Perth Festival: Two Classical Accordions

St John’s Kirk, Perth; 31/05/25

 Melia Simonot, Sofía Ros (accordions)

This year’s Perth Festival ‘Music on a Saturday Morning’ slot at St John’s Kirk, Perth on 31st May featured two students of the Serbian maestro of the classical accordion, Djordje Gajic, who teaches at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Edinburgh University, Douglas Academy and St. Mary’s Music School.  Both prizewinning young accordionists play the Eastern European version of the instrument, the bayan, a chromatic button accordion.  This was my first opportunity to hear French artist Melia Simonot.  I was already familiar with Spanish player Sofía Ros, having heard and reviewed her in two recitals of the 2023 East Neuk Festival.

Melia’s set opened with the finale of Vladislav Zolotaryov’s Sonata No.3.  It is a very stormy, dramatic and filmic piece that begins with a rapid rhythmic chase in a minor key with displaced accents.  The ‘Dies Irae’ is quoted.  Lyrical interludes in the storm include a prayerful lament with a beatific vision, a slow mournful soliloquy crushed by discords and a ghostly apparition, concluding on a peaceful major cadence.  One of my favourite Bach organ pieces, the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV 542, was up next, in Melia’s own arrangement.  The prelude is now stoic and noble, then pessimistic and tragic, by turns.  It features a harmonic trick whereby a descending scale appears to continue below the compass of the instrument (even on the organ).  Though still in G minor, the dancing fugue is in a lighter vein and said to have been improvised on the spot by Bach in an audition for a job in Hamburg.  Melia quipped that it took her a year just to learn the piece.  She caught the free improvised spirit perfectly, though.  Superb.  Vyacheslav Semyonov’s ‘Kalina Krasnaya’ (Golden Roses) is a fantasia based on a Ukrainian folk melody.  After a short meditative introduction, the folk tune emerged, nostalgic and wistful, restated with ornamentation.  It built in intensity and emotion to a climax with complex harmonies.  The end was more subdued and elegiac.  Melia’s set concluded with Vladimir Malich’s ‘Toccata’, a short energetic scramble of a piece with a distinctly Latin flamenco-influenced vibe, incorporating brief slower expressive interludes.  Thrilling.

Sofía took us back to 1724 for her opening piece, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ‘Les Cyclopes’, a rondeau and the 8th movement of the Suite in D major (RCT 3) from his Second Book of ‘Pièces de Clavecin’.  Quite like Scarlatti, it was performed with lovely phrasing and subtle dynamic control.  Rameau, she revealed, is one of Melia’s favourite composers.  Next up, a very moving piece by Czech composer Václav Trojan, ‘The Ruined Cathedral’, written as a reaction to seeing the destruction wrought by the bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, as was Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, with whose outer movements it shares an elegiac mood.  A beautiful sad melody steals into our attention.  Dark threatening chords are answered by peaceful pleas.  The intensity of the emotion builds before fading to a morendo ending.  I even imagined that I could hear the DSCH motif quoted in the bass near the beginning but, as the Trojan piece was written two years before the Shostakovich in 1958, that seems unlikely.  Back to Semyonov (who, Sofía revealed, taught their teacher Djordje Gajic) for her next piece, the first two movements of his Sonata No.1 ‘Basqueriad’.  Although born in the Canary Islands, Sofía grew up in Santander, not far from the Basque Country and marvelled at how well Semyonov (who had never been to Spain) caught the distinctive musical character of the region. The first movement depicted the excitement and heightened emotions of a bullfight, while the second was a melancholy love-song of separation.  Super piece.  A switch to Scottish traditional music for the next piece: Phil Cunningham’s ‘Loch Katrine’s Lady’, in an arrangement by Ryan Corbett.  With Melia, Sofía and Ciorstaidh Chaimbeul, Ryan completes the RCS Accordion Quartet. The lovely wistful nostalgic melody was written for King Charles’ coronation.  In this arrangement, the simple melody is followed by a variation rich in both counterpoint and harmony, incorporating subtle quotations from Bach’s Fantasia in G Major BWV 572 and the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major BWV 552, before a lovely quiet end.  Sofía’s set concluded with her own arrangement of Liszt’s piano study in G-sharp minor ‘La Campanella’, a transcription with variations of the Neapolitan-sounding theme of the finale of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No.2 in B minor, the name referring to the high repeated dominant sounding like a tinkling bell.  It sounded just as good on the bayan, the chromatic runs being particularly delicious.

At a time when I would normally be out getting my ‘messages’ in Alloa’s supermarkets, this was a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning.  I had intended to stay on and catch two free events in the afternoon before the night-time closing concert in Perth Concert Hall.  Unfortunately, parking in Perth on a Saturday is hellish, so I decamped to the Wee County and did my weekly shop after all.  I did return at night.  But that’s another review.