5 Hungarian Folk Songs

arranged for soprano and chamber ensemble by Richard Tognetti

Annyi bánat from 8 Hungarian Folk Songs (1907–17)

Régi Keserves from 20 Hungarian Folk Songs (1929)

‘Hatforintos’ Nóta from 20 Hungarian Folk Songs

Eddig való dolgom a tavaszi szántás from 8 Hungarian Folk Songs

Párositó from 20 Hungarian Folk Songs

One day in the summer of 1904, when he was living in the countryside in Gömör, Bartók happened to hear a Transylvanian folksong sung by an eighteen-year-old Székely nursemaid in the house where he was staying. It was a revelation. It was the beginning of his understanding that what he thought was Hungarian folk music – and what Brahms and Liszt had thought was Hungarian folk music – was far from the real thing. The material used by Brahms in his Hungarian Dances and Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies was not an organic product at all, he discovered, but the work of urban composers and gypsy violinists. Although he did not begin his researches into peasant folksong until after he had met Zoltán Kodály, who was already experienced in this field, by 1918 Bartók had collected as many as 1000 examples – not just Hungarian and Transylvanian but also Slovakian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and even Arabic.

Inevitably, as he collected, transcribed, analysed and classifiied these songs, he adopted more and more of their harmonic and rhythmic characteristics into his own musical language, which was completely transformed by the experience. Although he rarely quoted actual folk song in his instrumental and stage music, over the course of 20 years or so he did make concert arrangements of eighty examples, including more than forty for voice and piano – a delicate process which he compared to “mounting a precious stone.” Originally written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra (of which he is artistic director) Richard Tognetti’s arrangements of five of them retain the vocal line but reset that jewel in a different and more colourful metal.

Annyi bánat (So Much Sorrow), one of 8 Hungarian Folk Songs from the Csík district of Transylvania, is a pentatonic song all the more poignant for the simplicity of its setting. Régi Keserves (Old Lament) comes from a later collection, the 20 Hungarian Folk Songs, where each one is presented as a comparatively developed piece. Its unusually flexible vocal line is so expressive as to move the accompanying instruments to make a briefly sympathetic comment between the two halves of the song. From the same collection ‘Hatforintos’ Nóta (‘Six Florin’ Dance) is a contrastingly cheerful round dance accompanied by simulations of droning and wheezing bagpipes. Eddig való dolgom a tavaszi szántás (Up to now my work was ploughing in the spring time) was arranged by Bartók for a soldier’s concert in Vienna in 1917. In its unadorned misery it most effectively offsets the uninhibitedly exuberant and brilliantly witty Párositó, the first of the two lively wedding-song settings in the later collection.

Gerald Larner © 2009