The Scotsman Sessions #186: Sofia Ros

Welcome to the award-winning Scotsman Sessions. With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman.com, with introductions from our critics. Here, accordionist Sofia Ros performs Scarlatti’s Sonata in B minor K87

Last year’s lockdown fell at a particularly complicated time for Spanish-born, Scottish-based accordionist Sofia Ros. She’d been completing her final year at St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh when she suddenly had to fly home to Santander, after the Covid situation in both countries began fast deteriorating. She was able to return to Scotland for the start of her first term at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, but has since headed back again to Spain.

“I studied in person at the RCS for the first term,” she explains, “but after Christmas, they decided to take everything online. At the moment I’m home in Spain again – I’d love to go back to Scotland as soon as I can.”

But it’s been far from time wasted. Last autumn, she topped one of the accordion world’s most prestigious contests, winning the Junior Classique prize at the Trophée Mondial de l’Accordéon.

"The competition is usually held in different places all over the world,” she explains, “which makes travelling to it really expensive, especially since an accordion takes an extra plane seat. But this year they held it online, and judged recordings that contestants made – and when you’re making a recording, you can repeat it as many times as you like until you’re happy with it. The accordion world is so small that everyone knows everyone else, so people will hopefully remember – it can open doors for you in the future.”

Ros has chosen Scarlatti’s Sonata in B minor K87 for her Scotsman Session, originally written for harpsichord.

"Scarlatti is a really important composer for accordionists – it’s obviously quite a new instrument in the classical world, so there’s no older music written for it. He was Italian but spent many years in Spain and Portugal, and I can really hear that in his music, in its sense of fun, its character and its dances.”

For more on Sofia Ros, visit https://www.facebook.com/sofiaros.acc/

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