Lidia Kaminska accordion recital

Lidia Kaminska attracted a record crowd to her Astral Artists accordion recital and received storms of applause after each piece. I would have been happier, however, if she had varied the program by including more pieces that teamed the accordion with other instruments.

In theory, the accordion should be a complete stand-alone music machine, like the piano and the organ. In practice, it fails to deliver the majestic authority of the organ or the color and nuance that good pianists add to their solos. Yet Kaminska devoted the entire first half to works for unaccompanied accordion— a Bach prelude and fugue, a Scarlatti sonata, and two modern Russian pieces specifically written for her instrument.

Contrast this concert with the Astral program last season that featured clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester. For most of that event, Franch-Ballester worked with other musicians— sometimes as the lead, sometimes as another member of the ensemble.


A Russian art

Kaminska prefaced all the selections with engaging commentaries on the selections and on the accordion's rise to a higher status in Europe. Bach and Scarlatti had been a regular part of her training. Eastern European composers, especially the Russians, have been attracted to the bayan, a modern version of the accordion outfitted with buttons for the left hand that can be used to play complete chords.

In the second half, Kaminska was reinforced by two leading members of Astral's young artists roster: violinist Jennifer Curtis and pianist Michael Mizrahi. A Bird's Eye for Violin and Accordion, by Dutch composer Chiel Meijering, dates from 1989 and casts the violin as the bird in the perennial human fantasy of bird flight. The accordion starts out as an accompanist and becomes a full partner, with both instruments eventually engaging in some wild loops and dives.

A few wild moments

Jasmin for Accordion and Piano, by Russia's Tatiana Sergeyeva, is loosely based on the tango. ("It has the heavy accents," Kaminska commented, "and probably nothing else.") Sergeyeva created some wild moments for both instruments and contrasted them with winningly melodious passages for the accordion. Some of the best sections of the whole afternoon, for me, were the interludes in which the accordion functioned as a melody instrument.

For the finale, Kaminska switched to the small accordion traditionally used in tango music and joined her partners in personal arrangements of three tangos by Argentina's great master of the form, Astor Piazzolla. They were all beautiful examples of Piazzolla's contributions to the sensual, dramatic side of the chamber music repertoire, and Kaminska had arranged them so the accordion traded the lead with her partners and added the sonority of a wind instrument to the overall texture. If she had included one ensemble piece like this in the first half, the whole program would have received a useful jolt.