Kodaly: Duo For Violin And Cello / Hungarian Rondo / Adagio For Cello / Sonatina

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Zoltan Kodaly(1882-1967)Music for Cello,Volume 2Prelude and Fugue(J.S. Bach, tr. Kodaly); Sonatina for Cello and Piano Adagio for Cello andPiano; Capriccio for Solo CelloHungarian Rondo forCello and Piano; Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7The son of a railway booking-clerk, Zoltan Kodaly was born in 1882 at Kecskemet, fifty miles south-east of Budapest. In1900, after a childhood largely spent in the Hungarian countryside, Kodalyentered the pazmany University in Budapest, studying German and Hun?¡garian. Atthe same time he took lessons at the Academy of Music, where his compositionteacher was Hans Koessler, a cousin of Max Reger, a musician for whomtraditional Hungarian folk-song had no place. However, Kodaly's doctoral thesisin 1906 was devoted to just this subject, in the collection and investigationof which he had already busied himself, together with his close contemporaryBela Bartok.After a brief period of study in Berlin, Kodaly returned to Hungary tojoin the staff of the Academy where, in 1908, he took over the first-yearcomposition class. In the following years he continued his activities as acomposer and as a collector of folk-song, finding in the second activity anecessary foundation for art music that was genuinely Hungarian rather than inthe conventional German mould. He became deputy director of the Academy, whichwas granted the status of a university in the short-lived Hungarian Republicestablished in 1919, but he was barred for a time from teaching after the fallof the Republic four months later and the accession to power of Admiral Horthy.Kodaly's music attracted increasing international attention in thefollowing years, particularly with the first performance outside Hungary of hisPsalmus Hungaricus in 1926 and the success of excerpts from hisessentially Hungarian Singspiel Hary Janos. When he resumed his dutiesas a teacher, he was able to exert a strong influence on younger composers and a stillgreater influence over the whole process of musical education in Hungary, withmethods that have, however imperfectly, been much imitated elsewhere. The taskhe set himself was to establish a truly Hungarian musical tradition, to beabsorbed, as it was in his own music, into a recognisably Hungarian form of artmusic. While Bartok, whose style as a composer was generally more astringentand more experimental than Kodaly's, took refuge abroad, Kodaly remained inHungary during Admiral Horthy's period of rule, as he did under the newdispensation established in the years after the war, much honoured at home andabroad. He died in Budapest in 1967.Kodaly's transcription for cello and piano of the Prelude and Fugue inE flat minor from the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier wasmade in 1951 and dedicated to Pablo Casals, who had emerged from self-imposedsilence in 1950 for the Bach bicentenary. Kodaly offers the transcription toCasals 'in grateful memory of his wonderful renderings.' Transposed to the moreconvenient and, for the cello, more resonan