Banat

Founded and directed by the Franco-Hungarian conductor Bruno Kele-Baujard, the Ensemble Zene has made a specialty of daring and off-the-beaten path programs. Its evocative name - "zene" is the Hungarian word for "music" - inclines it towards the Magyar-speaking repertoire, and it is therefore quite natural that it devotes its second recording to the a cappella works of Bartók, Kodály and Ligeti, whose centenary is being celebrated in 2023.

Another excellent Sublime Frequencies collection of Omar Souleyman's work, these very modern electronic Arabic folk songs were recorded live.

Only one year and a half after their first meeting in Budapest in early 1905, Bartók and Kodály were eager to jointly publish their first settings of Hungarian folk songs. In their foreword to the volume Magyar népdalok (Hungarian Folk Songs), they declare their goal thus: “…to get the general public to know and appreciate folk songs.”

Andrea Rost gained recognition in the 1990s as one of the world's leading new lyric sopranos. Her family was not especially musical, but, she says, she was always singing. She copied what she heard on the radio and joined the school chorus. She was 16 when she first attended the opera, at the Budapest Opera House. The fare was Donizetti's Don Pasquale. She was entranced by the blend of music, story, and dramatic staging and said, "Oh my God, I have to do this." She studied voice, then entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Her teacher was Professor Zsolt Bende.