Martynas, interview - Telegraph "Rick was obsessed with accordion music and with finding an accordion player, and he told his office to look for one," says Martynas. I heard it took them 18 months, and then luckily they found me. They said "We'd like to meet you and why don't you play for us?"" One of the things that persuaded Blaskey of Martynas's potential was a YouTube clip of him at the 2011 opening ceremony of the TV show Lithuania's Got Talent (which is just like ours but in Lithuania), Martynas having won the competition the previous year. This showed him strolling among the crowd, wearing preposterous white shorts and boots and playing - and singing - Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely before being whisked into the night sky on wires. We've got him! He's the one!" whooped Blaskey. Winner: accdionist Martynas on Lithuania's Got Talent We're talking just after Martynas has delivered a showcase performance for his new Decca album, which is called merely Martynas. The disc has been designed to show off both his virtuosity and the breadth of material which the accordion can handle, whether that's film music by Ennio Morricone, Brazilian pop songs or a chunk of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Since it's basically a wind-powered keyboard instrument, a kind of miniature organ, it can play pretty much anything you could play on other keyboard instruments. In a cramped Soho basement, Martynas and his small band had run through the "Habañera" from Carmen, the theme from Verdi's La forza del destino and his own arrangement of Lady Gaga's Telephone, all delivered with a showman's panache and helpful introductions in fluent English. After a bar mitzvah-style knees-up with Hava Nagila, he sat alone and played a very plausible version of "Winter" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons for a finale. "People underestimate the accordion all the time," says Martynas. It has this image of being all folky-folky, but I'm trying to create a new identity for it. It's interesting to explore all the musical genres, and the accordion can play anything. I've even recorded Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in A Minor as extra digital download tracks. Martynas cheerfully admits there's a side to him which loves performing popular pieces to a riotous crowd, but his Royal Academy course was strictly geared to the classical side of the accordion. Back in Lithuania, he'd progressed methodically through state-assisted music schools (a legacy of the Soviet era) and spent four years in a conservatory while learning the technical and musical secrets of the instrument. "At the Royal Academy I studied a lot of contemporary music written for modern accordion, and sometimes the scores are full of graphics which aren't actually music, but more like drawings," he explains. There's a bunch of Russian composers who are really important in the contemporary repertoire - Sofia Gubaidulina for instance - and Luciano Berio has written a sequenza for accordion. Then there are also transcriptions of classical pieces for the accordion. Martynas has already had experience of playing classical concerts in the Royal Festival Hall and Wigmore Hall, yet any accordion-player must almost inevitably have grown up with the instrument's heritage in folk and popular music. Martynas first played it when he was three, when he was spending a childhood summer at his family's holiday house. That house in the forest was one of the most memorable things in my childhood, and it was in that house that I picked up an accordion for the first time. My uncle bought me my first accordion. It was just a little squeeze-box and there wasn't much you could play on it, but I used to play folk songs and sing along with myself. It wasn't until he was eight and began studying in earnest at a school in Siauliai that he realised there were rules to be learned, as well as something called "technique." I used to just play with two fingers, I didn't know anything else, and then there was this teacher telling me you had to use all five. For the first two years I didn't make any significant progress, I was just a talented kid but I didn't give too much importance to practising. But once his teachers spotted his huge potential and began entering him in music competitions, Martynas knuckled down to serious study. He began winning competitions all over Europe, and in 2004 became the first accordion player to win Lithuania's Queen Morta prize. In 2010 he won the Coupe Mondiale, the world cup for accordionists. That was also the year when winning Lithuania's Got Talent made him a pop star in his homeland, though he was nervous about telling his tutors and fellow-students at the Royal Academy that he was entering. Naturally, a news blackout proved impossible in this social networking age. "The Academy has a Facebook page, and everybody was coming up to me and saying "Are you the guy on YouTube who won Lithuania's Got Talent?" I was embarrassed in case they thought it was not classical and not serious, but in fact all my colleagues and friends were very happy for me. And I got lots of girls overloading my own Facebook page. Now appointed Lithuania's tourism ambassador, Martynas is looking forward to an eventful summer during which he'll pop up at the Wimbledon tennis championships and July's Henley Festival, where they're billing him under "Roving Eccentrica." "This is all a big experiment for everyone, repertoire-wise and marketing-wise," he reflects. It seems to be working quite well, but this is just the beginning. Martynas is released on Decca on July 1