As Dermot Dunne tells it, the series of broadening vistas that have constituted his musical life to date have all been more or less a matter of chance. Ireland's best-known classical accordionist, winner of the RTE Musician of the Future Competition in 1996, was in third or fourth class at primary school when he got drawn into learning the recorder from a nun who was giving lessons after school hours. "I'd never had an interest in music per se, but I was always keen on anything new, and anything that had a technique, whether it was computer games, reading, whatever . . . like any kid, discovering, exploring."
The accordion had actually come into his life at an earlier age, when his eldest sister, 12 or 13 years his senior, took it up. "But I was so terrified of it every time she played it that I'd cry. This was when I was about three or four."
These ages, like most of the ages, numbers and dates in his conversation, are given as approximations. But about the occasion when he fell in love with the accordion he's quite specific. He heard an accordionist play Scott Joplin's The Entertainer at the auditions for an inter-school music competition, and he was hooked. He was fascinated both by the music, and by the instrument, which, he felt, offered challenges far greater and much more interesting than those of the recorder.
He didn't go for lessons at first. There were seven children in the family, and lessons might well have been an expensive folly if the fascination with the accordion had turned out to be no more than a passing fancy. It didn't. "I practised more and more, and taught myself a lot about reading the chords for the left hand, and things I didn't know from having learnt the recorder." And then, when lessons were finally deemed in order, the local teacher, Paddy Kavanagh, was a good one: "highly respected, the best teacher I could have found at the time". The young pupil followed the usual path of grade exams, though not those of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (which didn't cater for accordionists at that time), but of the Irish Institute of Accordion Studies.
Along the way he encountered Patricia Kavanagh, accordion-playing daughter of Paddy Kavanagh, who gave him lessons on summer visits from Taiwan, where she was living at the time. When she returned to settle in Ireland, she became his teacher, with an approach he describes as "very unacademic". "We didn't have any particular time for a lesson. I'd practise for a while, and we'd fit in around each other's schedules. Then I might have three or four lessons in a week, and they could go on for hours. I'd be down at her house - she lived in Wicklow - or she'd visit me in Dublin. I've certain fond memories of sessions on Bach, going into the depths of the F sharp minor Prelue and Fugue from Book Two. It seemed inexhaustible, the work, particularly in Bach. And all of these lessons were free - she never took a penny from me for them." But a career in music doesn't seem to have been on his mind. On leaving school he went to UCD, to do actuarial and financial studies, completing his three-year course, while studying with Patricia Kavanagh, and doing "a considerable amount of teaching" for her father, who had retired. In the last year of his degree studies, he entered the inaugural West Belfast Classical Bursary competition. "It's a very free competition, there are very few restrictions. Even the Musician of the Future is divided into categories, but in Belfast anybody could basically play or sing whatever they wanted for a specific amount of time."
Rather to his surprise, he was among the winners and his prize, which included recordings for the BBC and RTE, brought him into contact with "the formidable Jane Carty". She encouraged him to enter the Musician of the Future Competition, in a new category which was open to a range of instrumentalists who didn't fit into the standard groupings. The rest, as they say, is history. I remember hearing from one of the jury members of the West Belfast Classical Bursary about an accordionist from Dublin with an awe-inspiring virtuoso technique. In the Musician of the Future finals, the music - a concerto by Zolotaryov - was Soviet-era kitsch, but the performance was blessed with an unassuming star quality. The next move, to study in Kiev, was one that, in a sense, had already been beckoning. A visiting adjudicator at an accordion competition, a Professor Semyonov from Moscow who was also a composer, had opened Dunne's ears to the potential of the freebass accordion, where the conventional chord-based left-hand keyboard is replaced by a keyboard of individual notes. And so it was to the Russian sphere of influence that he gravitated next. In Kiev, where he's still studying, there are 60 or more students with accordion as their principal instrument.
The repertoire studied there, however, is very inward-looking. "Knowing what I know now, I would have actually gone to Germany four years ago. Germany is a wonderful centre. But I did have this draw for Russia. And, there was also this technical brilliance associated with Russian schools of music, strings, piano and accordion, which attracted me."
Dunne has clearly been fired by some of the music he encountered there, including the accordion works of Sofia Gubaidulina, pieces which, he says, you're actually less likely to encounter in Russia than abroad. He now talks enthusiastically about the fact that there are works for accordion by Berio, Kagel, Cage and Yun, and realises that there's a substantial body of late 20th-century music awaiting his attention.
The Belfast-born composer Deirdre Gribbin chose an all-accordion programme as her contribution to the National Concert Hall's Composer's Choice series last April, and Dunne and Gribbin will be teaming up for a late-night concert at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November. And he's in discussion with the West Cork Chamber Music Festival about programming chamber music with accordion next year, with a special focus on works by Gubaidulina, in advance of the celebration of her 70th birthday in October 2001.
But, much as he might be interested in moving to Germany - and he even has a particular teacher in mind, Elsbeth Moser - Dermot Dunne is determined to stay in Kiev a little bit longer. He has taken up the study of conducting, and, once again, regards himself as particularly fortunate in his teachers. At home he has already worked as musical director of Opera Theatre Company's tour of Donizetti's The Love Potion (last performances at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, tonight and tomorrow night), and this day week, he'll make his orchestral debut in a lunchtime concert with the RTE Concert Orchestra at the NCH.
"Conducting is very difficult to get into. As an instrumentalist you practise and practise. And then, when you're ready, you play your concert. It's easy to organise a solo concert. You hire a hall, and you get your aunties and uncles to come along. But if you're conducting, you have to be offered an orchestra or some sort of chamber ensemble to work with." The nature of the next major vista will reveal itself as he faces the challenges of Verdi, Aroit, Thomas, Smetana, Oscar Strauss, Wallace and Tchaikovsky with soloist, soprano Cara O'Sullivan, and the RTECO next week.
It's an interesting programme for him. He's already talking about the dilemma of balancing his interest in opera and symphonic music. He sounds like a young man who knows no barriers.
