Too Budapest

So what if Liszt spent most of his life in France and Germany and never learned to speak Hungarian? The music of the Magyars' fiery favorite son played by a hot-blooded local boy is an irresistible combination. Even the delightful Dohnanyi filler (variations on ''Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star'') doesn't really douse the flames. Put it in the CD player and let 'er rip! Just be sure to remove all flammable vestments first. (Entertainment Weekly)

Neither too nationalist nor too internationalist, this 1995 recording of Béla Bartók's two violin concertos featuring Thomas Zehetmair with Ivan Fischer leading the Budapest Festival Orchestra is just right. Austrian-born Zehetmair has a fabulous technique, a warm but focused tone, and lively sense of rhythm, all of which make him an ideal Bartók player. His interpretations are less about showing off then about digging in, and his performances are more about the music than they are about the musician. Hungarian conductor Fischer and his Hungarian orchestra are not only up for the music in a technical sense, they are also down with the music in an emotional sense, and their accompaniments ground Zehetmair's coolly flamboyant performances. Captured in white-hot sound that is almost too vivid for its own good, these performances deserve to stand among the finest ever recorded.

First there was rhythm - pulsing, driving, primal rhythm. And a new word in musical terminology: Barbaro. As with sticks on skins, so with hammers on strings. The piano as one of the percussion family, the piano among the percussion family. The first and second concertos were written to be performed that way. But the rhythm had shape and direction, myriad accents, myriad subtleties. An informed primitivism. A Baroque primitivism. Then came the folkloric inflections chipped from the music of time: the crude and misshapen suddenly finding a singing voice. Like the simple melody - perhaps a childhood recollection - that emerges from the dogged rhythm of the First Concerto's second movement. András Schiff plays it like a defining moment - the piano reinvented as a singing instrument. His "parlando" (conversational) style is very much in Bartók's own image. But it's the balance here between the honed and unhoned, the brawn and beauty, the elegance and wit of this astonishing music that make these readings special.

A countryman of Bela Bartók and a sometime teacher to both György Ligeti and György Kurtág, Sándor Veress emigrated to Switzerland from what was then part of Hungary in 1949. Settling in Bern, he collected various prizes and teaching posts while working in relative obscurity on who knows how many pieces–most of which have been unavailable. This collection is made up of a pithy trio of compositions dated 1938 (Six Csárdás), 1951 (Hommage à Paul Klee), and 1952 (Concerto for Piano, Strings, and Percussion), and they show what a deftly melodic force Veress was. He's thrilled by blustery string wafts, especially in the concerto, where the percussion adds drama and immediacy. But he also favors sweetly chipper string formations, which surprise the ear during the homage to Klee, especially given the dissonances fostered early on by the twin pianos. The closing piano miniatures of Six Csárdás are counterpoint-rich gems, played with sharp precision by András Schiff.

Fans of Gustav Mahler's joyous Symphony No. 4 in G major will relish this buoyant performance by Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, featuring soprano Miah Persson, for it is wholly in keeping with the light tone and merry spirit of the score and is as delightful as any other recording on the market.

The project grew out of the musical acquaintance of the Hungarian double bass player Mátyás Szandai and the French violinist Mathias Lévy. After playing together in the Mathias Lévy Quartet, they decided to set up a project dedicated to Béla Bartók and invite to this the renowned Hungarian cimbalom player Miklós Lukács, a long-time companion of Mátyás Szandai. With the support of the Budapest Music Center, they made their first creative residency in January 2016. The debut concert of the trio took place on 27 May at the Hungarian Institute in Paris, followed by the recording sessions of the album at BMC and a full house concert at the Opus in January last year and further concerts in France during 2017.

This compilation is 3 plus hours of stuff (42 tracks), and all in good quality, chosen from his ECM career back to the mid-70s. I would call it the "highly accessible Jarrett" as it does not include any of the thorniest stuff from the solo concerts. It's mostly the Trio, the European quartet, and some encore "blues" excerpts from the solo concerts.

This compilation is 3 plus hours of stuff (42 tracks), and all in good quality, chosen from his ECM career back to the mid-70s. I would call it the "highly accessible Jarrett" as it does not include any of the thorniest stuff from the solo concerts. It's mostly the Trio, the European quartet, and some encore "blues" excerpts from the solo concerts.

This compilation is 3 plus hours of stuff (42 tracks), and all in good quality, chosen from his ECM career back to the mid-70s. I would call it the "highly accessible Jarrett" as it does not include any of the thorniest stuff from the solo concerts. It's mostly the Trio, the European quartet, and some encore "blues" excerpts from the solo concerts.

Kollar Attila is the flautist/flutist for Hungarian group Solaris. He released a new album which is a compilation of his work as a solo artist and also with Solaris. It is called "Progrock '55" and also contains seven previously unreleased tunes.
Kollar Attila: "This compilation was created from those songs where the author was me or I was one of the authors of these songs. It wasn’t so easy to chose 16 compositions from our last 36 years, because a lot of song are very close to my heart! But I know there are some real milestones during my musical career. The first five compositions of the album are definitly new songs or new recordings, which previously were not published…