Tim Ashley’s review of the BBCSO/Knussen Prom (8 August) refers to the UK premiere of Reinbert de Leeuw’s vast Der Nächtliche Wanderer, in which the composer renders banal a piano elegy by Wagner by playing it on the accordion. De Leeuw was not the first serious composer to try out Wagner on this instrument. In his remarkable CD for Winter and Winter entitled Wagner e Venezia, the New York jazz pianist Uri Caine recorded a series of Wagner lollipops live for a klezmer band, the music played completely without irony and with evident love, featuring, of course, an accordion, notably murmuring alluringly in the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. A beautiful and penetrating set of Wagner realisations (like de Leeuw, Caine has recorded populist and often quite bizarre versions of many other composers’ works, including by Bach, Mozart and Schumann – and Mahler for klezmer band, of course).
Bob Connell
Amberley, West Sussex
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