Piazzolla on Video

Bragatissimo

2012-01-28T14:34:00.003-05:00

Bragatissimo is rarely heard Piazzolla. It was recorded by Piazzolla and his Nuevo Octeto in 1963, reportedly in a basement in Uruguay, but released only in a limited edition 7" 33 rpm record. It was never included in subsequent collected works or, to my knowledge, performed again by Piazzolla. I had never heard Piazzolla's version of the work until it appeared this week in a YouTube video which is one of two featured performances in today's blog.

José Bragato, to whom the work is dedicated, was the cellist in that Nuevo Octeto and had a close musical relation with Piazzolla throughout their professional careers. He produced "classical" arrangements for ensembles and orchestras of Piazzolla's work which are still widely played today and most of Piazzolla's handwritten scores passed through his hands on their way to becoming finished musical products. I understand that many of those scores have been placed in a small museum in Mar del Plata by Bragato for the benefit of future generations of musicians. Bragato is an important composer in his own right and someday, hopefully, an enterprising writer will capture the relationship between Bragato and Piazzolla in a book (are you listening Ms. Azzi?).

Bragatissimo was composed in more of a classical than nuevo tango mode although there are hints of classical tango in the mid-section. It opens with a lyrical passage which shows well the musicianship of Bragato but at roughly the two minute mark, a bombastic nuevo classical element enters the work and Bragato, unfortunately, never returns. The contrast is striking. One wonders if Piazzolla is not modeling the two men and their relationship - Bragato the calm, elegant classical musician and Piazzolla, the brash, rule breaking new wave musician. The two meet in the middle but never resolve into a single entity. The lack of resolution is, to me, a weakness in the work but appears to be quite purposefully done.

A second video is included for comparison. It is a chamber orchestra version of Bragatissimo arranged and conducted by Marcel Costas. There is still no resolution but I believe that Costas' arrangement takes a little of the bombastic edge off the work and adds a musicality that is missing in the original. To my ears it is better music. Oscar López Ruiz has recognized Costas as providing "a sensitive interpretation of the Piazzolla feeling" and commented most favorably on the performances captured in Costas' recording La Música de Astor Piazzolla. López Ruiz, it should be noted, was a member of the Nuevo Octeto heard in the original. While the Costas recording does not include Bragatissimo, a video possibly recorded at the same time does include it and is included below.

If the original does not appear below, click here.

If the Marcel Costas version does not appear below, click here.

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Tango Nuevo Cabaret - Sergei Tumas

2012-01-25T11:15:00.006-05:00

Sergei Tumas is a well known tango choreographer and dancer so it was big news when he announced that he was creating a stage production dedicated entirely to the music of Astor Piazzolla. His show was titled Tango Nuevo Cabaret and the public got its first look at it in June, 2009 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in California. Music was provided by Walter Rios on bandoneon with an Armenian tango group, Cadence Ensemble. The show was successful enough to attract investors into supporting a world tour version of the show.

In October, 2011 that show premiered at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater just across the Hollywood freeway from the more famous Hollywood Bowl. Reviews were mixed and it remains to be seen if the world tour will ensue. Nevertheless, any large scale production based on Piazzolla's music deserves attention from this blog and the recent posting of sixteen videos from that show provides the opportunity. You can find all of those videos on Sergei's YouTube channel.

Quite a lot changed in the move from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium to the Ford Amphitheater. Walter Rios is gone, replaced by Peter Soave. And the Cadence Ensemble is replaced by a collection of talented jazz musicians from the Los Angeles area assembled under the name of the Tango Jazz Chamber Orchestra. While Soave is listed as the nominal leader of the group, the videos certainly suggest that it is Miles Mosely, the bassist, who is in charge. I have chosen to feature their performance of Buenos Aires Hora Cero in this blog - not because it is the best of the sixteen but because it is typical of the performances.

And, how were the performances? In a word, terrible. The music is absolutely lifeless. There are moments where things work: for example, Kamasi Washington's introduction to Libertango where the jazz element is unfettered and the vocal performance of Balada para mi muerte by Martin de Leon is superb (note however, it is to recorded accompaniment - the band is not playing). But there are other times where musical disaster appears imminent as in the opening of Primavera Portena. But most of the time it looks like a set of musicians uncomfortably sight reading new scores producing inarticulate, unaccented facsimiles of Piazzolla's music. A little more rehearsal time and a little more guidance from Soave or Rios, both of whom know their way around Piazzolla's music very well, might have saved the day. That day will probably never come again - a world tour seems unlikely to me.

