« Preludes, Waltzes and Flights », confessions of an accordionist

Preludes

Preludes represent a beginning: the first stone in an edifice that can only be built with patience, the start of a meandering path that you follow while watching out for the pitfalls, negotiating the bends and squeezing through the mountain passes.

Having chosen the accordion as their instrument and wanting to let it loose in a repertoire that many would prefer to banish it from, that of classical music – this is the situation that a good many accordionists find themselves in. But they have an absolutely essential tool at their service: that of transcription. For decades now, a host of talented players have been bold enough to perform many of the classical masterpieces on the accordion, an instrument these pieces were not originally intended for.

The preludes presented here form part of this exciting as well as necessary development. These pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms or Isaac Albéniz take on a whole new soundworld on the accordion, offering an array of brand new colours. It’s not a case of matching the originals, or even improving on them. It’s about experiencing, simply and humbly, the joy of performing this music that, while it may have been conceived for others, was most avowedly written for humanity as a whole.

Waltzes

The waltz is a celebration. It is a swirl of kaleidoscopic emotions – nostalgia, delirium, sadness and joy. The waltz is also the trusted friend of the squeezebox, contributing to its history and aura more than any other musical genre. From the taverns on the banks of the Marne to the dancing-halls of the rue de Lappe, from the most illustrious music-hall venues to the smoke-filled bars of jazz clubs, and from country dances in provincial towns to the big screens of movie theatres – the accordion has set people waltzing without interruption.

The five waltzes in this program are all homages, a way of acknowledging my roots and of telling a handful of accordionists past and present how much I love and admire them. They are Marcel Azzola, Joë Rossi, Joss Baselli, Richard Galliano and Domi Emorine. When my doubts and insecurities are at their most overwhelming, I listen to them, steeping myself in their music, and straight away I now once again why I chose this instrument.

Flights

For me, a Flight is all about hopes, dreams and achievements. Hopes for growth and progression. Dreams of seeing further, discovering new horizons. The feeling of having completed part of the journey so that time, for once, feels less pressing than usual and a short stop allows the traveller to take a backward glance.

But any flight also represents a defiance of the most elementary laws of physics. The force of gravity turns out to be particularly strong in its attempts to prevent the accordion from taking flight and setting off to conquer the repertoire of all categories of music. It has cost a good many composers a huge amount of energy to surpass these limitations. By inventing a brand new repertoire for the concert accordion they have engineered the launchpad that was necessary for our instrument’s epic travelogue to begin.

To illustrate this type of flight, I have chosen pieces that are very different in their characters and styles as well as in their compositional approaches. All are by accordionist–composers. They represent a journey through time, covering seven decades of new writing for our instrument. If André Astier and John Gart are sadly no longer with us today, Petri Makkonen, Franck Angelis and Evgeny Derbenko are very much alive and continue to compose wonderful pieces for the accordion.

These works also represent a flight around the world, taking off from the Finnish fjords for verdant French landscapes before soaring over the New York skyscrapers to land at last in the snowy Russian steppes at daybreak.