Place: Streaming/Internet, www.nordaccordion.com
Time: Thursday 5th of August, 20.00
Hanzhi Wang
Despite her young age, Hanzhi Wang has already made a great career, playing concerts all over the world as a soloist and chamber musician. She has won two of the most important accordion competitions for classical soloists: The Arrasate International Accordion Competition in Spain (2013) and the Primero Category of the International Accordion Competition in Castelfidardo (2015). In other words, the quality of what she delivers will be very high, and at this concert she will play excerpts from the Goldberg variations by J.S Bach.
Claudio Jacomucci
Claudio Jacomucci from Italy will perform Le Città Invisibili (2021) for microtonal prepared accordion. Le Città Invisibili (Invisible Cities), a famous book by Italiano Calvino, explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Khan. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience.
The music work by Claudio Jacomucci consists of 11 short compositions, one for each type of city. Every city is based on a particular sound or technique of an accordion that the composer has himself transformed, tuned and “sabotaged” over the years: a quartertone accordion with reed, reedblock and register preparation.
The powerful imagery of Calvino’s text has led the exploration of this unique instrument bringing up a wide spectrum of unexpected sounds like harmonics, multi-phonics, blows, whistles, tone-bendings and beatings.
Sound textures are created also with the use of a quadraphonic audio support which basically specialises and multiplies the live instrument. All audio materials are pre-recorded accordion sounds with no kind of electronic elaboration.
Microtonal accordion and classical accordion are alternated.
This version, especially created for NordAccordion, is amplified by the virtual presence of Kathleen Delaney in a video-dance performance.
Le Città Invisibili was written thanks to the support of Fonds Podiumkunsten NL.
