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Kodály: Sonata for Solo Cello - Truls Mørk

Kodály: Sonata for Solo Cello - Truls Mørk

2L  2L-177

Stereo  (34 minutes)

Classical - Instrumental


Zoltán Kodály: Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8

Truls Mørk (cello)


The year 1915 marked a tectonic shift in the history of the cello. When Zoltán Kodály completed his Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, he did not merely write a piece of music; he excavated a new sonic language from the Hungarian soil. The sonata is widely regarded as the most significant work for unaccompanied cello since Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites. It is celebrated for its daunting virtuosity, expanding the instrument's technical and expressive boundaries through a fusion of Hungarian folk music and modern 20th-century influences. The piece requires the cellist to tune the two lowest strings (G and C) down a half-step to F# and B. This adjustment deepens the instrument's resonance and facilitates the work's primary tonality of B minor.

Kodály, who spent years traversing the countryside with Béla Bartók to document peasant songs, infused this sonata with the raw source of Hungarian folk music. It is a work that breathes with the irregular rhythms of the Hungarian language and the mournful sighs of the tárogató. It utilizes advanced techniques such as extensive thumb position, complex harmonics, rapid string crossings, and simultaneous pizzicato and arco. Although written in 1915, its first performance was delayed by World War I until May 7, 1918, in Budapest by cellist Jenö Kerpely. The work was famously championed by Hungarian cellist János Starker, whose recordings and edited editions helped establish it as a staple of the professional cello repertoire.

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Recording date: September 2016
Location: Jar Church, Norway