APO and Cresswell’s Dragspil: a concerto comes home

James Crabb, accordionist, performs Lyell Cresswell’s accordion concerto Dragspil with the APO this week

Accordions are naturally fascinating objects. They are hefty and you can push things and pull things and squeeze things, and they make loud noises, except when you get it wrong and they make wheezy noises. 
James Crabb’s father had a beautiful white example. With a keyboard down one side and buttons on the other it was tactile and supremely covetable.  

“There was something about the care my father took when he put it down,” recalls the younger Crabb, who performs Lyell Cresswell’s accordion concerto Dragspil with the APO on 18 May. “Here was something precious.”

Crabb found the instrument impossible to resist and began lessons in Scotland, his home country, aged four. In his teens he was spotted by a competition adjudicator, who urged Crabb to go to Copenhagen and attend the Royal Danish Academy of Music, the leading conservatoire for classical accordionists. 

“I went there thinking I was pretty good,” says Crabb. “I was brought right back down to earth.”

Still, he was good enough to stay at the academy 25 years, first as a student and then professor, occasionally bumping into trombonist Giordano Bellincampi, now the APO’s music director (“I’m not sure we had a beer together,” says Crabb, “but I remember him.”) 

These days, Crabb lives in Australia, but he’s performed in New Zealand only once, at the Adam Chamber Music Festival. Cresswell’s concerto, meanwhile, has never been played here at all, despite its composer hailing originally from these shores, before moving to Scotland in the 1970s.

New Zealand composer Lyell Cresswell (1944 - 2022)

…his Dragspil will have its New Zealand debut this week.

Photo credit: Gareth Watkins

Cresswell wrote the work for Crabb to play at the 1995 BBC Proms, a big deal for any composer or performer.

“A new accordion concerto raised some eyebrows,” Crabb says. “But the feedback was fantastic, and it was important to play at the Proms.”

Cresswell's death in 2022 brings a bittersweet edge to Dragspil’s New Zealand debut. [Read a tribute to Cresswell here.]

“We spoke about playing it [in New Zealand] for years,” says Crabb. “We got close a couple of times but things have to align. I hope he was positive enough to know that it would happen some time.”

Dragspil, says Crabb, is difficult but not unplayable, and even the ending, which the accordionist describes as “a kind of madness” displays Cresswell’s famed wit. 

James Crabb

…premiering Cresswell’s concerto in New Zealand after the composer’s death is “bittersweet”.

Photo credit: Christoffer Askman

“It has a pulsating groove, a ceilidh stomp. I can just see Lyell chuckling away at this incessant, primal thing,” Crabb says. “It takes you by the collar and won’t let go. And when you think it’s over, it steps up another level and off it goes again. You’ve just got to hang on.”

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra with James Crabb, accordion, Dragspil, Auckland Town Hall, and broadcast live on RNZ Concert, Thursday 18 May. Tickets here.

This article was first published in NZ Listener issue May 13, 2023.