Perhaps it is significant that Zoltan Kodaly abandoned the quartet medium after just two worthy efforts. Having witnessed the astonishing creative precocity of his friend and compatriot Bela Bartok (whose patently superior Second Quartet is roughly contemporaneous with Kodaly's own Second), he must surely have sensed even then that Bartok's mastery signalled greater things to come. Yet Kodaly's own highly agreeable Second Quartet (1916–18) is a concisely crafted piece, with a chirpy, polychrome closing sequence and a moving Andante quasi recitativo that recalls the similarly folk-infused worlds of the solo Cello Sonata (1915) and Duo for violin and cello (1914), while anticipating the qualitatively superior Serenade for two violins and viola (1919–20). The work's harmonic language is far less astringent than Bartok's, its specific properties constituting a sort of stylistic cul-de-sac where subsequent influence was modest, save (perhaps) on the more ambitious instrumental works of Miklos Rozsa.
Kodaly's own influences are more powerfully exposed in the 43 - minute First Quartet (1907–09) a versicoloured epic that, in terms of its precise chronology, straddles Bartok's First Quartet (1908) and underlines the risks inherent in youthful overstatement. The attractive opening theme is strategically significant, but thereafter moods and ideas alter with alarming frequency, while the most obvious point of stylistic reference occurs 9'46'' into the expressively contrapuntal Adagio, where vivid recollections of Erno Dohnanyi's Serenade for two violins and viola (composed some five years earlier) remind us of Kodaly's Hungarian pedigree. The Presto third movement has a notably Slavic flavour (although in this case, not one that is particularly Hungarian), and the 13-minute finale is a discursive Theme and Variations.
A great work it certainly isn't, and yet its restless journeyings make for an enjoyable (and often dramatic) musical diversion, one that is admirably charted by the excellent Kontra Quartet. Add the wan but endearing Gavotte (posthumously discovered among Kodaly's papers) and a resonant, full-textured recording, and you have what amounts to an unusual and instructive programme which, while not exactly altering Kodaly's place in the scheme of things (as a superb educator and a fine composer), further confirms his instrumental mastery and quiet individuality.'