Gian Luigi Zampieri

If you like your Piazzolla in grande size, you will enjoy today's video which features the full Haifa Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gian Luigi Zampieri playing Adios Nonino. Zampieri not only conducts, he plays a version of Piazzolla's bandoneon part on the piano and he edited the original arrangement for orchestra created by José Bragato to tailor it for this performance. In comparison to any of Piazzolla's performances of the piece, I find the opening a bit vague but when the orchestra hits theme B at about a minute and a half into the video, there is a serious breakout of luscious beauty which continues to the end. Maestro Zampieri is no slouch at the piano but one can only dream of what this could sound like with a bravura pianist and proper sound mixing.

If you admire Zampieri's multi-tasking in this video, don't miss the video of Alevare from Maria de Buenos Aires, Piazzolla's operita, where Zampieri, in addition to his arranging and conducting duties, provides the narration voiced originally by Horaccio Ferrer.

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A YouTube Special

I want to know more about today's video. The song is Oblivion. The performers are talented. The arrangement is good. The production quality is high. But have the performers ever met each other? They refer to each other as "YT-friends". Günter Geurts, from Essen, plays the guitar and does the arrangement. Robert lives 596 km away in the village of Rain and plays the clarinet. Robert's other videos show he is also a fine guitarist, singer, and video multitracker. This latter skill explains the video. Two performances in two different places seamlessly edited together to provide a most enjoyable video experience.

Only on YouTube.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Pure Piazzolla

I have been waiting all month for that perfect quintet producing pure Piazzolla. I am still waiting but don't really mind when I find music like that provided in today's video of the Camerata Porteña performing Invierno Porteño. Nine superb musicians from Argentina devoted to the performance of Piazzolla's music and providing pure Piazzolla. The Camerata Porteña was created by the current director, Marcelo Rodríguez Scilla, in 1986 and has performed the music of Piazzolla all over the world. Their CD's are unfortunately not broadly available nor is their music available on iTunes but they do have three CD's available through their website. There are also videos available on YouTube of their perfomances of Escualo and La muerte del ángel. All enjoyable, but this is my favorite.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Piazzolla Rocks

This blog has perhaps unfairly ignored a segment of Piazzolla performers who are small but enthusiastic and who do demonstrate the reach of Piazzolla's music. That segment is the rockers. Two example have appeared this month. The first is a solo guitar interpretation of Adios Nonino by Brazilian shredder, Marcos De Ros. He is a remarkable musician and composer who shreds Schubert along with more standard heavy metal. I think he honors and respects Piazzolla in his performance here. The second is a more classic garage rock trio from Argentina, 3 de Copas, also interpreting Adios Nonino - clearly a favorite of the rockers. This performance took place in Córdoba, Argentina as part of a regular Tuesday night session held for the past seven years at a theater named "Cineclub Municipal." Their interpretation is a little looser but still respectful of the contrast between pathos and happy memories that capture the story behind the piece.

Turn up the volume and enjoy these.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Real Jazz from Rio

In monthly summaries I classify 10-15% of the Piazzolla performances posted on YouTube as "jazz" but I think most jazz musicians would say the number is much lower than that. Most are actually "pop" tunes with a jazzy arrangement. But a "real" jazz performance appeared today from some young jazz musicians from Rio who call themselves Jazzafinado. It is the improvisation that makes it "real" jazz. Four of the six members of Jazzafinado take turns with improvisations while the bass provides a steady framework and the drummer complements rather than overwhelms the music. Their tune is Libertango and their charts are well organized and structured. These guys are "real" jazz professionals.

Surprisingly, there was a second "real" jazz performance posted today but I will save that for another day. Meanwhile, enjoy Jazzafinao.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Is it the Violin or the Violinist?

