Glad Bartok was mentioned. Bartok and his colleague Zoltan Kodaly were inveterate collectors and scholars of central European folk music: they collected and notated nearly 14.000 songs from, among other places, Hungary, Roumania and Transylvania. They discovered that there was a gulf between authentic folk song, usually modal, and folk music overlaid by popular European dance idioms spiced with flamboyant Romani ornamentation -- called verbunkos music. Kodaly wrote the Dances of Galánta, which is verbunkos-derived, and its companion piece, the Marosszék Dances, which employs authentic folk tunes. Kodaly also wrote Variations on a Hungarian folksong, "The Peacock.". Kodaly may have been a lot less rhythmically and harmonically edgy than was Bartok, but the pieces are great fun nonetheless. Also worth a listen are Leos Janacek's Lachian Dances (Czech) and Georges Enescu's second Roumanian Rhapsody. Much of Liszt's, Dvorak's and Brahms' Rhapsodies and Enescu's first Roumanian Rhapsody are less purely folk in origin and are based more on the verbunkos-type of synthesis of folk and popular dance tunes with other influences.

michael