Quiet Times is a Stereo Pure DSD 256 recording.  Exclusively available in Pure DSD 256 at NativeDSD.

On Quiet Times, I tried to express through sounds the influences that have affected me from childhood to the present day. Every person’s life is determined by where they come from, the environment in which they grew up, the positive and negative experiences that have shaped their life. I am no different. I grew up in the 8th district of Budapest, where I met a wide variety of people, including famous musicians, actors, but also socially unacceptable and sometimes even dangerous people. I could have been anything, even an underworld figure, but I and many of my peers were interested in music.

The fact that I became a musician is mainly due to the fact that my father was a famous pianist when I was a child. It was his influence that made me start learning the piano. I was a very shy, withdrawn child, even bashful. There were many reasons for this, and it took me a long time to prevent them from interfering with my life and my music. But my father was an open-minded person, like all talented people. Even in the 1970s, he spoke openly on television about Jesus Christ and other topics that were not really allowed to be discussed at that time. In 1974, he wrote his first piece on Roma themes, The Red Caravan, in our 25-square-metre apartment, and it was performed that same year. And as a child while playing I was listening to the piece being created and these sounds were engraved in my memory.

In our family there were many talented people on the piano – which can be good or bad. For me it was inspiring. I think if you love music, it’s a natural reaction. My dad never taught me or my brother Robi to play the piano, but that was fine, it was natural. Once I asked my father to transcribe a two-handed standard as a classical piece. He didn’t really want to, but my mother insisted, so he did it anyway, and then he told me: Look through the sheet music, then forget it and play it the way you think it should be played.

That’s what I tried to do on this album: play the way I think it should be played, accepting the uncertainty of how it would go. I hadn’t prepared for the pieces at all, and I was a bit anxious about it, but it made the result more natural. Besides my own compositions and improvisations, I played my father’s compositions, and I also selected music from other musical areas for the album, for example a famous piece by Sándor Járóka, The Way I Felt. I play Mozart’s piano concerto transcription with an exceptionally talented pianist who is my life partner. I am very happy that she is contributing to my album, at least in this one piece. It would be great if she released a solo album that the audience could listen to.

Bela Szakcsi Jr. – Piano
Laura Csík – Vocals (Track 6)