Kodály Comes to SFSymphony+ Chamber Music

Victor Romasevich and Jill Rachuy Brindel playing Kodály’s Opus 7 duo (screen short courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

The latest installment in the Chamber Music Series of videos streamed by SFSymphony+ was added this past Thursday. Readers may recall that the last such video discussed on this site was a duo performance by San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians Amos Yang on cello and Charles Chandler on bass. The new video also presents a duo performance with a cellist, this time Jill Rachuy Brindel. On this video, however, the cello is coupled with the higher-register violin, played by Victor Romasevich.

The duo being performed was Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 7, structured in three movements. Those of my generation that know this music at all probably know it because of the recording made by two of RCA Victor’s top-notch talents in the decades following the end of World War II, violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, both living comfortably in Southern California and making recordings at the RCA Studios in Hollywood. Recognizing that most of the record-buying classical music lovers probably knew nothing about Kodály, RCA decided to package it on a long-playing record shared with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 8 serenade for string trio in D major. Mind you, Opus 8 was not particularly familiar either; but record buyers would usually go for Beethoven, even when they were unfamiliar with the music itself.

Kodály’s duo was composed in 1914, about a decade after his pioneering ethnomusicological research with Béla Bartók. It is not difficult to detect folk influences among the themes that populate the three movements of the duo. However, there is also a solid command of the scope of string technique, resulting in a generous share of virtuoso passages, often passed from one instrument to the other. In that context the camera work for this video is top-notch when it comes to directing the viewer to these themes as they unfold and develop. That sensitivity to content can be easily mined from the performance because the performers themselves give a clear account of both the exposition and the development of the thematic material.

This music will probably be familiar to a relatively small number of listeners, but those having a “first encounter” experience are likely to be readily drawn into the entire thematic landscape that Kodály develops over the course of his score.