Hyperion Records

Weiner took the task of providing educational music for young players very seriously, and the Húsz könnyü kis darab (‘Twenty easy little pieces’, subtitled ‘Hungarian nursery rhymes and folk songs’) is heard here in a transcription for violin and piano by Tibor Fülep (who re-ordered Weiner’s original Op 27 publication and dropped the composer’s descriptive titles for each miniature). As a cycle it ranks with Bartók’s Hungarian folksongs and For children. In these tiny pieces—some of them only a few seconds long—Weiner precisely and often wittily fixes the character of the various songs with a minimum of fuss and not a single wasted note. Nevertheless, he is able—as in the very slightly longer Andante, No 18—to give them full expressive weight.

from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2009