El último aliento is the third ECM New Series album by the Vienna-based Hungarian guitarist Zsófia Boros, after En otra parte (2013) and Local Objects (2016). Its programme looks two ways: towards contemporary composers from Argentina, and towards the French composer Mathias Duplessy, born in 1972, who contributes six of the eleven pieces. The title, "the last breath", comes from the piece by Carlos Moscardini that closes the record.
Boros plays alone, on classical guitar and, for one piece, on the ronroco. The other Argentinian composers are Joaquín Alem, Quique Sinesi and Alberto Ginastera, and Alem, Sinesi and Moscardini are guitarists themselves. Duplessy is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist whose writing joins 19th-century harmony to contemporary structures. The album was recorded in March and April 2022 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Stefano Amerio was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced it.
Duplessy's De rêve et de pluie opens the record with a shimmering, flowing accompaniment beneath a sparse melody. In Sinesi's El abrazo Boros mutes the strings with a rubber band, and the music stays close to a whisper. For his Tormenta de ilusión, conceived for charango, she switches to the ronroco, an Andean instrument with ten strings in five double courses and a slightly lower range. Ginastera's short Milonga carries a gentle tango undertow, and Duplessy's Berceuse, the shortest track, lasts just over two minutes.
Fanfare magazine has praised Boros's "clear, beautiful tone, liquid phrasing, precise layering of melody and accompaniment". Reviewing the album in BBC Music Magazine in 2023, Steph Power heard miniatures that find "common ground in bittersweet harmonies, plangent melodies and fluid, sometimes sultry, rhythms". James Manheim at AllMusic singled out the engineering as an exemplary way to record a solo guitar, placing the listener in an intimate space free of extraneous noise. Her earlier albums had ranged over Leo Brouwer, Al Di Meola and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, and Local Objects already included Duplessy's Nocturne.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2769, released on 14 April 2023. The booklet prints a poem by Antonio Machado.
