XLCR HomeEXCELSIOR DeclassifiedThis isn't your usual "new world" fare, to be sure, but it's a great record for anyone with a love of the accordion, the violin and a skewed sensibility. Excelsior is comprised of Evan Harlan on squeezebox, Mimi Rabson on violin, Claudio Ragazzi on electric guitar and Grant Smith on drums. They attack the works of Dmitri Shostakovich, Samuel Barber, Igor Stravinsky and Francis Poulenc with a sense of humor, aggressive production and a generally "bad" attitude. Harlan leads the charge with his accordion, squeezing surprising and unexpected lines out of music more commonly associated with a sedated Carnegie Hall audience than the smoky nightclub his playing evokes. The music runs from straight readings to almost unrecognizable hatchet jobs and it's all done with wit and style.
-- Cliff Furnald, CMJ/New World
Serious music interpreted with contemporary verve
SOMERVILLE - About 200 years ago, classical music stopped being music and became Art. By now, especially with "new music," one often feels that it is the audience's duty to appreciate the performance, rather than the performer's duty to entertain and engage the audience.
Thank God for Excelsior, which appeared Thursday night at Johnny D's in Somerville, playing Shostakovich's piano preludes transcribed for accordion, electric violin, electric guitar and drums. The group also played transcriptions of Stravinsky, Poulenc, Barber and Ginastera. The performance was complex, challenging and fiendishly virtuosic, but also lots of fun.
Evan Harlan, Excelsior's accordionist and arranger, says that in general the pieces are "religious" transcriptions of the composers' scores. He insists that if they feel like tangos, polkas or hard rock, it's because that feel was there in the original.
Guitarist Claudio Ragazzi says the point is to play the written score as if every note were being improvised on the spot. The result is that the gimmickry of the concept disappears and the music succeeds entirely on its own terms.
Excelsior's work is reminiscent of Astor Piazzolla's "new tango" or the Berlin theater music of Kurt Weill, both of which blend high art with gut impact. The set was an impeccably programmed emotional roller-coaster ride, mixing light, dancing melodies with dark, atonal exploration.
Shostakovich's Op. 87, Prelude 14, which Excelsior has retitled "Gulag," began with Mimi Rabson's violin wailing like a police siren, then built from ominous foreboding to brutal cacophony, ending just short of physical pain. It was followed by the soothingly lyrical "memoir" (Op. 34, No. 10) and the jerky, perky "Bit Part" (Prelude 2), acting as a bridge into the complexity of Barber's First Excursion for Piano, which Excelsior calls "Get a Horse."
Harlan had some brief trouble with his accordion synthesizer, but otherwise the use of electronics was impressively tasteful and imaginative. Rabson got amazing sounds out of her six-string violin, using an octave pedal to play in bass range and screaming like a hard rocker on "Mimi Goes Me(n)tal (Prelude 17).
Ragazzi, better known for jazz work, proved he could rock, and balanced the drawn-out accordion and violin tones with his choppier attack. Grant Smith's drumming emphasized the varied, shifting rhythms.
Harlan provided a solid underpinning, and soloed with grace and fine dynamic control. On "Stone Polka" (Prelude 8), you could hear the accordion breathing, giving the music an acoustic earthiness to balance the electric overdrive. So much "new music" is played with a sterility out of keeping with its adventurousness that it was wonderful to see serious musicians getting rowdy, moving around onstage and playing with such warmth and passion.
-- Elijah Wald, Boston Globe
Excelsior: where Stravinski meets rock
Excelsior performs the music of 20th-century composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Francis Poulenc, and Igor Stravinski. But if you are expecting dusty drawing rooms and tuxedos, your are in for a surprise. This band not only deconstructs and reinterprets the classical ideas of the European masters, it also rocks out like nobody's business.
"We just can't help ourselves," says Evan Harlan, 43, who plays accordion in the group. "Rock music is in all of our backgrounds."
Harlan's first rock experiences were in high school as a keyboardist playing the psychedelic music of groups like Vanilla Fudge. Violinist Mimi Rabson is a founding and current member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, but her rock background includes backing up Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Drummer Grant Smith has solid punk credentials: he played with The Violent Femmes.
Inspired by Emerson, Lake and Palmer's liberal interpretation of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," Harlan, who had been touring with jazz and World Music ensembles and composing for soundtracks, assembled Rabson, Smith, and Latin jazz guitarist Claudio Ragazzi for his own radical reinterpretation of some of Shostakovich's preludes. It worked so well they decided to form Excelsior, a moniker that came from the brand name of Harlan's accordion.
To keep the group focused, Harlan chooses composers from the same era.
"It has to be music that the accordion works for," he says. "The are all composers who used folk melodies, or the way they wrote had that kind of dance-like quality to it."
-- David Wildman, Boston Globe
Excelsior creates classic with folk interpretations
Classical composers in the early 20th century often made cunning use of folk-music melodies, yet the merging of the two genres has largely ended with the sheet music of the greats.
Evan Harlan has taken the combination one daring step further. His band Excelsior zeroes in on composers fascinated with folk, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Barber and Francis Poulenc and then arranges their piano pieces for accordion, electric violin, electric guitar and drums. The result is brilliant, funny and slightly mad. The underpinnings range from Jimi Hendrix-like apocalyptic blues to antic sprees of polkas, waltzes, horas and hoedowns.
"We thought we'd open up, draw on the full extent of our backgrounds and not rule anything out," says accordionist Harlan. "Maybe I'm being perverse, but everything seems to flow from the original compositions in a natural way."
Excelsior, the brand name of Harlan's accordion, began as a Shostakovich project. On "Declassified," its debut CD, 10 of Shostakovich's 24 preludes are interpreted, and while most include improvised segments, even the note-for-note readings sound radical. What were once solo piano vehicles are now highly amped attacks replete with violin and guitar distortions.
Excelsior isn't merely clever. Every tune emits emotion, and what's unique, the modern air of nervous breakdown merges with folky, life-affirming merriment. It isn't so much apocalypse being evoked as a carnival-ride-world skewing off-kilter.
Harlan, former Orange Then Blue pianist, met violinist Mimi Rabson and drummer Grant Smith in the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Guitarist Claudio Ragazzi comes from Brazil with jazz and tango roots.
-- Daniel Gewertz, Boston Herald