Around 1930, Béla Bartók began a long-held desire: a multi-volume cantata cycle based on Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak folk texts. With this cycle, Bartók wanted to express his idea of the close connections that exist between folk cultures of different peoples in Central and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, it remained only with the first movement, the Cantata Profana. Bartók based this piece on
… an old Romanian folk poem, in which the nine sons of a hunter suddenly turn into deer. Although Bartók eventually had the piece published in Hungarian, among his sketches is an early version in Romanian. This recording features that Romanian primal version, adapted for performance by choral conductor Cornel Groza. The Cantata Profana is preceded, how appropriate, by Bartók's Dances from Transylvania (an orchestration of his Sonatine for Piano). The Transylvania Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra dives deep into its own bicultural history with these pieces. Both ensembles complete the album with two pieces by Kodály related to the city of Budapest. The Budavári Te Deum underscored the liberation of the city of Buda from Turkish rule in 1686. Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus celebrated the 50th anniversary of the city of Budapest, a contraction of the cities of Buda and Pest, in 1923 (JWVR).more
