Local Objects

Zsófia Boros

Local Objects
Release date: 07.10.2016 ECM 2498
CD18,90 €add to cart
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The second album from the Hungarian-born Vienna-based guitarist finds her embracing a broad scope of music, broader even than on her outstanding debut En otra parte. This time the range extends from contemporary composition to jazz etude via music from Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Azerbaijan – all embraced with imagination and creative flair. Pieces played here by Zsófia Boros include Egberto Gismonti’s challenging “Celebração de Núpcias” (made famous on Dança das cabeças), Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s “Fantasie”, Al Di Meola’s “Vertigo Shadow”, and Carlo Domeniconi’s Turkish-influenced “Koyunbaba”. These Local Objects are rendered universal by Boros’s subtle and sensitive playing in an album recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo in November 2015 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Auf ihrem zweiten Album befasst sich die in Ungarn geborene und in Wien lebende Gitarristin mit einem noch breiteren musikalischen Spektrum als auf ihrem herausragenden und stilistisch schon vielfältigen Debüt En otra parte. Diesmal spannt sich der Bogen von zeitgenössischer Komposition über Musik aus Brasilien, Argentinien, Italien und Aserbeidschan bis zu Jazz-Verwandtem – alles mit Fantasie und kreativem Flair interpretiert.
Unter den hier von Boros gespielten Stücken sind Egberto Gismontis anspruchsvolles “Celebração de Núpcias” (bekannt geworden auf dem Album Dança das cabeças), Franghiz Ali-Zadehs “Fantasie”, Al Di Meolas “Vertigo Shadow” und Carlo Domeniconis  von der türkischen Musik beeinflusstes “Koyunbaba”. Diese Local Objects gewinnen durch Boros‘ subtiles und sensibles Spiel eine universelle Qualität.
Das Album wurde im November 2015 im Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano aufgenommen und von Manfred Eicher produziert.
Featured Artists Recorded

November 2015, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano

Original Release Date

07.10.2016

  • 1Nocturne
    (Mathias Duplessy)    04:41
  • 2Celebração de Núpcias
    (Egberto Gismonti)    03:11
  • Koyunbaba op.19
    (Carlo Domeniconi)
  • 3I Moderato02:56
  • 4II Mosso01:36
  • 5III Cantabile03:31
  • 6IV Presto03:46
  • 7Milonga
    (Jorge Cardoso)    04:29
  • 8Vertigo Shadow
    (Al Di Meola)    03:12
  • 9Fantasie
    (Franghiz Ali Zadeh)    08:41
  • 10Inspiração
    (Anibal Augusto Sardinha)    02:59
  • 11Gothenburg
    (Alex Pinter, Stephan Dickbauer)    02:16
Her subtle touch on the acoustic guitar seduces the listener. The guitar, already a very personal instrument, never sounded so intimate or beautiful. She plays with a quiet passion and clearly loves the music she chooses.  She has a distinct way of phrasing.  You can detect that she plays it all with unbounded pleasure. On this new recording, the artist, who is now based in Vienna, plays repertoire from French, Italian, Argentine, Brazilian, Austrian, and Azerbaijani composers. As on the first record, her touch on this new album is exquisite, and the pristine quality of ECM’s recording makes you feel like she is giving a house concert in your living room.
Tom Schnabel, KCRW Rhythm Planet
 
Die Boros ist eine Meisterin der dynamischen Schattierung, sie kann sich ganz in ihr Instrument zurückziehen, die angeschlagenen Töne fast  in den Bereich des Unhörbaren absenken, um sie dann aufwallend erklingen zu lassen. Sie spielt klug mit Leerräumen, kultiviert die Pause als nachklingenden Raum.
Tilman Urbach, Stereo
 
La guitariste hongroise ne s’y embarrasse pas d’étiquettes, mettant son jeu aussi propre que chaleureux au service de compositeurs contemporains, pour la plupart tentés par la note bleue. Le tout nimbé d’une mélancolie assez classieuse pour que cette guitare-là porte bien son nom.
TR, La Liberté
 
Vienna-based Hungarian guitarist Zsófia Boros brings remarkable interpretive clarity and a uniquely unifying touch to a diverse collection of pieces in her second recording for ECM, Local Objects. Phrasing in distinct ways while staying faithful to the spirit of the music, she
offers new perspectives on standards of the concert repertoire such as Carlo Domeniconi’s “Koyunbaba” and Jose Cardoso’s “Milonga”, differently flavours Egberto Gismonti’s harmonically-inventive “Celebração de Núpcias”), and reveals a highly observant musical eye in the choice of contemporary guitar pieces  such as Mathias Duplessy’s “Nocturne”,  Alex Pinter’s “Gothenburg”, and the epic “Fantasie” by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh.
Gismonti’s “Celebração de Núpcias” appeared on the 1976 recording Dança das Cabeças (a duo with late percussionist Nana Vasconçelos), the Brazilian master’s first ECM album. Zsófia’s version highlights the trance-like qualities of Gismonti’s original: “I couldn’t stop playing it,” she says. “I just wanted to hear those harmonies.”
On “Milonga" by Argentinian Jorge Cardoso and Brazilian Anibal Augusto Sardinha (Garoto)’s exquisite, lyrical “Inspiração”, Boros adds introductions of her own. On the latter, harmonics suggest glass stars over a distant shore, before the melody arrives. “Like a film director, you focus on a small thing and it creates a feeling before you know what the film is about. Water droplets, droplets on a flower, a flower garden … I don’t want to go straight into the room where the story takes place, I want to go first into the garden, to see the flowers.”
 
With Italian composer Domeniconi’s four-part “Koyunbaba op. 19”,  about a thirteenth century hermit who lived in a cove by the Aegean Sea, Boros puts each of the various sections and elements of the piece in an explicit light, creating an enlarged vision of the whole. After climactic chords, soft paper placed on the guitar strings helps produce the muffled, quasi-sordino passage that opens Zsofia’s building rendition of the “volcanic” presto, as she describes it, played fast but light.
 
Alongside the “Koyunbaba”, the album’s second extended offering is “Fantasie” by Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, an open-ended instrumental and compositional showpiece (in the positive sense of the term). Inside its complexity, Zsófia says her challenge was to “find the story”.“I need to make a piece my own for it to be authentic. And I can only be authentic if I’m honest, honest if I’m free.”
 
Short pieces by composer-instrumentalists bookend the album. The opening “Nocturne” by Frenchman Mathias Duplessy evokes, if unconsciously perhaps, the nocturne in its original Italian denomination describing a type of serenade. “I can hear it a thousand times and it still touches me,” she says.
 
“Gothenburg”, by Austrian guitarist Alex Pinter, is about the end of a relationship. “Everybody knows how when a relationship ends, you have all these questions,” says Zsofia, for whom Pinter is a friend. She plays his lament liberally, empathetically, as an “object of local insight” to borrow from the Wallace Stevens poem that lends its title to this recording and is published in the CD booklet.
YEAR DATE VENUE LOCATION
2024 October 27 Triskel Christchurch Cork, Ireland
2024 November 22 De Bijloke Gent, Belgium
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