How is it that some violinists have such a sweet tone while others have such a hard tone? Is the tonality built into the violin or is it in the bow or is it all in technique? Whichever, violinist Alexander Prushinskiy certainly plays a sweet violin in the Astor Trio's version of Oblivion. Oblivion is the third most played tune composed by Piazzolla and it sometimes drifts into emotional trivia but in the firm hands of the Astor Trio, it stays on the romantic rails. The other two musicians, Tobias Kassung on guitar and Dragan Trajkovski on double bass, are exceptional but it is Prushinskiy's sound, reminding me so much of the sound that Fernando Suárez Paz brought to Piazzolla's quintet, that makes this performance special.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Piazzolla in Australia

Australia has many fine musicians but until this video appeared, I must admit I was unaware of Cathie Travers and her interpretations of Piazzolla. As you can see in today's video, Travers is a very fine accordionist but she is also a noted composer in a variety of genres ranging from rock to symphonic and including tango. Her tango sensibilities are very apparent in Preludio 9 which she performs here with Perth's Juniper Chamber Orchestra. The September 16, 2008 concert at which this video was made included two other Piazzolla works, Oblivion and Tanguedia, as well as a tango written by Ms. Travers. All of the Piazzolla is very well done (and viewable through the links above) but Preludio 9 works particularly well for a small chamber orchestra. Piazzolla wrote the piece for his Conjunto 9 which with its five string players was as close to a chamber orchestra as he ever got. The Conjunto 9's original version of Preludio 9 is available in a recent CD reissue.

Many thanks to the musicians of Western Australia for this video.

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Four More Hands

Piazzolla loved fugues. Perhaps instilled in him from the Bach he learned at age 13 in New York City from Bela Wilda, one of his early music teachers. Or perhaps from the compositional exercises assigned to him from his last music teacher, Nadia Boulanger, in Paris. You will find them in much of his music. One of his best is titled simply Fugata, recorded at least twice by Piazzolla (albums Adios Nonino and La Camorra) and by many others including Gary Burton and Yo-Yo Ma. But I have never heard a one piano, four hands arrangement of the piece as played here by talented twins from Italy, Davide and Daniele Trivella.

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A Tall Tale from Belarus

It was late in Minsk as Piazzolla and his quintet finished the first set at Club Italiano, the small club owned by Piazzolla’s boyhood friend, Paulo. Piazzolla had not seen Paulo since 1959 when his friend had immigrated to Belarus with his new wife, the daughter of the Belarus ambassador to the U.S. As Piazzolla was enjoying the spaghetti and sharing memories of New York and a bottle of red wine with Paulo, entertainment was being provided by Paulo’s two young sons on piano. Both boys were born without a left arm, perhaps a condition inherited from their mother, but had mastered the art playing the piano – one taking bass, the other treble. Piazzolla, no stranger to physical disability, was soon back on the stage sharing the piano bench with the boys and improvising a bass part while the two boys applied their right hands to ever more enthusiastic treble parts. The audience soon noticed and encouraged them. The music was a strange blend of Belarussian folk music and Piazzollian rhythm. When it was over, Piazzolla grabbed a menu and with a pencil moving more deftly than most people can generate script, wrote out a score for the music they had just played, titled it “Reminiscenza” and signed it with a flourish.

That score has remained a family treasure but has never been shared publicly until Paulo’s grandsons put today’s video feature on YouTube. True to family tradition, the song is still played by three players using four hands – one left and three rights. The musical joke, introduced near the end of the tune, was not in the original music but I think Piazzolla would have enjoyed it.

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Yes, I made up the story. I believe the song is a version of Reminisence from the Piazzolla/Mulligan CD, Reunión Cumbre. It is not played very often and even more rarely with the enthusiasm shown in this video. Whoever those three young pianists are - thank you for sharing your talents. Wait . . . there's more. A new video from the same talent base in Belarus featuring four hands on two accordions playing Libertango.

Brothers Bouclier

I have been looking for many days now for a good nuevo tango quintet to feature in this blog. Such groups remain my favorite source for Piazzolla's music. Two brothers are three short of a quintet but they do put a nice nuevo tango flavor into their version of Violentango. View Dimitri Bouclier on the accordion and his brother, Julien on the violin in this video which was recorded at a concert in Bonneville - presumably the one in the Haute-Savoie, not the one in Utah.

