For starters, try Est (‘Evening’, tr 27), a setting of a poem about the dying moon, where night has come, perhaps for ever – music in some respects prophetic of the more quietly haunting episodes in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, composed some eight years later (1911), a sort of ‘coming of age’ in terms of Bartók’s abilities on the choral music front. But the real masterpiece comes towards the close of the disc: From Olden Times for male choir, the most substantial work programmed. It dates from around the period of the Fifth String Quartet and consists of three movements lasting for some 15 minutes, the first poem about the peasants’ unhappy lot (the choral writing here so skilfully tiered), the second a biting scherzando and the third an affirmation of the peasants’ self-sufficiency. Kodály had long been urging his friend Bartók to explore a genre that he himself had become a master of and it was the beauty of these particular texts – which as the scholar László Somfai has pointed out are virtually untranslatable – that goaded Bartók into creative action.

The rest of the programme tends to centre on miniatures, opening with Four Slovak Folksongs for mixed choir with a bright-toned piano accompaniment played by Krisztián Kocsis, colourful pieces, dynamically very varied. The first of the Five Slovak Folksongs, although setting a warlike text, is extremely moving and there are two versions of the Four Old Hungarian Folksongs, the original from 1910 (included as part of an ‘appendix’) and the familiar revision from 1926. From four years later dates one of Bartók’s choral masterpieces, the Hungarian Folksongs, and his last choral folksong settings, the Székely Folksongs, the first song a lament for lost love, another moment of exquisite beauty.

Whether involving the Hungarian National Choir or the Slovak Philharmonic Choir (the latter it seems takes part in just the two sets of Slovak folksongs), the singing is both superbly blended and subtly expressively, Zoltán Kocsis and his chorusmasters combining for performances that have the ring of musical truth about them. The recorded sound is very well balanced.