“Music for Self-Isolation” recording, with accordionist Joseph Petric, Toronto Symphony musicians, and others

“Like the comic Rodney Dangerfield, the accordion ‘don’t get no respect’ in some classical music circles,” writes William Littler in Saturday’s (7/31) Toronto Star (Canada). “Not that the accordion is completely without friends, among them the Canadian composer Frank Horvat, who has featured the instrument along with a couple of dozen others in an extraordinary new compact disc album on the Centrediscs label titled ‘Music for Self-Isolation.’ … As Horvat explains in his album notes: … ‘During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic … I composed 31 short pieces of music for unaccompanied solo instrument or voice or a duo of musicians self-isolating together.’ The compositions are indeed very short … solos for the predictable piano, violin and guitar but also for the less predictable double bass, tuba and trombone…. On this album, the trombone is played … by [Associate Principal Trombone] Vanessa Fralick of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra…. [The] accordionist … is … one of Canada’s most prominent champions of the instrument, Joseph Petric, who has turned his COVID-19 self-isolation into a productive year and a half, commissioning a dozen and a half new works and working on three new compact discs, as well as preparing a set of essays.”