They also posted two other Piazzolla videos: Ave Maria (Tanti Anni) and Libertango. The first is quite nice, performed in a classical mode but their version of Libertango leans a bit too far toward the Lady-of-Spain style of accordion playing for my taste.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

An Exception

This blog is supposed to focus on videos of musicians performing music composed by Astor Piazzolla but as those who glance at my Piazzolla on Video website know, about 30% of the Piazzolla videos on YouTube are photo montages of cats, dogs, people or places set to Piazzolla's music. My rule is to ignore those videos on this blog. But, I am going to make an exception for this one posted by Patriczia from Argentina. It uses the art of Antonio Berni, an Argentine artist with a distinct style, and some simple but clever animation done by Patriczia to create a bilingual children's book. The music is Adios nonino. I think my grandson will enjoy it - I hope you do to.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Ana Vidovic

Ana Vidovic is a young and beautiful Croatian guitarist who was a child phenom, giving concerts since the age of seven. She has studied with the best and perfected her technique but it is not her technique that makes her music special, it is the feeling that she expresses through her music. No where is this more apparent than in her performance of Milonga del angel in today's video which was made at the Zuidlaren Guitar Festival. The video begins with Verano Porteño (thanks to blog reader Pedro for identifying the tune correctly) which is done well, particularly the slow middle part of the piece, but it is in her slow and graceful treatment of the Milonga that her musical gifts really become apparent. None of her CD's cover the music of Piazzolla but with the quality of these performances, let's hope there is one on the way.

Note the "Part 1" in the title of this video. There is a Part 2 and it is equally good. I suggest you sample it after you view the video below.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Milva

Milva, curiously unknown to most Americans, is an enduring phenomenon in Europe. Milva, real name Maria Ilva Biolcati, was born in 1939 and had already been a popular singer in her native Italy for 15 years when she first met Piazzolla in 1979. According to the Azzi and Collier book, Le Grand Tango, Milva was largely responsible for Piazzolla's early European popularity as a result of a 1984 joint tour viewed by 200,000. You will find early video of Milva performing with Piazzolla on YouTube and you will also find today's video where Milva, at the age of 70, is still enthusiastically performing his music. This video, which has the look of a pirate video filmed surreptitiously from the balcony - so watch soon, it may disappear, shows Milva performing in Vienna just three days ago. If you enjoy this you may enjoy a second performance the same night and an undated performance on Polish television which was also posted to YouTube this week.

Milva and Piazzolla were a classic combination. It is good to see Milva continuing and we can only wish that it was Piazzolla today on the bandoneon in this quintet.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

La fortezza dei grandi perché

La fortezza dei grandi perché - perhaps translates to the Fortress of Great Reason, I don't know. It is an obscure tune from Piazzolla. Perhaps written for a movie sound track? It sounds like Piazzolla's movie music. Perhaps associated with the Italian songstress Milva? It can be found in a book of sheet music dedicated to Milva's performances of Piazzolla's music. Until I came upon this charming video of the tune posted from Hungary, I had never heard it in spite of countless hours with Piazzolla's music. The performer, Barnabás Tankó (known on YouTube as milarepa87), seems lost in the music and I find his elegiac performance quite compelling in spite of the loss of the last measure or so of the music from the video. The arrangement is very much that of Enrique Ugarte as found on his CD, Tango Argentino. That version is available on iTunes and I have now downloaded it and am listening to it as I write this. It, too, is wonderful but not quite as pure and simple as that of milarepa87.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Mellow Jazz: Jacinto Chiclana

For some reason, there has been a burst this week of jazz flavored performances of Piazzolla's music. They have arrived in a variety of styles from the frenetic to the mellow. My personal tastes run to the mellow and the video below is one of the finest mellow jazz treatment of Piazzolla I have ever heard. The piece is early Piazzolla, Jacinto Chiclana. It is played by an Argentine group called "Cuarteto Rio de la Plata" and represents a cut from their new, about-to-be-issued CD titled "Los chicos del tango - Brescia." The video was recorded at jazz club Jazzonlive in Brescia, Italy. I find little information about this group on the web but they are fine musicians (2 Argentine, 1 German, 1 French) who play extremely well together. I hope the music from their new CD makes it to iTunes.

They have posted a number of cuts from the CD on YouTube. This is the only one featuring music of Piazzolla but the other cuts are well worth a listen. You can find the others here.

If your taste runs more toward the frenetic, I would recommend this jazz version of Verano Porteño by the Mario Parmisano Trio which was posted yesterday.


