Classical music at the crossroads

Eric Clapton wasn’t the only artist to title a noteworthy album Crossroads in 2024.

There were also the Latvian classical accordionist Ksenija Sidorova, who with the Normunds Šnē–conducted Sinfonietta Rīga released Crossroads (Alpha) in October, and the Armenian pianist Hayk Melikyan, who released Crossroads 2023: Live at Komitas Museum-Institute (Amara LLC, Yerevan) one month later.

Both recordings illustrate what crossroads symbolize: the need to make a decision or the meeting of two worlds.

The worlds that meet on Sidorova’s Crossroads are that of J.S. Bach and those of his 21st-century heirs Sergey Akhunov, Gabriela Montero, and Dobrinka Tabakova—the late Baroque, in other words, and whatever period (surely “post” something) that we’re in now.

Bach’s energetic Concerto in D Minor, especially with the whiff of Parisian cafés that an accordion inevitably brings, makes a striking contrast leading into the delicacy of Akhunov’s accordion-­only “Sketch III” (inspired by Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier) and the gradually accumulating layers of his sinfonietta-and-accordion Chaconne. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of Bach’s “Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and Tabakova’s Horizons works in reverse: four minutes of prayerful accordion followed by eight minutes that Sidorova accurately describes in the liner notes as “otherworldly, transcendental, cosmic.”

Hayk Melikyan’s Crossroads, meanwhile, confronts the listener with a choice: namely, whether to embrace the eight contemporary compositions that Melikyan performs as the shape of “classical” music to come or as old film-noir, suspense-building soundtrack music rebranded for an audience too young to remember such media.

The pieces could, of course, be both. But how ironic if today’s cutting edge (a fitting metaphor given the jagged nature of many of the pieces’ microtonal clusters) turns out merely to be a case of “Everything old is new again.” Or, to root the matter further in the past, what if the debate is just a contemporary version of the one over Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, which its defenders considered a revolutionary masterpiece in the depiction of motion but the critic Julius Meier-Graefe considered an “explosion in a shingles factory”? There’s certainly something cubist about the four movements of György Kurtág’s aptly titled Splinters.

At least once, however, the orbits of two worlds intersect. Over the course of nearly eight minutes, Artur Akshelyan’s “Where the Farthest Stars Sink Down …” moves from an opening worthy of Debussy into something like a classical pianist’s idea of jazz improvisation and back again, exemplifying a “swinging” pendulum in more ways than one.