Silhouetten: Music for Accordion Solo

Description

Silhouetten
by Giacomo Fronzi

Étienne de Silhouette was the finance minister of King Louis XV in 1759, and the inventor of a kind of property tax. Probably, he could not imagine that his name would have been preserved from the ravages of time. His fiscal reform, which taxed the wealthiest, made him unpopular with the high-income classes, but also rather famous: indeed, the tight and pocketless trousers in vogue at the time were called à la Silhouette, since there was no use for pockets when the money to store inside them was missing… The word “silhouette”, however, soon transitioned from indicating the trousers to denoting the typically aristocratic pastime (practised by the Minister himself) of cutting the figures’ profiles. That pastime become the black art of silhouette, an artistic practice which, on the wave of the eighteenth-century Neoclassical taste, took inspiration also from the Greek and Southern-Italian ancient vascular paintings.
Beyond this, how could we interpret the black figure of the silhouette? Firstly, it leads us to the dialectics between light and shadow, between visible and invisible. The black figure stands out against a luminous background, from which it takes meaning and definition; it exists only as a space stolen to light. It has well-defined contours, but, at its interior, it is mysterious and undecipherable. Can we speak of an “aural silhouette”, however? Since silhouettes naturally belong in the world of vision, this formula could seem to be rather absurd. However, music does have its own “profile”, it has “contours”, and it shows itself in the form of a dialectics between background and foreground. What is it, then, if not a constant dialectics between presence and absence, sound and silence, and, indeed, light and shadow?
In this album, with its very diversified contents, Michele Bianco proposes his demonstration of a thesis which we could formulate as follows. The musical discourse is a gallery of “silhouetten” which assumes its global meaning by subtracting itself from silence, just as a “silhouette” withdraws itself from light. As happens with the famous “figure of Rubin”, which is at the same time a vase and two faces, music moves on diverse perceptive, cognitive and emotional planes. Bianco, by mastering his bayan, succeeds in eliciting them all.
We were speaking of diversified contents. Indeed, the parable designed by Bianco ranges from Bach to Hermosa, i.e. from the seventeenth/eighteenth century to our times. This choice responds to one need among others: to demonstrate how extremely versatile an instrument the bayan (patented in 1907) is. It is capable to offer very interesting timbral solutions in its relationship with works written centuries earlier. The origins of the name “bayan”, an instrument which can be defined as a “chromatic accordion” (Germano Scurti), have something emphatical and pretentious. They seem to refer to Bojan, a figure which (in the famous Russian poem Tale of Igor’s Campaign, written by an anonymous author around 1185) is presented as a poet, as the singer of past times. This reference is interesting, because Bojan is not the poet of present times, but rather the singer of what has been. In the bayan’s sound these traits penetrate deeply, having an ancient and nostalgic colour, while expressing a liveliness and dynamism which are in full syntony with today’s sensitivity. It is as if this instrument possessed the past’s symbolic and touching energy, and, at the same time, the brilliancy and energy of what is projected towards the future.
Be it as it may, from Russian culture this instrument moved to Western Europe, thanks to the Dane Mogens Ellegaard. This transition, however, would not guarantee to the bayan an adequate placement within the Western instrumental and musical panorama. This would only arrive in the second half of the twentieth century (for example with Sofia Gubajdulina’s De profundis of 1978). Probably, one of the reasons for its escape from isolation is bound to the ancipital character to which we were alluding, as well as to the timbral fascination it manages to perform, to its particularly evocative tone and, last but not least, to its extraordinary technical and expressive potential.
This album, therefore, constitutes not only a proof of high instrumental and interpretive accomplishment for young and gifted Michele Bianco, but it also represents a further demonstration of the bayan’s exceptional characteristics.

