Kodaly: Hary Janos Suite – Kertesz

There’s a particular smell to old Kingsway Hall recordings, or so I’ve always imagined — plaster dust and cold radiators, London fog seeping in under the door. You can practically hear it on this Decca reissue of Kertész conducting Kodály with the LSO, made in 1964 and sounding, frankly, better than most things that were made last year.

Kodály has never had quite the international standing he deserves, and I’ve spent forty years wondering why. Perhaps because Háry János wears its folk allegiances so openly — that famous orchestral “Sneeze” that opens the suite is a joke, essentially, a peasant tall tale rendered in brass and percussion, and audiences trained on Brahms and Mahler sometimes don’t know what to do with a composer willing to be that plainly entertaining. Kertész knew exactly what to do with it. He had Hungarian folk music in his blood the way Kodály himself absorbed it, tramping around villages with Bartók and a primitive album machine before the First World War, harvesting melodies that were already vanishing.

The cimbalom entrance near the start of the suite gets exactly the right amount of spotlight here — present, glinting, but not shoved at the microphone the way some later, more garish recordings manage it. You hear it as Kodály intended: an exotic color folded into the orchestral fabric, not a party trick. And when the “Song” movement winds down into that hushed close — the drowsy tremolo, the sense of a story dissolving into sleep — Kertész holds the tempo back just enough to make the silence afterward feel earned. That’s not something you can fake with a metronome.

Textually, the sound is vintage Decca: broad, warm, with real depth of field between the strings and the woodwinds sitting back in the picture. There’s a small scuffed patch in the bass at the very opening of Háry János — a flake of tape, a scored groove, something — but it passes in a second and you’d have to be listening with unusual suspicion to mind it. The hiss is there too, because it’s 1964, but it recedes behind the playing almost immediately. I’ll take honest analogue hiss over the scrubbed, vacuumed silence of some digital remasterings that suck the room right out of the sound.

Dances of Galánta gets an interpretation that leans toward warmth rather than incision — Kertész lets the LSO breathe, lets the rubato stretch a little further than a purist might want, and somehow it still sounds idiomatic rather than indulgent. That’s the real trick with this music: play it too correctly and it turns into wallpaper; play it too loosely and it curdles into kitsch. Kertész finds the Hungarian lilt without turning it into a caricature of gypsy fiddling, and the LSO — a London orchestra, mind, not a Budapest one — follow him into it with a suppleness that still surprises me on repeated hearings.

The Peacock Variations is the real discovery for anyone coming to this disc fresh. It’s a big, discursive piece built on the old Hungarian folk tune “Fly, Peacock, Fly,” and it rewards patience — the harp writing around the fourteen-minute mark is exquisite, subtly balanced against the strings rather than spotlit, and the flute writing that follows a few minutes later has an almost Delian glow to it, pastoral and slightly melancholic. My one complaint, and it’s not small: the reissue doesn’t index the variations separately, so navigating the piece means either sitting through the whole arc or guessing at timings. Dorati’s older Philharmonia Hungarica version bands each variation individually, which matters if you’re trying to teach the piece or just find your way back to a favorite passage.

Speaking of Dorati — I went back to those Philharmonia Hungarica recordings after living with this Kertész disc for a week, half expecting to prefer their greater documentary authenticity, all those Hungarian players presumably closer to the source. Instead I found the sound close and a little congested, the orchestral image slightly fuzzy at the edges compared with the crisper, more spacious Decca engineering Kertész got a decade earlier. Less hiss, yes. But less air, less presence, less of that sense of a real hall around real instruments.

Kertész died young — drowned off the coast of Israel in 1973, only forty-three, in the middle of what should have been a much longer career — and recordings like this one are a reminder of how much was lost with him. He had an unforced sympathy for this repertoire that nobody since has quite matched, Solti included. This disc, going for next to nothing these days, is as good an introduction to Kodály’s orchestral music as exists on record. Get it before someone realizes what they’re charging for it.