Accordionist Ratoi dazzles with piquant originals and arranged classics
The accordion is the only instrument that you play by embracing it. That helps to account for its unique brand of expressiveness, which was on display in abundance Thursday night in Merkin Hall, as accordionist Radu Ratoi made his New York debut.
Essentially a wearable reed organ, the accordion is as capable in classical music and jazz as it is in the kind of immigrant popular music with which it is usually associated in this country. It’s common for classical music conservatories in Europe to have an accordion department, where virtuosity and musical communication are cultivated just as fervently as in the piano and string programs.
A prize-winning graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Ratoi went on to win the 2024 Susan Wadsworth International Auditions of the organization Young Concert Artists, which presented his debut Thursday.
Besides shouldering aside pianists and violinists to win top competition prizes, Ratoi advocates for his instrument in Lisztian fashion by arranging familiar pieces for it. Bach, Schubert, Stravinsky, and Liszt himself were among the composers artfully accordionized by the Moldovan musician at this concert.
The classical accordion’s own small but growing original repertoire was represented in 20th-century works by Per Nørgård and Anatoly Kusyakov, as well as the New York premiere (and world deuxième) of Inhale. Exhale. by YCA Composer-in-Residence Hannah Ishizaki.
The program began with a lively Baroque curtain-raiser, the overture to Rameau’s Pygmalion, which showcased Ratoi’s dexterity playing two parts in imitation with just one hand on the piano-style keys. It also introduced the listener to the accordion’s novel way of playing fast repeated chords: hold the keys down while jittering the bellows.
For more serious Baroque business, there was Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, one of the works on Ratoi’s 2022 debut album of transcribed organ music. Although his instrument had several “reed ranks,” equivalent to organ stops, offering a variety of timbres, it still required considerable mechanical ingenuity and imagination to reproduce both the intricacy and the grandeur of Bach’s masterpiece.
Not to mention physical exertion. The effort of moving all that air and piling up crescendos while managing counterpoint and musical expression left the player breathless and mopping his brow while acknowledging the audience’s enthusiastic applause.
By contrast, excerpts from Nørgård’s 1967 accordion suite Anatomic Safari were an exercise in “Danish modern,” as whimsical whispers burst into a syncopated dance. Right-hand skill was matched by virtuosity with the bellows, which included not just repeated chords but tremolo effects, biting accents, sudden swells and fades, and even slapping the bellows itself to make a hollow drum sound.
A more familiar, but equally dazzling, form of virtuosity emerged in Ratoi’s version of Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No. 10, “Appassionata.” The shiver of interlocking hands on the piano became a flutter of fingers on the accordion, and ingenious registration produced something like the piano’s sweeping arpeggios on the accordion’s smaller 3 ½-octave keyboard. In less fiery moments, the player’s right hand produced both a singing tune and its filigree accompaniment.
While on a concert tour of Germany, Kusyakov, the Russian accordion master, was moved by visiting a site of Christian martyrdom to compose his Sonata No. 6, “Stained Glass and Cages of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Münster,” now a staple of the instrument’s repertoire. Ratoi’s performance of the sonata’s finale was a brilliant rush of fast triplets, with lots of repeated chords, ripping glissandos and stark accents.
Heightened emotional states were also the subject of the new piece Inhale. Exhale. by Hannah Ishizaki, who came onstage to describe the physical sensations of excitement and anxiety when speaking or performing in public and how they were reflected in her piece. Ratoi’s performance swung between stasis and panic, from high jittery sounds to mashed cluster chords. The player used hand vibrato to make plaintive phrases tremble, and dramatic dissonances swarmed at the end. Afterward, the composer acknowledged appreciative applause for her expressive piece.
The finale of Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) finds the four players whirling away in a fast tarantella. In Ratoi’s arrangement, reproducing that effect required rapid, expert manipulation not just of the right hand’s piano keys but of the left’s bass buttons, which the player brilliantly achieved, along with dramatic crescendos and diminuendos and the occasional melody floating free of it all.
Violinist Lun Li, a previous YCA laureate, joined Ratoi for selections from Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, a favorite of the violin-and-piano repertoire. Here one missed the characteristic attack-and-decay of piano tone, which makes acoustical room for the violin. Li’s elegant neoclassical phrases and slender tone were no match for the swell and surge of Ratoi’s instrument, which, despite the player’s best efforts, tended to engulf the violin. Still, even if acoustically challenged, it was a charming and melodious performance.
To close, Ratoi tackled a work for full orchestra, Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, in a dazzling performance characterized by whip-smart dialogue between treble and bass (right and left hands), strong bellows work for marcato rhythms, and alert registration to suggest flutes one moment and a lonely clarinet the next. The pianissimo ending put a Gallic shrug at the end of this program, bringing a laugh and delighted applause from the audience.
Ratoi responded with a single encore, “Dixi-Mǎrunțica” by the Moldovan accordionist and composer Mihai Amihalachioaie, whose bee-buzzing prestissimo, syncopated accents and slow-drag interlude are presumably as challenging to play as the title and the composer’s name are to pronounce.
Young Concert Artists presents “YCA on Tour,” with violinists Risa Hokamura and Oliver Neubauer, violist Toby Appel, and cellists James Baik and Benett Tsai, in works by Elizondo, Dohnányi and Schubert, 7 p.m. Feb. 5, 2026 in Merkin Hall. yca.org/event
Leave a Comment
