Today is the birthday of Zoltan Kodály, the Hungarian composer and music educator. His education technique (the Kodály Method) is popular around the world today and may be his greatest legacy.
That's too bad, because his music is particularly good. Like other turn of the century composers like Edvard Grieg and Ralph Vaughan Williams, be made a study of the folk music of his native land. Kodály was a pioneer of musical recordings, using phonographs to gather folk music from as early as 1905.
Today's selection represents him at the apex of his late-romantic era interpretive powers from a surprisingly late date (immediately before World War II).