Guide to Contemporary Hungarian Composers

Extract

PÁL KADOSA (1905) represents the German tradition among his contemporaries, and in this regard he might be said to continue the course indicated by Weiner and Jemnitz. But whereas Weiner's music is anchored in the romantics and Jemnitz's in the expressionist school of Reger and Schoenberg, Kadosa's model was the music of the young German post-First-World-War school, of which Hindemith was the leading figure. Another factor contributing a great deal to the formation of his idiom was his being a practical musician, a pianist of considerable gifts. These two considerations, viz. Hindemith and the piano, inevitably dominate the instrumental character of his music as a whole. What distinguishes his work from that of the German father-figure is the strong influence of Hungarian folk-music in the rhythmic element of his music. It came via Bartók, since Kadosa did not take active part in folk-music-collecting. His mature personal style is predominantly contrapuntal, terse and detached to the point of austerity; and since he thinks in patterns of motivic figurations, it possesses marked rhythmic and dynamic power. The baroque revival of the nineteen-twenties and 'thirties—whose German version was associated with an impersonal “New Objectivity”—is reflected in his series of concertos—including four for the piano, two for the violin, one for the viola, and one for string-quartet and orchestra—precise, often epigrammatic in utterance, showing a kind of restrained and diffident lyricism that is so typical of Kadosa, and conceived in terms of brilliantly effective instrumental writing.