Zsófia Boros - 2016 - Local Objects

CD release on ECM, cat.-no. ECM 2498, release date: 3.10.2016
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. (Source: ECM Records URL: https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1471957637/local-objects-zsofia-boros-zsofia-boros, 5.12.2016)
=Tracks=
# Nocturne (Mathias Duplessy) 04:41
# Celebrão de Núpcias (Egberto Gismonti) 03:11
# Carlo Domenico - Koyunbaba op. 19, I Moderato 02:56
# Carlo Domenico - Koyunbaba op. 19, II Mosso 01:36
# Carlo Domenico - Koyunbaba op. 19, III Cantabile 03:31
# Carlo Domenico - Koyunbaba op. 19, IV Presto 03:46
# Milonga (Jorge Cardoso) 04:29
# Vertigo Shadow (Al Di Meola) 03:12
# Fantasie (Franghiz Ali Zadeh) 08:41
# Inspiração (Anibal Augusto Sardinha) 02:59
# Gothenburg (Alex Pinter, Stephan Dickbauer) 02:16
=Background=
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 Zsófia ’s building rendition of the “volcanic” presto, as she describes it, played fast but light.
 
Another extended offering on the album 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 Zsófia , 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.
 
Local Objects was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in November 2015, and was produced by Manfred Eicher.
(Source: ECM Records URL: https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1471957637/local-objects-zsofia-boros-zsofia-boros, 5.12.2016)
=References=