Ilker Arcayürek / Simon Lepper FRANZ SCHUBERT Der Einsame

 

DER EINSAME

 

Lucy Crowe / Stephen Higgins THOMAS ALLEN September Songs

Sir Thomas Allen is an established star of great opera house around the world with a huge repertoire - with fifty roles at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden alone who has now recorded something comp letely different for Champs Hill Records. September Songs is a chance to explore songs he grew up with, loved then and loves still, but repertoire thats not usually associated with him, the golden age of Broadway and Hollywood with its melodic beauty, lyrical inventiveness and emotional directness. Allen has always hankered to give it a go and to explore songs by the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill.

Jiyoon Lee / Henry Kramer MYTHES

As part of her prize for winning the Windsor Festival International Strings Competition in 2015, South Korean violinist Jiyoon Lee makes her debut recording on Champs Hill Records with duo partner Henry Kramer in a recital of Stravinsky, Wieniawski, Bartok, Szymanowski and Ravel. · Winning the David Oistrakh competition in 2013, Jiyoon Lee subsequently won prizes in the Indianapolis, Queen Elizabeth and Carl Nielsen competitions, in addition to Windsor, and is now performing around the world. Henry Kramer has similarly won prizes in the Queen Elizabeth and Montreal competitions and an award winner at the Julliard School.

Ksenija Sidorova CLASSICAL ACCORDION

The accordion is an underexploited resource in western classical music. Like a number of "marginal" instruments it needed a champion before composers began to take it seriously: Andrés Segovia and the guitar is an obvious parallel. Although the concertina, first patented in 1829, could call on a repertoire of classical compositions from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, thanks chiefly to the efforts of Giulio Regondi (1822-72), it was not until the early twentieth century and the invention of the free-bass accordion  "which much expanded the tonal and harmonic resources of the instrument" that the stimulus for a modern concert repertoire was perceived. The musician who picked up that challenge was the Dane Mogens Ellegaard (1935-95), who began to play the accordion when he was eight. In an interview in 1990 he looked back on the conditions with which he initially had to contend: 

When I started, there was absolutely no accordion culture. 

Unless you define accordion culture as "oom-pah-pah", or the Cuckoo Waltz  that sort of thing. The free-bass accordion didn't exist! it was entirely unknown when I was a child. At that time the accordion world was living in splendid isolation. No contact at all with the outside musical world. Concerts for us consisted of Frosini, Deiro1 repertoire or folkloristic music. The possibilities of getting a formal, quality education [on accordion] were nil. The accordion was not accepted at any of the higher music institutions.... The possibilities for a soloist, for the best players, would be variety "night club" work, Saturday night shows.... This is what I was doing when I was very young. 

 In 1953, while still a student, Ellegaard acquired one of the first free-bass accordions in Denmark and within four years the light-music composer Vilfred Kjaer had written a concerto for him: a work of light character, but anyway a beginning. At that concert, also by coincidence, Ole Schmidt [1928-2010] was sitting in the audience. He didn't like Kjaer's composition, but liked the instrument, and told me this bluntly afterwards. So I challenged him to write something better. In 1958 he wrote Symphonic Fantasy and Allegro, Op. 20, for accordion and orchestra, which was the first really serious work for accordion written by a good composer. The search for a modern repertoire for the accordion was now underway, and over the next four decades Ellegaard's commissions built it up from scratch, with his students in turn commissioning further works. Of course, accordionists have also worked backwards, transcribing earlier keyboard works for their instrument  which gives Baroque music in particular a new lease of life. This CD mines both the old and new veins in the modern accordion repertoire.

Ksenija Sidorova FAIRY TALES

What I like about mixing transcriptions with repertoire written specifically for the accordion, is that the audience has a fresh perspective on the so-called "old stuff" after hearing the unexpected and unique sounds of the new. I think it aids an understanding of the contemporary repertoire too. As an accordionist you sort of have to carve your own path, so I consider it my mission in this way to introduce the instrument to a wider audience.

Thus speaks the classical accordion's latest and most passionate knight in shining armour, the rising Latvian star Ksenija Sidorova. And to help her here in her avowed mission of popularization, she has chosen a varied group of pieces to show off the full range and emotional power of her chosen instrument. From the quick- fingered whippy virtuosity of Mendelssohn's familiar Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream, via the pulsing energy of Petr Londonov's Scherzo-Toccata (a popular piece with accordionists, but little-known to wider concert audiences), to the deceptively naive and charming melodies of the Fairy Tales concerto by Vaclav Trojan, Sidorova has devised a programme full of humour and excitement. "I had an enormous amount of fun over the days of recording," says the accordionist. 

Her recital includes two nineteenth-century showstoppers. The first of them, Caprice Espagnol, was composed for the piano in 1885 by Moritz Moszkowski (1854 -1925), and arranged for the accordion by the Russian performer and teacher Friedrich Lips (1948- ). Since, like many of the other arrangers on this disc, Lips writes for the bayan, which has rows of buttons on both sides rather than a piano keyboard for the right hand, Sidorova herself has "transcribed the transcription" for her own preferred piano-accordion.