The Tokyo Concert (2019)
13 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
This album has some broad similarities to Llio Rhydderch’s Sir Fôn Bach, which I wrote about a month-ish ago. They’re both entirely solo instrumental albums released this year, by musicians who are considered to be at the very top of their instruments’ mastery. And, for my part, I’d not heard of either of them before I put on their albums.
Richard Galliano is a virtuoso of the button accordion and a great innovator of bal musette. You know bal musette even if you think you don’t. Imagine a romantic Parisian café in all its wistful, clichéd glory: cobbled streets; candle-lit tables; wafts of coffee, wine and garlic; a bubble of witty conversation on the light breeze, and outside is a musician playing his accordion for the sophisticates within. That is bal musette. Galliano’s music brings that scene vividly to mind, but he also goes much further.
A great comparison that I heard is that Galliano is to bal musette as Astor Piazzolla was to tango. He places the French folk style as the crucial foundations of his music, but he takes it into high-art territory by combining it with classical and jazz sensibilities of harmony, arrangement and performance. Me being me, I really love it where, on tunes such as ‘La Valse à Margaux’, the style is so utterly French while including wildly extended and dissonant chords like some outer reaches of jazz. This album also shows his comfort in bringing in Argentinian tangos and Brazilian choros into his influences or repertoire.
Probably my favourite piece on this album is ‘Aria’. It’s Galliano’s own composition, written in the style of Bach, but there’s a really lovely feature about it that makes me marvel every time it comes around. It’s quite a simple thing really. The whole piece goes along in the manner of one of Bach’s grandiose organ compositions, ebbing and flowing with grace and drama, and you can feel it building up to a perfect cadence – sort of like a musical full stop. He sets it up with the chords before it, leading into a classic iic-V-I sequence, where your brain expects to hear that last, grounding chord in a major key, giving the otherwise dark piece a ray of light at the end – what’s called a tierce de Picardie. But Galliano doesn’t do that. When it gets to that point, the final chord is left open, before a minor third comes in after a slight pause. It makes it feel both resolved and unresolved at the same, as well as tamping the imposing nature of the piece with a shy, nervous ending before it sets off once more. It happens a few times throughout the piece and it surprises me every time. It’s a perfect example of defying the audience’s expectations in a thrilling way.
This is the only album I’ve ever heard by Richard Galliano, so this might be one of his best or one of his worst, I wouldn’t know. But it must certainly be a good recommendation. He shows such an amazing verve and intelligence in every aspect of music making, from composition and arrangement to the sheer, eye-watering skill of his performance. Add into that the gentle ease at which he plays entirely alone with just an accordion to an auditorium of 5,000 fans, as cool as you like, and it really shows just how much of an expert performer Richard Galliano really is.
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