Farkas

This twelfth release in the Toccata Classics exploration of the music of Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) once again puts his chamber music with flute in the spotlight – here with an oboe chaser. As with previous albums in this series, the music highlights the characteristics that make Farkas’ music so appealing: catchy tunes, transparent textures, buoyant rhythms, a fondness for Baroque forms and a taste for the folk-music of his native Hungary that marks him out as a true successor to Bartók and Kodály. The works in this recording are almost all reworkings – by Farkas or the two soloists here – of music first written for different forces and now taking on a new lease of life.

Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) was one of the longest-lived members of the wave of Hungarian nationalist composers which began with the rise of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. A student of Ottorino Respighi in Rome, Farkas blended Respighi’s Latin melodiousness with the Magyar folk-heritage that Bartók and Kodály had made the central element of Hungarian music. His Old Hungarian Dances of the 17th Century have become a staple of the wind-quintet repertoire; the other five works on this disk display the same irrepressible joie de vivre.