Zoltan Kodaly
30 candidates will face the jury of the Kodaly Conducting Competition starting August 21 in Debrecen, Hungary. This jury, chaired by Jorma Panula and including Janos Acs, Peter Broadbent, Remy Franck, Zsolt Hamar, Oksana Madarash, Dániel Somogyi-Tóth, will evaluate the work of one female conductor and 29 male conductors. Those come from Australia, Austria, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, UK, USA.
The finalists will have to conduct Zoltan Kodaly’s choir work Psalmus Hungaricus, a beautiful but all too seldom heard composition which testifies to Kodaly’s melodic imagination, the love for his country and evokes through the biblical text the adversity he himself often had to face in his work. The not so many recordings of this work show the various interpretative possibilities, between the between the angular and edgy version of Georg Solti, the opulent recording of Charles Mackerras, the richly diversifying, orchestrally wonderfully transparent version of Ivan Fischer, the dramatically intense declamatory recording of Ferenc Fricsay and the most lyrical and directly operatic version of Herbert von Karajan.
