Proms Composer - Kodaly
Each week Andrew recommends recordings of music by a Proms composer whose music deserves to be heard more often. This week's Proms Composer, Zolt\xe1n Kod\xe1ly, was a Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist. In the early 1900s he visited remote villages to notate the folk music of Hungary and the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Slovakia and Romania. Kodaly and his friend Bela Bartok recorded the songs on phonograph cylinders. His work is an attractive mixture of late-romantic, impressionistic and modernist musical styles inflected with folk idioms. His most famous pieces include the H\xe1ry J\xe1nos Overture, Dances of Marossz\xe9k, Dances of Gal\xe1nta and Psalmus Hungaricus.