Aria

The witty liner notes to this collaboration liken the meeting between accordionist Richard Galliano and organist Thierry Escaich to a frog and a cow who are utterly different and yet free from envy or pride. Both of the pair's instruments harness the wind, and there are times in Galliano's back catalogue that he has sought – like his musical hero Astor Piazzolla – to give his humble squeezebox the intensity of an ecclesiastical instrument.

Aria kicks off with the title-track, which is an almost Bach-like meditation on silence and serenity. The third track, ‘La Follia’, is like a Beethoven toccata, while the seventh is an adagio for an oboe. Throughout these and other pieces, the mighty lungs of the organ of Berne's French Church bellow and boom, ripple and resonate. When the pair tackle Piazzolla's ‘Oblivion’, from the soundtrack to the 1984 film Enrico IV, the solemnity is mitigated by Galliano's playful pulses on the accordion. Other tango-inflected songs allow him space to breathe and turn a risky but fun experiment into a collaboration that finds a rich seam of emotion somewhere in the gaps between notes.