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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Piazzolla Crash

An unexpected event occurred during a performance of Invierno Porteño by violin virtuoso Koh Gabriel Kameda with the Orquesta del Nuevo Mundo in Mexico under the dangerous baton of Johannes Bruno Ulrich. It has become known as the "Piazzolla Crash" and has been captured in full slow motion in today's video.

The full performance is worth watching. As true professionals, Kameda and the orchestra continued without missing a beat during the crash. You can watch the full performance here.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Swingle Singing

Today's video, a choral performance of Primavera Porteña by the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela under the direction of María Guinand, is the best example I have seen of "Swingle Singing" applied to the music of Astor Piazzolla. Not quite a capella since there is a piano accompaniment, this is still a performance of which the famed Swingle Singers would be proud.

Actually, comparing Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (formerly known as the Schola Cantorum de Caracas) is not quite fair. SCV is a serious and well known choral group which has toured the world and recorded for labels such as Nonesuch and Deutsche Grammophone. They recently premiered and recorded Osvaldo Golijov's La pasión según San Marcos. While that work shows that SCV can handle a contemporary choral challenge, today's video shows they can also produce beautiful music from Piazzolla's nuevo tango of yesterday.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Alienación - A Rare Gem

Alienación is a rarely heard Piazzolla composition. According to Bardoblog, it was originally written in 1981 for Piano and voice (baritone) and left, unperformed, in a drawer at Piazzolla promoter Aldo Pagani's office in Rome until it was found by guitarist Rob Bangert of the group Quinteto Bailongo. That group recorded it on a CD, Tiempos viejos, in 1997. You can hear their version sung very well by Fabián Russo and read the lyrics (written by Francisco Bagalá) at Bardoblog. There are perhaps other recordings of Alienación but none that I know of until . . .

Maria Estela Monti recorded it for a new CD, Solo Piazzolla, and released this excellent video created by Gustavo Fernandez. The CD is not yet available in the U.S. nor is it available on iTunes although most of Ms. Monti's work is available there. Let's hope Alienación gets there soon.


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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

17th Century Piazzolla

A surprisingly good match - a harpsichord and the Piazzolla composition Milonga del angel. The harpsichord looks like a bentside spinet of the type popular in the late 17th century, perhaps built by Silvermann. Not much more information is available on this video. We know that the person and presumed artist is a female from Argentina who has a good sense of humor and plays a mean ragtime piano.

Enjoy the sound:

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Creative - Yes; Crazy - Maybe

Perhaps today's video falls into the bizarre category - or perhaps it is the work of a creative genius. Actually, probably both. Regardless, this is a unique and must see interpretation of Piazzolla's Balada para mi muerte. Posted from Spain by a person known only as Dramaturgia. From viewing the other postings by Dramaturgia I conclude the person is an actor and singer of some skill who has also mastered the art of video editing and is extraordinarily skilled in finding musical drama which fits his unique skills.

Bravo to Dramaturgia, whoever you are.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.

Where In The World Is Astor Piazzolla

I just posted the February summary of Piazzolla videos on the Piazzolla Video website. Included in that summary is an item on the source of videos featuring live performances of Piazzolla's works. The breadth of interest in Piazzolla's music is greater than perhaps many suspect. The videos came from 42 different countries but 10 countries accounted for 80% of the posted videos. Those ten are listed below with the number of videos from each country noted in parenthesis:

1. Argentina (41)
2. Italy (32)
3. Brazil (23)
4. Russia (22)
5. Spain (21)
6. France (16)
7. USA (16)
8. Germany (10)
9. Finland (6)
10. South Korea (6)

Do any of these surprise you?

East Meets West

Let's start the new month with a wonderful jazz interpretation of the classic Libertango played by the Japanese group, Sakura Project. This "group of ladies musicians" plays a combination of western instruments (flute and violin) and eastern instruments ( a traditional koto, a 17 string koto and a biwa) along with very tasteful percussion. The result is fresh sound made even better by the high level of skill of the musicians.

A great way to start a new month of Piazzolla videos on YouTube.

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To learn more about Piazzolla videos, visit the Piazzolla Video site.