Music to my ears

Donald Macleod

Radio 3 presenter

I’ve got quite an extensive library of CDs, but Genesis by the young Polish accordionist Bartosz Glowacki is the only disc of accordion music I’ve ever bought. I’m not much of a fan of the instrument, but he absolutely transforms it. In Vladimir Vlasov’s Five Views on Gulag State, which was a piece I’d never heard before, the accordion is virtually unrecognisable – he gets such extraordinary sounds out of it. It’s a feast of dazzling virtuosity and infinite subtlety.

I live close to Alexandra Palace and so attended the first. We’ve been starved of live music, so to see such a cleverly staged – albeit reduced – performance was an off-the-scale experience. You could feel the palpable excitement from the singers, even though it must have been so bizarre to look out to a sea of car windscreens.