Mihály Borbély: clarinet, tárogató, soprano sax, tilinkó
Dániel Szabó: piano
Balázs Horváth: double bass
István Baló: drums
Balázs Kántor: violoncello

This album is a personal testimony: to Kodály's music, to the timeless beauty of folk music and its lasting power. It has been maturing within me for some time, and a commission assisted in the ideas' becoming notes, in my being able to say when the disc was finished that I am grateful to fate for enabling me to come one step closer to myself. It may be that the image of Kodály I paint is very subjective, and his music has matured within me to become something different, something he never intended. Yet for sure, what I respect in him is not only the composer-cum-statue or a strict father of a pedagogical method, but the musician, who is "father of notes, the shepherd of hope". (János Káldi: Zoltán Kodály)
The disc begins, by way of an overture, with a trio improvisation, which foreshadows the themes played later. This is followed by the only composition whose source of inspiration is not on the album, but musical associations are facilitated not only by the title (Marosszék), but by the fact that the original folksongs that Kodály arranged are fairly well known. The Evening by the campfire was my first "folk music" experience, which while studying music as a child propelled me into a world I would subsequently always long to return to. This small clarinet piece is the beginning of a series of pairs in which a chamber work by Kodály is followed by a rhyming piece of my own, less with concrete quotations than with oblique musical references and improvisation. The inspiration for these was an idea of Kodály's which he felt to be so important he set it down twice: in the foreword to the Choruses for Children's Voices (1929) and his written piece Music in the Kindergarten (1941): "...every healthy child would improvise, if he were allowed to".
Knowing my excellent fellow musicians, I decided to put together a programme in which the same musicians perform Kodály chamber works, my own compositions, and improvisations based on them and drawing on folk music r.......
more

This album is a personal testimony: to Kodály's music, to the timeless beauty of folk music and its lasting power. It has been maturing within me for some time, and a commission assisted in the ideas' becoming notes, in my being able to say when the disc was finished that I am grateful to fate for enabling me to come one step closer to myself. It may be that the image of Kodály I paint is very subjective, and his music has matured within me to become something different, something he never intended. Yet for sure, what I respect in him is not only the composer-cum-statue or a strict father of a pedagogical method, but the musician, who is "father of notes, the shepherd of hope". (János Káldi: Zoltán Kodály)
The disc begins, by way of an overture, with a trio improvisation, which foreshadows the themes played later. This is followed by the only composition whose source of inspiration is not on the album, but musical associations are facilitated not only by the title (Marosszék), but by the fact that the original folksongs that Kodály arranged are fairly well known. The Evening by the campfire was my first "folk music" experience, which while studying music as a child propelled me into a world I would subsequently always long to return to. This small clarinet piece is the beginning of a series of pairs in which a chamber work by Kodály is followed by a rhyming piece of my own, less with concrete quotations than with oblique musical references and improvisation. The inspiration for these was an idea of Kodály's which he felt to be so important he set it down twice: in the foreword to the Choruses for Children's Voices (1929) and his written piece Music in the Kindergarten (1941): "...every healthy child would improvise, if he were allowed to".
Knowing my excellent fellow musicians, I decided to put together a programme in which the same musicians perform Kodály chamber works, my own compositions, and improvisations based on them and drawing on folk music r.......
more