The album opens with J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue BWV 543 of 1708-17, performed by Bianco following the original score (i.e. without transcribing it for the bayan). Since this work was originally written for the organ, it appears more immediately enjoyable to the ear. However, the effective result should be highlighted: Bianco reaches it by always maintaining a noteworthy balance among the parts, the voices and the registers.
After this first “proof of maturity” in the interpretive field, the Capriccio n. 1 (2006) by bayan-player and composer V. Semionov follows. He is considered as one of the fathers of the modern bayan school. With the pages of his Capriccio, the composer not only demonstrates to be one of the most important bayan players of the twentieth and twenty-first century, but also someone who knows the instrument deeply. The piece’s technical difficulty puts into light the instrument’s technical specificities, but also opens the way for using it in “speaking” a fully contemporaneous musical idiom.
The nostalgic piece Our Evenings by L. Janáček is the opening piece of a famous cycle of short piano works by the title of On an Overgrown Path [Po zarostlém chodníčku], written between 1900 and 1912. In its general atmosphere, it reveals the composer’s deep sadness after the death of his daughter Olga, in 1903. The particular poetic mood of Our Evenings, however, moves not only within an impalpable aura of melancholy. It also testifies both the composer’s connection with the Moravian musical tradition, and the instrument for which these pieces were originally composed, i.e. the harmonium. In this piece, of such intensity, voice and breathing merge with each other in a lonely remembrance of moments when an affectionate communion happened, against the nuanced horizon of the evening.
Janáček’s piece is followed by the one lending its title to the album, i.e. J. Ganzer’s Silhouetten (1988). Bianco performs here the third of the three movement in which the work is articulated, bringing the listener back to a frankly contemporaneous musical world. Over a repeated ostinato and a constant rhythm, the performer moves with skill among different registers, rapidly displacing himself over different aural planes. The alternating rhythmical and dynamic game created by Ganzer builds its efficaciousness over the impending chase of the two manuals, thus giving to Michele Bianco the possibility of demonstrating his technical skill and his full mastery of the instrument.
The album’s second part opens with A. Kusyakov’s Sonata No. 1 (1979), which is a true classic of the bayan repertoire. This Sonata displays the typically Soviet tendency to let diverse styles and creative orientations cohabit. It fully belongs to the experimentalism of the second half of the twentieth century, demonstrating how the quest for novel compositional solutions could move in the most unexpected directions.
Discontinuo non lineare by C. Saldicco (2020), a work begun in 2019 and finished when the pandemic was at its height, proposes a very interesting dialogue between the instrumental and the electronic levels. This work’s thick scoring is perfectly positioned within a sophisticated game of perceptive illusions. Here, the stereophonic continuum generated by the two manuals is constantly interrupted by clusters and digital interferences. In the concluding part of this process, the initial, refined electronic abstraction transforms itself, thanks to the bayan’s ever-increasing presence, into a solid instrumental “materiality”.
Finale op. 35 (1878) is a transcription of the third movement of P. I. Čajkovskij’s Violin Concerto in D major, realized by the Ukrainian composer and accordionist V. Zubitsky. The passage from the original ensemble to the bayan does not detract from the elan characterizing the piece, which is interspersed with popular rhythms, surrounded by a texture full of liveliness and virtuosity, although not devoid of moments of an intense lyricism.
The last piece, Pater noster (2012) by G. Hermosa, written on the text of the Lutheran chorale “Vater unser im Himmelreich” is a work which seemingly indulges to a certain immediacy, without however crossing the border with triviality. This pressing prayer in music, whose rhythmical pace is interrupted by a more meditative parenthesis halfway-through its itinerary, bears witness to how the bayan’s voice is a bridge capable of crossing the centuries, and of putting in dialogue past, present and future.
Displaying a controlled virtuosity, Michele Bianco self-assuredly walks on the various itineraries of this multifaceted landscape, ranging from Bach to present-day. He exalts the bayan’s exceptional versatility, and, on the other hand, displays his own full maturity in being able to use every possibility this instrument offers, in both technical and poetic terms.