Music
Suzan Peeters
The accordion romantic? Not in the hands of this audacious mechanic-cum-adventurer
Accordionists are hard workers and their chosen tool seems to toil along with them. No other instrument huffs, putters, squeaks and creaks, or makes so much peripheral noise. Suzan Peeters approaches it like a mechanic. She knows the 'cassotto' in particular—a sound chamber that provides the accordion with its warm hum—inside out, and does things with it that will make purists fume. In the hands of the Brussels composer and improviser, an entire festival meadow fits into that small crawl space, high up in the instrument, where the machine violence is bound to make your ears flap and tradition takes a dangerous, distant flight, as befits an early-19th-century invention.
