Three British Accordion Concertos: Dove, Jacob, McGuire

The development of an original classical repertoire for the accordion began with Mogens Ellegaard in his native Denmark and his student, the Scot Owen Murray, in the UK. In 1976 Ellegaard gave the first broadcast performance of Gordon Jacob's pastoral, elegant Concerto, which treats the accordion almost as a chamber organ. The two concertos written for Owen Murray a generation and more later open out the possibilities of the accordion much more adventurously, exploiting its extraordinary range of colour, its striking range of expression and its mercurial ability to weave through orchestral textures.