Ruralia Hungarica [Pure DSD - Direct Mixed]

Pure DSD - Direct Mixed

Recorded, mixed, mastered and delivered purely in DSD 256. Direct Mixed albums are the top tier digital recordings available anywhere: nothing comes closer to the source sound. 100% DSD from microphone to edit master.

Suzana Bartal’s Ruralia Hungarica puts three Hungarian composers side by side and asks what “Hungarian” in classical music really means. As Endre Tóth writes in his liner essay, the answer shifted across a century. For Liszt, it was the verbunkos dance tradition and the improvisatory style of Gypsy bands, with their slow lassú and fast friss sections. His Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos. 5 and 6 turn that tradition into Romantic piano virtuosity: the “Heroic Elegy” of No. 5 moves from funeral march to lyrical fantasy, and No. 6 imitates the broken chords, cimbalom-like ornaments and whimsical tempo changes of a Gypsy band, with a central Lassú built on the song “Cserebogár, sárga cserebogár.”

For Bartók and Kodály, the real heart of Hungarian music lay in a far older peasant layer that they discovered on their field-collecting trips. Bartók’s Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs, Sz. 71, treats those tunes as the foundation of composition itself, from four lament-like old tunes and an ironic Scherzo to the tragic ballad of Borbála Angoli and the bagpipe-like dances of the closing “Old Dance Tunes.” Dohnányi’s Ruralia Hungarica, Op. 32c (1923), stands somewhat apart in a late Romantic idiom, reaching toward folk melodies, among them a variant of the Cserebogár tune, a children’s song, the orphan’s ballad “Árva vagyok apa nélkül,” and a closing kuruc mocking dance. Recorded at MCO Studio 1 in Hilversum, the programme shows a pianist moving between three very different versions of one national voice.

Suzana Bartal, piano