Barbara Vine Three

This extravagant six-CD set documents the astonishing life span of the first pop independent label in the U.K., Immediate Records. Founded in 1965, Immediate flipped, flopped, and staggered its own way, competing against unhip American labels like EMI and Decca until late 1969. The label, and the documentary CD set, showcases in particular the Small Faces, who enjoyed a brief U.K. number one hit, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake. More familiar to American listeners will no doubt be the three-chord sock-hop favorite "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, and a number of covers of familiar American folk-rock hits are present as well. The esoteric collector will appreciate inclusions by such café balladeers as the Poets and Les Fleurs-de-Lis, also signed by Immediate before the advent of the swinging London sound, marked by the Rolling Stones revolution and other mod developers influencing the pants off the tiniest studio cover bands. Immediate also helped sculpt the success of anguished bellower Chris Farlowe, soon to be joined by the similarly throaty vibrato of PP Arnold and, of course, manager/producer Andrew Oldham's best toss of the dice, the Small Faces, whom he ripped away from Decca. By the fourth disc, you are, in fact, in the throes of swinging London, featuring Farlowe's heart-stopping "Yesterday's Papers" and Arnold's "The First Cut Is the Deepest," written by the much-in-demand Cat Stevens. Most of the music is minimal and often out of tune, production at an early-time low, replete with tinny echoes and accidental outtake moments.

The Hungarian pianist Balázs Sozkolay was born in Budapest 1961, the son of a mother who is a pianist and a father who is a composer and professor at the Ferenc Liszt Academy. He started learning the piano when he was five and in 1970 entered the preparatory class of the Budapest Music Academy, where he completed his studies with Pál Kadosa and Zoltán Kocsis in 1983 .He later spent two years at the Academy of Music in Munich, with a West German government scholarship. Balázs Szokolay made an early international appearance with Péter Nagy at the Salzburg Interforum in 1979, and in 1983 substituted for Nikita Magaloff in Belgrade in a performance of the Piano Concerto No.1 of Brahms. He is now a soloist with the Hungarian State Orchestra and has given concerts in a number of countries abroad, including Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In September, 1987, he made his recital début at the Royal Festival Hall in London.