“Often I think I am holding the choice of music in my own hands, but later I wonder if the music has chosen me as a medium. My approach is always very intuitive; when a piece of music grips or touches me, I want to reflect it – to become a mirror and convey it.”

Hungarian guitarist Zsófia Boros was born in Prague in 1980 and studied in Bratislava, Budapest, at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (the city in which she is now based) and at the Francisco Tárrega Guitar Academy in Pordenone, Italy. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including first prizes at the North London Music Festival, the Concorso Internationale Val Tidone, the Paganini Competition in Parma, and the Premio Enrico Mercatali in Gorizia.

Boros’s ECM New Series debut, En otra parte (“Elsewhere”), appeared in 2013. At the heart of the album is music by Leo Brouwer (b. 1939), the Cuban composer who viewed the guitar as an orchestra and once declared that it has “no limits”. Brouwer’s work has been a major reference for Boros from the beginning of her musical journey. Nora McCarthy of Jazz Inside magazine wrote of her playing on the disc: “Not only is her musicianship exquisite but her soul and her ability to transmit emotion, and intuit thoughts and feelings is quite extraordinary”.

The guitarist’s second New Series album, Local Objects, was released in 2016 and covered an even broader spectrum than here debut, with music from Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Azerbaijan. Fanfare Magazine has praised her “clear, beautiful tone, liquid phrasing, precise layering of melody and accompaniment, fluid figuration and her emphatic sense of mood and emotion”.

Il último aliento, Zsófia’s third recording for ECM, is split in two, with one spotlight turned towards music from Argentina and the other on the multiple-idioms spanning compositions of French composer Mathias Duplessy. Zsófia: “Pieces of music are like places for me, like spaces that I visit, step into and experience. They all have their own mood and colour, their own scent, their own pulse and a special effect on me.”