pieces include the Háry János Overture, Dances of Marosszék, Dances of Galánta and Psalmus Hungaricus.