Here's a little tour of Eastern European nationalist thinking between the time of the grand Romantic idiom and the modern, abstract ethnomusicological way of thinking about folk music. None of these works is well known, and a lesser pianist than Britain's
Nicola Meecham would have closed out the program with
Bartók for maximum audience appeal. But
Meecham is just right to end with
Kodály's Seven Pieces, Op. 11, which focus the program more clearly and connect it to
Debussy, whose experimentation with scales and modes allowed all three of these composers to accomplish the things they did.
George Enescu and Leos Janácek use the qualities of their national music (Romanian, specifically Moldavian in
Enescu's case, and Czech, specifically Moravian in Janácek's) in an almost psychological way, to suggest flashes of troubled memory.
Meecham combines an intelligent program with a superb performance that is alert to the threads of suppressed emotion in the Janácek work without stinting on the sheer Lisztian power in parts of the
Kodály. Anthony Burton's notes (in English only), linking all these impulses to the wider question of nationality in the waning days of the Habsburg empire, are another attraction. Highly recommended.