The clarinet-accordion combination has never achieved the status of, say, the violin sonata in chamber music, and this is no accident. Both instruments carry a double identity: the clarinet has balanced between salon and folk festival ever since Mozart, the accordion between musette and concert hall, and whoever combines them must either smooth out this ambiguity or deliberately cultivate it. Yet it is precisely this borderline position that makes both instruments attractive to composers seeking a sonic world in which the popular and the refined do not exclude each other but can actually reinforce one another. Reedin' the Air, the new Da Vinci Classics release featuring clarinetist Emanuele Salvatore Anzalone and accordionist Mario Romeo – together known as Duo RomAnce – deliberately embraces this approach and makes this ambiguity the foundation of the entire program. This is no coincidence: the first seven compositions on this CD were written specifically for the duo and dedicated to them. In this way, the album documents not only new repertoire for a distinctive instrumental combination but also a fruitful collaboration between composers and performers.
The opening triptych by Alberto Tomarchio (b.1962) sets the tone without hesitation. Au Moulin Rouge is theater in sound, with a cabaret curtain that seems almost audibly opening, though the piece sometimes remains somewhat trapped in its own theatrical gesture: the playful character of the music receives in performance precisely the lightness it requires. It is, however, especially Rubik's Cube that shows how inventively this composer handles rhythm and color. What on paper seems an intractable game of meter and movement becomes here a natural fluidity: the music constantly surprises but never loses its dancing character. Romeo gives the accordion a solid foundation, while Anzalone above it unfolds his lines with great lightness and agility. The result is not a musical puzzle but a playful dialogue in which both instruments continually challenge and complement each other.
With Roberto Cipollina (b.1994), the register shifts from the playful to the narrative, and here lies immediately one of the most difficult balancing acts on the album. Lu re d'amuri seeks to evoke a Sicilian fairy tale without illustrating it, which means the music must function through allusion rather than program. This largely succeeds: the recurring motifs are given enough space to become familiar before they are disrupted again, and the duo knows how to convey the shift between the tragic and the ironic – those two inseparable poles of Sicilian storytelling – without caricature.
Shapes 898 by Francesca Adamo (b.1987) is a short but intriguing miniature in which an asteroid, named after Hildegard von Bingen, serves as the starting point for an encounter between twelfth-century mysticism and a contemporary sonic world. Not a monumental gesture but a concentrated musical thought in which silence and suggestion become as important as movement. The piece therefore asks not so much for time but for a different way of listening: it lingers like a question, not an answer.
It is, however, Guernica, 26/4/1937 by Gorka Hermosa (b.1976) that forms the moral and musical weight of the album, and it deserves not to be passed over too quickly. The piece refers directly to the bombing during the Spanish Civil War and to Picasso's painting that followed barely a month later – two artworks, two media, one fury. While Picasso's canvas freezes destruction in a monumental image of horror, Hermosa chooses the time dimension of music: not a depiction of violence but a sonic trace of memory and resistance. That Hermosa wrote it as a seventeen-year-old, in barely a week, and confined himself to diminished fourths and sevenths, is in itself a curiosity; what ultimately gives the piece its power is that this limitation never sounds like poverty but like discipline. The duo opts for a strikingly spare interpretation: Anzalone's nearly vibrato-free clarinet and Romeo's restrained accordion playing avoid any hint of effect-seeking. One gesture too many, one dynamic lapse into the sentimental, and the piece would have drowned in pathos. It is precisely this danger that is avoided here.
Not everything on the album reaches that level. Full Tarantella by Carmelo Mantione (b.1980) is technically adroit with its three contrapuntally interwoven themes but lacks at times that touch of shamelessness a tarantella needs to not sound like a learned exercise; the irony lies mostly in the title and less in the music itself. Mario Romeo's own Diamond Dance, in which the accordion creates a sliding, harmonically ambiguous sonic backdrop above which the clarinet dreams, is another kind of problem: the piece is atmospheric and convincing in sound but is rather long-winded in relation to its limited material – a matter of form, not content.
Eddy Flecijn's (b.1962) closing , BWV 1001-1006 — and when I listen to his music, there is something that clears the mind and orders everything. It has the same effect as meditation., written for the interludes of Marie Ndiaye's theatre play Hilda, brings yet another kind of commentary with it. The emotional richness of the series – hope, betrayal, anger, remorse – certainly comes into its own for the most part, but the dramaturgical coherence that the suite undoubtedly had in the theatre is less directly tangible for those who hear the piece solely as concert music. This is not a shortcoming of the performance, but rather an inevitable loss when theatre music is severed from its original context; it does explain why the CD ultimately ends with a series of strong impressions rather than a fully rounded musical statement.
Technically, this repertoire is anything but a free pass: the constant switching between rhythmic precision, lyrical freedom, and colour changes demands an exceptional sense of timing and breath from both musicians, and this mastery is constantly audible. But ultimately, it is not technical perfection that tips the scales here, but rather the natural ease with which Duo RomAnce brings new repertoire to life. Alongside an absolute highlight such as Guernica , there are also pieces that don't reach quite as far, and precisely because of that, Reedin' the Air feels like an honest portrait of what is being written for clarinet and accordion today: with peaks, annotations, and everything in between – not as a curated selection of polished miniatures.
What remains most striking is the natural ease with which Duo RomAnce approaches this music. Anzalone and Romeo do not treat the clarinet and accordion as opposing forces that must be reconciled, but as two voices that have found each other. The fact that the first seven works were specially written for them and dedicated to them says much: this duo doesn't merely perform new repertoire, but has also actively contributed to its creation. They play with infectious dedication and show that contemporary music can be just as playful, warm, and communicative as classical repertoire. Perhaps that is the greatest achievement of this release: it makes no pretence to prove anything, but does so precisely through the natural ease with which this music sounds here. Anyone who Reedin' the Air listens hears not a curious instrumental combination, but music that sounds so natural that you wonder why this repertoire is still played so rarely.
