Beethoven and Kodály

A highly varied concert with a great deal of unusual music: newer works to begin with, and slightly older twentieth-century Hungarian music after intermission. Augusta Read Thomas (born 1964 in New York) was inspired by a poem about courage by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalal al-din Rumi. Rumi Settings for violin and viola can therefore be seen as a song without words. Anna Clyne (born 1980 in London) composed the playful Hopscotch for flute with inspiration from folk melodies and classic children’s games.   

Endre Szervánsky (1911–1977) was a composer and teacher (including of Hungarian-Swedish Ákos Rózmann). He is overshadowed, but was also inspired by, his fellow countrymen Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Like them, he used folk music in his compositions. We hear the trio from 1951.

The piece is entitled Serenade for two violins and viola, but why did Zoltán Kodály not simply refer to it as a trio? The nineteenth-century serenade genre denoted somewhat lighter music in several movements, and that was what Kodály was referring to with this piece from 1920. The style is typical: a blend of folk melodies, more modern harmonics and dancing rhythms – flirtatious and playful.