Ryedale District Council supports the Ryedale Festival.

Thursday 20th September

Háry János at the Riding School, Hovingham Hall, North Yorkshire, July 17th 2009.

Kodály's Háry János is a popular orchestral piece, but the opera from which he took the six-movement suite has never established itself outside Hungary, and it was characteristically bold of the Ryedale Festival to choose it for its annual opera, staged in the round.  The festival, whose fortnight of concerts, lectures and music-theatre events draws local inhabitants and visitors in large numbers to its North Yorkshire churches, art centres, village halls and stately homes, had a Hungarian theme this year, with a focus on Haydn and the Hungarian and gypsy influences on his music.

For all its piquancy and charm, Háry János is not an easy work for a westerner to grasp.  It springs from its country's long oppression by foreign powers, yet faces that history with disconcerting high spirits and self-mockery. Kodály composed it in 1926, when Hungary was bleeding from the Treaty of Trianon, which sliced off chunks of its territory and displaced thousands of its people.  Yet it is, in the words of János Garay, on whose poem the libretto is based, a 'comic epic'; the immemorial injustice that inspires it is relieved in laughter and an irony largely free from bitterness. Hungary cannot change its horrendous past - but it can still dream.

To Kodály (quoted by John Warrack, the festival's president, in a talk given before the opera), János the archetypal Magyar peasant is 'the personification of the Hungarian story-telling imagination'. He is no mere Münchhausen. The fantastic exploits of which he boasts and which demonstrate his innate superiority to all who cross his path - Napoleon, the Russian frontier guard, the Austrian emperor and his court - 'may never have happened, but he has experienced [them] in spirit, so [they are] more real than reality'.

In the same spirit, Kodály celebrates his country not portentously but with the lightest touch, in an episodic Singspiel whose music comes from the people.  Most of the melodies are Hungarian folk songs, collected by him on his travels (with Bartók) and orchestrated with a mastery that never overlays their native zest and snap -the textures clean as a whistle, the colours (flute or clarinet skirling hauntingly against the shimmer of cimbalom, ringing trumpets, saxophone moaning for the humiliated Napoleon) a constant delight.

They were well realized, in a skilfully reduced chamber version, by the King's Camerata (made up of musicians from Opera North) under the festival's artistic director, Justin Doyle.  Joe Austin's English translation and necessarily simple staging of the work caught something of both its humour and its wistfulness. Riccardo Simonetti's János and Clare McCaldin as Örzse, János's sweetheart, were the stars of the lively cast.

An equally vital Ryedale tradition is the annual Community Opera devised and organized by Em Whitfield Brooks and the composer Tim Brooks, involving more than 100 Yorkshire schoolchildren and adults. This year's was an adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman, given in the nave of St Peter's Church, Norton, with the rapt, expertly drilled cast, the band playing Brooks's tuneful, rather Brittenish music in the south aisle, and the packed audience hemming in the performers, united in a communal dramatic action as enthralling as any I have experienced in a long time.

David Cairns
Opera, October 2009