Monday, September 28, 2009

Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto--on Accordion.



Lyrical, gorgeous, that old chestnut 'virtuoso' must be carted out, plus it's so much fun to hear it on what I, sillily, think of as a silly instrument. The balloons and butterfly tacked onto the wall suggest to me that this piece was played at some very informal event, a high school talent show, perhaps?

Found at allclassical.org

3 comments:

Rob said...

Wow! This kid is an amazing talent despite what you might think of accordion instruments.

Http://accordionstop.com

Celery said...

Hey, I actually read that this was a major accordion competition in Eastern Europe, that he was a 2nd place tie-winner. There are 3 other pieces from the competition. Supposedly he's a conservatory student in the Ukraine, I think...

Ministry Administrator said...

Wow! I played this piece on the (Piano) Accordion in the Australian Accordion National Championships in 1983 (Adelaide) and it was done by another 13 year old lady in 1981 (Melbourne) at those same competitions.

It is probably the most difficult piece to play on the Accordion and takes some serious practice to perfect.

Where one must be careful with it is in not making it sound too mechanical, although giving it a Gypsy/Russian feel does add a lot of genuine firepower to the piece.

Believe it or not, it was the slower tempo parts of the piece that were in a sense the most difficult, in that you had to come down from the Virtuoso "full speed" sections of the piece and then try to give the slower movements a great deal of feeling at the same time.

The mastery of this piece even on the accordion would be equal to say a top pianist mastering a very difficult piece to play in a world renowned orchestra - it takes very serious work to sound like this.

Two of us that I know of in Australia achieved that with this very same piece on Accordion in 1981 and 1983.

A beautiful piece of music.