Samuele Telari plays Bach

Samuele Telari is an accordionist from Spoleto in Italy and a rising star in classical music. He’s a multi award-winning musician with a truly international solo career. Samuele records for Delphian and is one of the exceptional young musicians represented by YCAT (Young Classical Artists Trust). You can read more about him at https://www.ycat.co.uk/samuele-telari

The accordion is an astonishingly versatile instrument. A ‘baby’ in musical instrument history (it was invented in the 1820s), its sound quickly became synonymous with the Parisian streets, cafes and dance halls of the early 1900s. After the 2nd World War, this ‘bal-musette’ music was the most popular form of dance in France, turning its stars - such as singer Édith Piaf and accordionist Gus Viseur - into household names. In the 1950s Astor Piazzolla, composer and virtuoso on the bandoneón (a square-built button accordion) took the tango out of the dance halls of Argentina and into the major concert halls of the world.

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of classical accordion players in the 60s and 70s, the accordion now has a concert repertoire of its own. Samuele performs contemporary music (works by Gubaidulina, Donatoni, Berio) alongside incredibly imaginative transcriptions of music by Mussorgsky, Schubert and Bach.

Transcribing music from one instrument to another is a challenge, and it doesn’t always work well. But Bach’s music is an exception that seems to positively permit re-arrangement of all kinds. The musicologist Donald Tovey said ‘Bach wrote on the principle, not that music was written for instruments, but that instruments are made for music.’ Bach himself made organ and harpsichord transcriptions of concertos by Vivaldi and Telemann. He was ambiguous on matters of instrumentation; the ‘Art of Fugue’ and the ricercars from ’The Musical Offering’ have no indication as to what musical forces ought to perform them. Like most composers of his time, Bach was constantly borrowing and rearranging his own compositions; the Double Violin Concerto of 1719 turns up 20 years later as a concerto for two harpsichords. The slow movement of his G minor violin concerto is better known as the opening Sinfonia to the cantata ‘Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe’.

The accordion conjures up memories of a bygone golden age; it is modern yet nostalgic, joyful yet melancholic. When Samuele plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations, he finds something timeless and intimate in the strange synergy between this towering baroque masterpiece and the rich, breathy, delicate voice of the accordion. Samuele describes the experience of performing it as being ‘like a mirror...I feel as if I watch myself inside each time I play it… its so huge that you discover new things in it and about yourself every time you play it’.

Cameras, sound, direction & editing by David Lefeber
Music performed by Samuele Telari
Stapleford Granary is very grateful to YCAT and Samuele Telari for kind permission to release this extract.

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