Acoustic Accordions

Motion Trio are three Polish accordion players: Janusz Wojtarowicz, Pawel Baranek and Marcin Galazyn. Since their debut CD, Pictures from the Street (Asphalt Tango), they’ve been involved in various film and collaborative projects. This new recording came out of a commission from the Polish Cultural Institute in London for the current POLSKA! year of Polish culture. It features nine tracks of Michael Nyman’s music, principally from his Peter Greenaway films, arranged for the three accordions plus occasional solos from Nigel Barr on horns and Nyman on piano.

The opening ‘In Re Don Giovanni’ is all repeated chords, chugging rhythms, melodies and chord progressions borrowed from Leporello’s ‘Catalogue Aria’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Chugging chords are Nyman’s signature device, prominent here in ‘Knowing the Ropes’ (from Drowning by Numbers), ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’ and ‘Miranda’ (from Prospero's Books) and ‘Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds’ from The Draughtsman's Contract, the film that first brought Nyman to popular attention. It makes the slower, more introspective moments like ‘Trysting Fields,’ with its mellow, overlapping chords and fragments of melody slowly building in intensity, all the more welcome. The final ‘Silence’ is a piece by Motion Trio, taking its cue from Nyman’s sound world, but with sparer textures leading to a long held note and then, well, silence.