Concerto for Classical Accordion

Composed by Aaron Copland (1900–1990)

25 minutes


We open tonight with Aaron Copland’s beloved suite from his 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring, commissioned for choreographer Martha Graham. The ballet follows a young pioneer couple beginning their married life and facing an uncertain future in “a new town, some place where the first fence has just gone up”.

Settle into the hopeful, wide-open chords that introduce the small community - the couple, a wise Pioneer Woman, a stern Revivalist and his flock of Followers. Across the suite’s eight sections, complexity, texture and tempo rise and fall through American folk music idioms: the buoyancy of a square-dance, crisp percussion evoking daily life on the frontier, and restless shifts of rhythm that acknowledge the challenges beneath the community’s optimism. A tender duet for the couple in the third section turns towards a more ardent, Old-World romanticism without losing sight of the New.

The emotional core of the piece is the Shaker melody Simple Gifts which emerges through solo clarinet, then is shaped into a series of increasingly exuberant variations before the music subsides into evening. Graham envisaged in the ending “the feeling of the town settling down for the night”: distant children, a barking dog, a call in the twilight—and then darkness.

Copland navigated with quiet integrity the parts of himself that lay outside America’s dominant cultural story, preserving privacy without retreating into concealment in an era demanding discretion and conformity. From that vantage, he fashioned a musical language for a country still imagining itself. Yet Appalachian Spring does not end with conquest or certainty. It leaves its newlyweds at the threshold of an unfinished future: the fence is up, the night has fallen, and everything remains to be made.

Composed by Composed by Holly Harrison (b.1988)

22 minutes


The TSO is delighted to present Sydney composer Holly Harrison’s accordion concerto InsideOut, commissioned jointly by four Australian orchestras. This is its third performance since premiering with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in July and Queensland Symphony Orchestra last week.

Harrison describes InsideOut as “a series of musical nesting dolls, in which the orchestra is continually unpacked from within the accordion itself”. The first movement, Stretch, distends the E7♯9 chord made famous by Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze until the accordion evokes an "overdriven electric guitar". In the second movement, Squeeze, soloist and orchestra duck and weave between camouflage and sudden visibility. The finale, Engine Room, celebrates the instrument’s extraordinary compass: ‘grungy’ in its depths, ‘glitchy’ in its heights as it is magnified and reflected across the full reach of the orchestra.

Harrison’s background as a drummer is unmistakable. Rhythm is not accompaniment here but architecture - our percussion storeroom has been gleefully raided to furnish the work’s bombastic textures. InsideOut reveals the classical accordion as a one-player ensemble: keyboard, reed choir, rhythm section and breathing body all at once.

Like Copland, Harrison builds a concert work from sounds that have not always been granted equal status in the concert hall. Yet where Appalachian Spring ultimately gathers itself into simplicity, InsideOut blows tidy reassembly to pieces. Each layer opens to reveal another, and another—until it is no longer clear whether the accordion sits inside the orchestra, the orchestra inside the accordion, or all of us inside the sound.

Composed by Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992)

5 minutes


Tonight closes with Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango (1974), a work whose title fuses libertad – liberty - with tango. Sensuous, propulsive and unapologetically theatrical, it announced Piazzolla’s liberation from the conventions of traditional tango and his embrace of tango nuevo.

Piazzolla brought to the concert hall the bandoneon’s life in Buenos Aires dance halls, cabarets and brothels, its legs tangled intimately with his classical and jazz influences. The result scandalised tango traditionalists: performances were disrupted, his music was denounced, and threats followed. This is music of defiance.

Its rhythmic engine is the tresillo, a 3+3+2 pulse whose uneven tread drives relentlessly forward. Against it, syncopations and sharp accents generate friction, while a long, soaring melody stretches and sings above the repeating harmonic pattern. Desire and discipline, freedom and constraint, elegance and danger remain locked together. Rather than delivering a conventional triumphant cadence to finish, the work lets its tensions disperse, leaving spaciousness and promise.

Piazzolla and Copland both studied in Paris with the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who urged her students to absorb everything they could without abandoning their own voices. After hearing Piazzolla play one of his tangos, she recognised what his polished classical scores were lacking: “Here is the true Piazzolla. Don’t ever leave him.”

Across tonight’s program, three composers open new territory by carrying their histories with them. Copland raises a fence; Harrison breaks open the walls; Piazzolla dances straight through them.