RFI Musique: What does the accordion bring to Bach’s music?
Richard Galliano: A rare touch. Accordionists have been playing Bach for fifty or sixty years now, but not many people know about it. The accordion is like a portable organ and it works well with Bach, but there’s a risk of falling into the “great organ trap”, in other words, using the accordion to play material composed for an organ. I interpret music written for violin, piano and oboe, which sounds much better on the accordion. And I perform in a classical sextet, playing some of the better-known Bach pieces, which are very accessible.  The accordion that I use was manufactured 200 years after Bach’s time, and yet it feels perfectly natural to interpret his work, as if it had been composed for the accordion.

As a musician and composer, what does playing Bach do for you?
It’s a great lesson in humility. Bach was a musical craftsman. There is never any gratuitous artifice in his compositions. His music is always very deep and humble. And I take real pleasure in playing this music in a sextet and bringing out the classical emotion. It’s very different from playing contemporary music or jazz.

In 1979 you played Ravel and Debussy, and now Johann Sebastian Bach. Do you come from a classical background?
Let’s say that I’ve always been interested in classical music. As a child, I used to copy out short biographies of the great composers. I had a few vinyl records that I used to listen to a lot: composers like Chopin and Giocchino Rossini. Then there was the conservatoire. I extended my classical culture and discovered jazz, which I found just as fascinating. Now I like all kinds of music. Yesterday, for example, I sat down at my son’s drum kit, put on a James Brown CD and had a great time playing funky music! To get back to classical, I can’t stand the idea of “scholarly” music.

Is playing Bach on the accordion part of your “New Musette” approach; another way of destroying the accordion’s easy listening image?
I was a teenager in the sixties and seventies, the heyday of jazz swing. It was an era for accordion dancing. I’ve got nothing against folk music, but there was an obligatory way to play the accordion then, always with a smile, it was a real cliché. Some people, like Yvette Horner (the best musician of them all), André Verchuren and Marcel Azzola did the accordion a disservice because they played it out of tune, with one reed in tune, another very low and another very high. It might make a poetic sound, but if you only play the instrument like that, it sounds like a swarm of bees. The result was that music lovers rejected the instrument because they thought that’s what the accordion sounded like. As a teenager I really suffered from that image and I wanted to set things straight. And I still feel that way!

How do the public react to this new album?
Really well! It’s a nice surprise because it’s been at the top of the classical music charts. But there’s still some musical racism out there. Two years ago I was on a TV programme and a woman in the audience reacted to the project by saying, “Bach on the accordion, how funny”. Clichés don’t die easily. But although the accordion’s image has really moved on in France, people have trouble considering it as an instrument in its own right. And yet it’s an all-round instrument that’s used a lot in Forró in northern Brazil and in the Balkans for example. On stage, I often start with Bach, then play Piazzola and move on to my own compositions. I stick to Bach’s score, I don’t improvise at all. The atmosphere in the audience is almost religious, and something magical takes place with the musicians. Then, with Piazzola, the audience relaxes and reacts more openly, they let themselves go a bit more.