An Introduction to the Music of Zsolt Durkó

Like most present-day Hungarian composers, Zsolt Durkó is scarcely known even as a name in this country, so for a start it will help to place him in a wider context. He was born in 1934, an exact contemporary of Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, and a near contemporary of Maw, Williamson, Bennett, Crosse and Goehr—a member, in other words, of that gifted generation whose formative years were post-war, and who now stand at the very centre of new music in the sixties. British composers have had their obstacles to surmount. In Hungary politics and music history have posed obvious problems. But in the music which is beginning to percolate into Britain, whether, by Bozay, Petrovics, Hidas or Durkó, they are seemingly mastered, and Durkó's work at any rate pays lip-service neither to ideology nor to the two great figures of twentieth-century Hungarian music, Bartók and Kodály.