In Finland, the accordion enjoys a status according a "real" instrument, more so than it does in the United States where it is associated with
Lawrence Welk and the nerdiest kid in your school, invariably the only student who plays one.
Mikko Luoma is no nerd; he is a professor at the Turku Music Academy in Finland who organizes an annual new music festival called Aboa Nova in Tallinn, conducts master classes in accordion throughout the world, and participates in a group called the Plus Ensemble. Bridge's Virtuoso Accordion is the first solo outing on disc for
Luoma; it contains seven works, including four by Finnish composers, including
Magnus Lindberg, who played accordion in his youth, as did late French composer Gérard Grisey.
The most impressive of the pieces here is the Carpathian Suite (1974) by Russian composer Vladimir Zubitsky, who was only 20 when he wrote it. Its mixture of contemporary techniques and snatches of folk accordion-derived gestures makes for a dazzling and heady combination, and this appears to be the first complete recording of this work to appear in the West.
Jukka Tiensuu's Aufschwing (Upswing, 1977) is nearly so; it is far less referential than Carpathian Suite but makes effective use of the accordion's ability to produce reedy, swelling cluster chords and rapid repeating figures. Likewise, Tiensuu's Zolo (2002) makes effective use of wheezing, microtonal tonalities achievable through under-pumping the accordion's bellows, though as a whole the piece tends to stick to too limited a range of compositional ideas.
Sciarrino's Vagabonde blu (1998) suffers from much the same syndrome, though the basic sounds he is dealing with are interesting.
Virtuoso Accordion was recorded at Kaskerta Church in Turku, and the accordion should have been miked a little closer. The sense of distance in this bright space blankets
Luoma's accordion in a resonance reminiscent of the public lavatory used for Weird Al Yankovic's first hit, "My Bologna," and one might be fairly certain this was not what
Luoma was shooting for. Moreover, apart from the Zubitsky and
Sciarrino works, the pieces on the program are a bit too similar in sound and approach; one craves variety and has a hard time telling one piece from another. The Zubitsky work, however, is a major one in the canon, and accordionists with a flair for the contemporary may well find something beyond that to enjoy with
Mikko Luoma's Virtuoso Accordion.