Salvatore Accardo (*1941)

No. 377 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/377-salvatore-accardo-1941-alc

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

Today’s A la Carte montage is fashioned around Salvatore Accardo’s visit with the Montreal Symphony in May of 1986, which we featured on a past Once Upon the Internet post.

Salvatore Accardo was born in Turin in a family coming from the South of Italy: his father Vincenzo, artist engraver of cameos was passionate with music and his mother was a primary school teacher. At 3 he asked for a violin and began to play to ear, at 5 he began his studies in Naples with the musician and pedagogue Luigi D’Ambrosio, later he entered the Naples Conservatorio of San Pietro a Majella where at 13 he graduated  full marks playing for the first time Paganini’s Caprices, earning the first prize of the 1958 Paganini Competition in Genoa. 

Admitted ad honorem at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena, Accardo studied there with Yvonne Astruc, former pupil and assistent of George Enescu, starting to be friends with his classmates: Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Charles Dutoit, and Maurizio Pollini.

 He was a leader of "I Musici" (1972-1977) and has long been associated with Italian and European ensembles; he founded the Settimane Musicali Internazionali in Naples, the Accardo Quartet in 1992 and he was one of the founders of the Walter Stauffer Academy in 1986. and the Cremona String Festival in 1971. In 1996, he re-founded the Orchestra da Camera Italiana (O.C.I.).

He has an extensive discography of almost 50 recordings on Philips, DG, EMI, Sony Classical, Foné, Dynamic, and Warner-Fonit. Part of today’s montage includes selections from the Italian RCA release "Salvatore Accardo’s magic bow" featuring violin and piano showpieces.

From the MSO concert, we packaged his performance of the Stravinsky violin concerto and Ravel’s Tzigane,

I think you will (still) love this music too.