Search - Teodoro Anzellotti :: Accordion Music

Incredibly sensitive creator/performer, a profound wind box

Rachel Abbinanti (tusai1@aol.com) | Chicago | 08/03/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Accordeon in the hands of Teodoro Anzellotti becomes an incredibly magnificent instrument. He can play just about anything on it,as well as offering new ways, new timbres,which somehow transcends itself. Although Italian, Anzellotti has lived since the early Eighties in Germany and has made a wonderful reputation for himself,composers literally throw pieces at him to play, like a Sonic Oracle, he is the only one who can unlock the mysteries contained within a piece of music it seems. Gerhard Stabler for one is a sensitive composer to sound,he knows also the mysteries contained in sound in various timbres,sometimes utilizing the barest of means to embark on a new musical journey. His "California Dreams" was written after extensive time he has spent there concertizing and lecturing, and here this is a piece that structurally seems too big for its frame, chordal and with melodic lines. Stabler is not afraid of writing melodies,placing however directly accessible material within an abstracted musical frame, that of pure sound sheets at times, or simple exposed lines. Likewise Nicolaus A. Huber (Stabler's mentor) has an impressive body of work where he has made significant contributions toward an aesthetic that purges into new structural divisions with an intense affinity for timbre,form,and here the Accordeon is transformed into a gorgeous "wind-machine", a bellows of pure beauty, a box of fragments of wind, and shards of exposed lines. Sofia Gubaidulina is someone we are just beginning to know with the emergence of perestroika in the mid-Eighties. Her music has always a severe quality to it. Granted her native Russia has been a plagued,politically divisive place,still here music trys to strike a balance between a direct reflection of this and shard of hope.Anzellotti again is quite a diamond-cutter of emotions,like a scientist searching for emotional discovery."