Echoes of Budapest
Pál Hermann (1902-1944)
String Trio (1921)
Géza Frid (1904-1989)
String Trio, Op.1 (1926)
Duo for Violin and Cello ‘Kan-Ti’ (1925)
Zoltán Székely (1903-2001)
String Trio (1921)
Hague String Trio
rec. 23-25 April 2025, Westvest90, Schiedam, The Netherlands
Cobra 0096 [66]
Zoltán Székely, Pál Hermann and Géza Frid – violinist, cellist and pianist – met as precocious students at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest and forged a strong alliance there, and thereafter when they left Hungary and lived in the Netherlands. Frid remained there, Hermann was deported to his death in 1944 whilst Székely won a measure of fame as soloist and even more as first violinist of the Hungarian String Quartet. The three friends were also composers and the three trios, and one Duo, in Cobra’s disc reflect their early forays in the string repertoire in works composed between 1921 and 1926.
Hermann was 19 when he wrote his trio as a student and it remained unpublished. It’s compact at just eight-and-a-half minutes, but it’s packed with incident – lithe pizzicati, bracing folkloric themes, a cello drone, and athletic interplay, with material well distributed between the three strings. It’s a tribute to the training available in Budapest that Hermann could turn out a piece as effective and enjoyable as this but it’s evident that one of the most important figures in encouraging such ambition was Zoltán Kodály, who tended to offer private teaching away from the Academy, where its formal strictures could be loosened. Frid was 22 when he wrote his own Trio, Op.1 and it has a nervous neo-classical vitality that impressed Kodály and led him to urge its publication. There are saucy folklike melodies in the first movement, and solemnity in the central slow movement though Frid drizzles some zestier contrasts, and the finale generates a fast dance all’ungharese to end a youthful, admirable work.
Both these works have been recorded before – see the all-Hermann disc from Etcetera and the similar disc from Toccata which is part of a multi-volume reclamation of his music, as well Naxos’ Hungarian string trios release, which includes Frid’s Trio. However, Frid’s Duo is new to disc. It’s subtitled ‘Kan-Ti’ and the booklet notes helpfully suggest this could mean either ‘to sing’ in Esperanto or Sanskrit for ‘beauty’ or ‘radiance’. Either way, it shows the 21-year-old Frid fully the master of his material, the opening movement (of two) slow, intense with plenty of unison writing as well as more folk influence. He’s adept at ensuring the duo play at reduced dynamics, something that violinist Justyna Briefjes and cellist Miriam Kirby follow to the letter. The second movement unleashes lively, finely crafted interchange between the two.
The final work, where violist Julia Dinerstein rejoins the ensemble, is Székely’s large-scale four-movement Trio which was written in the same year as his friend and string colleague Hermann’s own Trio, 1921. This was another work of which Kodály strongly approved and no wonder, given its composer was only 18 though its genesis apparently dated back to when he was 15. Private composition lessons were duly forthcoming. There are shafts of humour in the piece and much thematic variety given that he was working on a large canvas – the Trio lasts 28-minutes, dwarfing the other works in the disc. The longest movement is the finale, full of sizzling energy. My only complaint is that this ambitiously constructed work is rather too long for its material but there’s no doubting the young violinist’s ambition.
Whether you decide to plump for an all-Hermann disc containing the String Trio or a mixed-recital featuring Frid’s Trio, the Hague String Trio play these works outstandingly well, and include those two première recordings. The booklet documentation is first class, as is the recording in Westvest90, Schiedam.
Jonathan Woolf
Buying this recording via the link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free
