KODALY CONCERT

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31774, 3 September 1968, Page 12

KODALY CONCERT

Choral programmes which consist of single works are not unusual; but even in choral music it is rare to find a complete programme given to a number of shorter works by the same composer.

One of these occasions will take place in the Oxford Terrace Baptist Church on Saturday, when the Christchurch Harmonic Society will present a programme of works by the Hungarian composer, Zoltan Kodaly, who died last year at the age of 85. Kodaly ranks among the greatest creative artists of modem times, and with his renowned predecessor, Franz Liszt, and his no less famous contemporary, Bela Bartok, he is acclaimed as one of the three greatest Hungarian composers. Bora in 1882 in the small Hugarian (now Czechoslovakian) village of Calanta, he lived until he was nearly 40

in a land that was still part of the dual monarchy of Aus-tria-Hungary, politically dominated by the Austrian House of Hapsburg and, as a direct consequence, musically dominated by the German romantic art of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Wagner. For a brief period at the end of the First World War Kodaly was assistant director of the Musical Academy at Budapest. The following years, 1923 to 1940, were the period of his greatest creative activity and what was lost at the academy was regained many times over as his music spread through Europe and into America. SOUGHT FOLK-SONGS

With painstaking care he travelled widely throughout Hungary, unearthing a treasure trove of folk music which he then made known to his countrymen and the world. He also developed ins own choral method by which he brought his people into an active relationship to their heritage of song.

The first work on the programme to be given on Saturday is “Pange Lingua,” sung by the full choir. This setting of the Latin hymn, “Sing, my tongue, the mystery telling,” is a motet with free organ accompaniment. Despite modern harmonic procedures and key changes there is a similarity in mood *o sixteenth-cen-tury polyphonic liturgical music.

The second work, “Hymn to Zrinyi,” for baritone solo and mixed chorus, has something poignantly in common with the troubled central European affairs of the last few weeks. The story comes from a prose work, “Medicine against the Poisons of the Turk,” written by a seventeenth-century Hungarian patriot, Miklos Zrinyi, and relates an incident during the Turkish domination of Hungary in the four-teenth-century. This work was performed by the society during its tour of the United Kingdom in 1965, but this will be its first performance by the society in Christchurch. Winston Sharp and the Harmonic Chorale will be featured. SHORT WORKS The second half consists of a number of short works and one somewhat longer. “Laudes Organ!,” possibly Kodaly’s last major composition, was commissioned for the 1966 national convention of the American Guild of Organists. In this work, as in the first work on the programme, there is a long organ prelude capable of standing on its own as a recital piece. The work is a paean in praises of the organ and an exhortation to all who play or listen to it to marvel at its greatness. The organists in both works will be George Martin. The whole programme will be conducted by William Hawkey.