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.

The Gabor Varga Jazz Trio’s release of Cool Jazz in 2020 was one of that year’s biggest events on NativeDSD. With Cool Jazz going on to become a 2020 Album of the Year award winner. And a frequent entry on the NativeDSD Top Sellers List to this day.

Few Russian musicians in the second half of the nineteenth century could match the eminence of Anton Rubinstein. As a piano virtuoso he was internationally admired, as a progressive educator he had profound influence, and as a composer he was both significant and successful. The Symphony No. 6 in A minor, Op. 111 was his last symphony, composed in 1866, and fully revealing those qualities of grace and energy, as well as clever scoring, that make his works so appealing.