condition (records/cover): NM / NM

The accordion arrived late in the concert hall. Its associations with popular music, with folk entertainment, with the street rather than the stage, gave contemporary composers pause - and then, beginning in the 1960s, gave them material. The instrument's capacity for sustained tone, its microtonal flexibility, its ability to produce dense chordal textures or piercing single lines: when composers began writing for it seriously, they found something genuinely new. In Poland, no one was more important to this process than Zbigniew Koźlik - accordionist, composer, and above all the performer around whom an entire repertoire was built. By the time this LP appeared, Koźlik had already premiered more than seventy works written specifically for him.

The Pro Viva label - a smaller Polish imprint alongside the dominant Polskie Nagrania and Muza - published some of the most singular chamber and solo documentation of the Polish avant-garde during the 1970s and 1980s. This LP is among them: a record of what the concert accordion had become in Poland by the late 1970s, in the hands of a performer who had shaped the instrument's entire contemporary identity. The works presented here, drawn from composers who worked closely with Koźlik over the preceding decade, span extended technique, electroacoustic combinations, and the kind of concentrated formal construction that takes a single timbre and pushes it toward its limits.

A document of a scene that built itself around a single performer - which is not a diminution but a description of how the most interesting repertoires are often made. Original Pro Viva pressing.