Fred Varga

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy memories feel more or less the same; but the unhappy times are experienced differently by each one of us. We’ve all had some really tough weeks, which sometimes turned into months, and (with a bit of bad luck) into years… I like to think that “off” years help us grow and prepare for the beautiful things that will undoubtedly come our way (I am an optimist at heart), but living through dark times is a complicated process.

While these recordings by the Hungarian Quartet contain perfectly acceptable performances and adequately idiomatic interpretations of Schubert's later chamber music for string quartet and quintet, they contain nothing more than that. In the late '50s and early '60s, the Hungarian Quartet was a widely respected group playing in the central European tradition of plumy intonation, sugary sonorities, sometimes scrappy ensemble, and often sentimental interpretations.

“This very special period made me think and put a lot of things into perspective. I said to myself, finished the superfluous, if this is to be my last album, I do not want to put anything unnecessary, the watchword is therefore: Straight to the essential! Hence the title of this album ”.

Double CD celebrating 25 first years of Fred Chapellier's career. One CD made of studio recordings including one unreleased track and one CD made of live recordings including one unreleased track. CD cover from illustrator Carlos Olmo.

Winner of the 2016 Prix Django Reinhardt from the Académie du Jazz and nominated for the Victoires de la Musique Jazz award in 2018, the pianist Fred Nardin, who plays with, among others, the Amazing Keystone Big Band and Cécile McLorin Salvant, is one of the great revelations of French Jazz in recent years. The trio’s new album, released in March 2019 on the label Naïve, with Or Bareket and Leon Parker, is proof that high-quality jazz can reach a wide audience, from simple amateurs to the most expert connoisseurs.

Very few musical compositions truly deserve that overworked adjective “unique,” but it accurately applies to William Walton’s Façade.”] Or perhaps we should call this mostly-early work Façades, as it is recorded here in three parts: “Façade – An Entertainment” (21 pieces dating from 1922); “Façade 2 – A Further Entertainment” (8 more pieces; 1978-79); and the four pieces of “Façade: Additional Numbers” (1922, 1977).