by Kevin T McEneaney
This past Friday at Lyall Community Church, Millbrook Music Salon produced an amazing concert that featured four of the eight virtuoso finalists from the recent Young Concert Artists competition in NYC. Artistic Director Sophia Zhou invited four to form a quartet and perform in Millbrook. The result was an exciting afternoon of thrilling performances by four extraordinary virtuosos. in this Salon Series, which was free to the public.
The nature of this one-hour concert (their first concert on their scheduled tour) was unusual. The role of the accordion in classical music has nearly disappeared, yet accordionist and arranger Radu Răţoi from Moldovan has had an accordion company in Castelfidaro, Italy, produce a specially constructed accordion with five thousand parts. The accordion takes two weeks to tune up. Radu is a gifted arranger, and all four compositions played were original arrangements.
They opened with Café Music (2010) by the American Paul Schoenfield (1947-2024), a pianist-composer who is known for his genteel salon combinations of pop, folk, and classical music. This piano trio featured an accordion arrangement that shunned dreamy, polished elegance for the raw street power of the raucous tavern. The first of the three movements featured the full quartet, yet the second and third movements were a trio with violinist Risa Hokamura from Japan playing on the “Joachim” Stradivarius with intense resonance, along with cellist Benett Tsai (who has worked with Esa-Pekka Salonen and other conductors), who performed with deep vibrations.
The full quartet next performed Suite Italienne (1932) by Igor Stravinsky (originally for piano and cello, a 1719 instrument from Cremona, Italy), yet here arranged for accordion and cello in the first two movements, where a wide rippling of dancing emotions flew by like a kaleidoscope. The fourth movement “Gavotta” paired with Risa’s high-pitched violin to offer more ethereal sophistication, while satiric “Scherzino” paired with Lun Li on violin with lower, gritty, sardonic and ironic ambiance from his 1735 “Samazeuilh” Stradivarius! The concluding minuet gathered all four players melded into a mellow celebration of languorous politesse.
There was a brief pause wherein Radu spoke about his singular instrument.
They next performed La Valse (1920) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) which Diaghilev commissioned as a ballet, but it is really an orchestral work (wherein the patron was disappointed). This Trio version with Lun Li on violin and cellist Benett Tsai traced the birth, decay, and death of the waltz in three portrait sensibilities. World War I horrors produced the death of the waltz, and the finale was a Mount Everest of accordion fingering that was a plunging swirl of such rapid racing on the keyboard, it speared to incarnate an impossibility of ear and sight!
They concluded with the most popular of Astor Piazzolla’s compositions, The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (1970), wherein Piazzolla fused jazz with classical music. Here all four players performed with impressive unity on the sequence of summer, autumn, winter, and the aural delights of spring: summer slow with nearly suffocating heat, autumn redolent with pleasant memories, winter was harsh and uncomfortable, spring burgeoning with wondrous delight. The quartet performed with such melded unison that one might have thought that this was the end of their tour, and yet it was merely the beginning for these extraordinary, accomplished, young players who have the prospect of performing musical miracles before them.
This was an unforgettable concert!
