Hungarian Dance No.6 in D major (orch Schwarz)

Hungarian gypsy music was as liberating an influence on some nineteenth-century composers as jazz on some twentieth-century composers. Brahms succumbed to it, its distinctive rhythms and exotic harmonies, when he met Eduard Reményi, a slightly disreputable but persuasive Hungarian violinist who gave several concerts with the young composer in the early 1850s. When Brahms started writing his own Hungarian Dances for piano duet in 1858, while there were other sources for him to turn to, he could scarcely have avoided drawing on his memory of the Hungarian pieces that had made such an impression on him when he heard Reményi play them. Certainly, when the first two sets of Hungarian Dances (Nos.1-10) were published in 1869 Reményi accused Brahms of stealing the tunes from him.

The Hungarian Dance No.6 in D major - performed here in an arrangement by tonight’s conductor Gerard Schwarz - is based on “The Dance of the Rose Bush” which is attributed not to Reményi but to a composer called Nittinger. Whoever wrote the original material, it is a particularly brilliant example of what Brahms and his contemporaries found so attractive in the Hungarian gypsy idiom. The teasingly slow opening followed by a sudden explosion of energy is only one of the many tempo changes in a dance remarkable for its exuberant harmonies, its reckless rhythms and, with at least five distinct tunes presented in quick succession, its melodic abundance.