condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Four composers, four approaches to the central question of Hungarian chamber music in the early 1970s: how to write within the post-Bartók inheritance without being crushed by it, and how to engage with the European avant-garde techniques that had arrived through Darmstadt and Warsaw without losing what is specifically Hungarian in the compositional instinct.

Sándor Szokolay, best known for his opera Vérnász (Blood Wedding), brings the theatrical intensity of his vocal writing to the chamber context - his music here showing the eclectic language that drew on Stravinsky, Britten, and folk inflection simultaneously. László Dubrovay, recently returned from study with Stockhausen and Rumpert in West Germany, contributes work that shows the electronic music training beginning to inflect his acoustic writing - the timbral effects and noise elements that his institutional experience had opened up. Lajos Papp, who had taught himself the Second Viennese School from study of the scores alone, brings a more chromatic and searching serial language. Pál Károlyi completes the quartet with writing that moves between folk-rooted melodic gesture and more abstract formal thinking.

The Hungaroton Contemporary Hungarian Music series documented these generational positions with a fidelity that no private initiative could have sustained under the conditions of the time. This LP is part of that archive. Original pressing.