Back to the reviews

Gramofon
January 2005

Mátyás Seiber: Chamber pieces and songs
Chamber pieces from Hans Koessler and Emanuel Moór

Mátyás Seiber: Chamber pieces and songs
Hungaroton Classic

Mátyás Seiber was one of the favourite students of Kodály. He died in a car accident aged fifty-five -when Kodaly composed a touching lament. We still do not know much about him but to counterbalance this deficit, Hungaroton released in the year of the cosmopolitan’s 100 th birthday his first full retrospective CD. We can get acquainted with this music pedagogy once highly respected in Great- Britain and elsewhere from many angles. His was the spicy humoured composition for the 1954 Halas & Bachelor cartoon adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm, but he was equally interested in jazz, the twelve-note system, the teaching technique for the piano accordion or Moldovian folk songs. The selection offers a sample from every period of the composer, in total nine compositions in a well-constructed and elaborate performance. The contributors to the recording were:- Lesley-Jane Rogers and Andrea Meláth (singers), David Frühwirth (violin), Péter Szabó (cello), László Ernyei (accordon) and Zsuzsa Kollár (piano).

Chamber pieces from Hans Koessler and Emanuel Moór
Hungaroton Classic

The greatest virtue of the album is that it offers a more complex picture of the composer whose bigoted conservatism is usually mentioned in parallel to his outstanding professional skills. On the disc there are two pieces composed by Hans Koessler –who was the teacher of Bartók and Kodály at the Academy – a trio from 1922 and a piano quintet from 1913. Although they are written in a musical language of 50 years earlier, still, the music is permanently in motion, it displays interesting harmonic shifts and hot musical colours. Moór’s Cello Sonata written on the turn of the century is a less showy piece, though the composer, who worked for Károly Flesch, Kreisler and Ysaye, was admired by Casals.
The two Austrian violinists (David Frühwirth and Christoph Ehrenfellner) and the French violist (Genevieve Strosser) are in perfect harmony with the Hungarian performers (Péter Szabó – cello and Zsuzsa Kollár – piano).

VT

Translated by Susan Kapás

Back to the reviews