An important reminder, this, of how and where Hungarian piano music is progressing. Far from keeping within narrow national boundaries, its most recent representatives have taken Bartok's lead and fully exploited the instrument's tonal resources. The last piece of Peter Frankl's programme dates from 1988; the Paesaggio con morti by Andras Szollosy, an impressive, 11-minute study in musical shades and textures. Working back from there, and tracing the general direction of Szollosy's route, is a relatively simple task. Oddly, Kodaly more than Bartok seems—in this case, at least—the overriding influence: his Seven Pieces, Op. 11 have never sounded more engaging than here, and the largest of them, ''Epitaphe'', is surely among the composer's most dramatic inspirations. With Gyorgy Kurtag, credits revert back to Bartok, and in particular to pieces from his minutely-jewelled Mikrokosmos—which, when sampled beside Kurtag's Plays and Games for Piano, seem to grow virtually by the minute. Frankl extracts the maximum tonal effect from these gnomic utterances (none lasts for more than 42 seconds), all of them helpfully revealing of some or other aspect of piano technique.
Leo Weiner's spicy Hungarian Rural Dances include a ''Ronde de Marosszek''; but here again, it's more Bartok than Kodaly who springs to mind. Bartok's own Dance Suite is, of course, a pivotal creation, not so much in this slightly compromised piano transcription (where the reduction process offers scant reportage of the original's bite and pungency), but in its use of Eastern European and Arabic modes, and the way they are so expertly welded on to the work's overall structure. And then to Dohnanyi and Liszt, although the former's pleasant Gavotte and Musette seems more a side-long glance at Smetana than an extension of the bold, bald and audacious world of Liszt's menacing Czardas macabre. Here we can locate the seeds of Bartok's mature style, sown not merely among the realms of local folklore (although this disturbing Czardas is profoundly Hungarian in spirit), but deep within the furthest recesses of our collective musical unconscious. None of this would have occurred to me had the performances been less than sympathetic, or the recordings found wanting. Strongly recommended.'