Dohnányi: Ruralia Hungarica / Humoreskenin Form einer Suite

Valentina Toth: "Although my parents had no musical education, they taught me to love Bartók and Kodály. I appreciated their music at a young age, and discovered Dohnányi's work much later by chance. It was romantic, virtuosic, and incredibly well written for the instrument. What more could a concert pianist ask for? And although he just seems much less typically Hungarian than Bartók, many aspects of his country are reflected in his music. I remember this: when I was working on the Ruralia hungarica, my father knew many of the melodies from songs he had learned as a boy." As a composer, Dohnányi, whose work focuses primarily on piano music, always remained a musician rooted in 19th-century Romanticism at heart. He wrote Ruralia hungarica in 1923, giving the piece a truly Hungarian appeal by incorporating a wide range of folk melodies into all movements. The Humoresques Op. 17, written in 1907, date from the time he was teaching in Berlin. They are fundamentally Romantic in nature and occasionally recall Brahms's piano music. As the name suggests, they are more or less lighthearted character pieces in which he invokes 18th century musical forms.