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Adios Nonino - 1984, Caracas

2011-12-22T19:50:00.003-05:00

After sitting in a box for more than twenty years a long forgotten video tape of a full Piazzolla concert has been found and shared this week on YouTube. There are very few videos of full concerts which makes this video of particular interest to Piazzolla fans. Today's featured video of the Quintet's performance of Adios Nonino is just one of the eight posted videos which fully capture the concert.

According to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, Piazzolla's Quintet made a quick tour of Mexico and Central America in the summer of 1984. Vocalist, Raúl Lavié, joined the quintet on the tour (and is featured in four of the videos). While not mentioned in Le Grand Tango, that tour evidently also included a stop in Caracas, Venezuela where today's video was made. The notes with the video suggest it was a brief visit with no time to assemble an audience, to rehearse, or to do a proper sound check (and apparently no time to tune the piano). The video was preserved on a U-Matic tape and is one of the first broadcasts in Venezuela to be recorded in stereo. The quality of the sound is quite good as is most of the video.

Many thanks to "BlackbirdRabbit" for finding and sharing the video.

If the video does not appear below, click here. Links to the other videos from the concert are provided below.

Additional concert videos: Lunfardo/Michelangelo 70, Los Pájaros Perdidos, La Bicicleta Blanca, Balada para mi Muerte, Balada para un Loco, Verano Porteño, and Mumuki.

Full audio of the concert can be downloaded here.

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Note added on 23 December, 2011: The poster of this video has added an additional piece of information about the arrangements behind this television performance. Hugo Carregal, an Argentine actor, singer and producer who lived in Venezuela and was very influential at RCTV convinced Piazzolla to fit the performance into a busy schedule. Were it not for Mr. Carregal's efforts, we would not be enjoying this video.

Without the Bongos

2011-11-12T19:26:00.003-05:00

Pablo Aslan issued a very interesting album this week: Piazzolla in Brooklyn. The album takes nine tracks from a 1959 Piazzolla LP titled, Take Me Dancing, and reinterprets them in contemporary jazz format. Aslan talks about the concept behind the new recording and you hear quite a bit of the track titled Counterpoint in today's video.

The 1959 version was recorded in New York City during Piazzolla's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to establish a musical career in that city. He recorded six LP's during that period. In five of those, Piazzolla was a band leader and instrumentalist playing other people's music. Take Me Dancing is the only LP of the six in which he was able to play a significant amount of his own music, which he termed Jazz-Tango. That album contains eight tracks composed by Piazzolla and four standards. The music is, for the most part, forgettable - the textures are bland, the tempos metronomic and the bongos are irritating. For many years the music on the LP was available to only a few who were lucky enough to find a copy of it in a dustbin but I note that today, you can download the full contents of the LP.

But Aslan heard something else in the music. As he says in the video, "There is a lot of great music in there, if you can get past the bongos." Aslan, himself a bassist, assembled a quintet: Gustavo Bergalli on trumpet, Nicolas Enrich on bandoneón, Abel Rogantini on piano, and Daniel “Pipi” Piazzolla on drums. He, Enrich and Rogantini transcribed seven of the pieces that Piazzolla had composed, two of the standards and added a tenth piece, La Calle 92 (La Calle translates as "the street" and one of Piazzolla's addresses in NYC was 202 West 92nd Street) which was composed in 1961. All of the musicians are seasoned jazz musicians who also know tango. They recorded the music in Buenos Aires over a period of days. The pattern for each track is roughly the same: they open with essentially a direct reading of the score and after the full thread of the original has been spun they begin to improvise around Piazzolla's music - frequently playing above and around the original themes. They make good music - a clear improvement over 1959. If you are a jazz fan you will enjoy the music. If you are a jazz fan who enjoys Piazzolla, you will love the music. If you are looking for a nuevo tango recording - this one is not for you.

In addition to the interesting comments and snippets of the recording session, you will hear a significant portion of the work Counterpoint (also known as Contratiempo) starting at 3:25 in today's video. You can compare what you hear to Piazzolla's 1959 recording in this video. You may recognize the fugue that opens the piece - Piazzolla recycled it into Fuga y misterio in the operita, Maria de Buenos Aires.

The concept for the album is creative and the execution respects the music that Piazzolla composed. The improvisation is excellent and left me wanting to hear these five musicians take on some of Piazzolla's more successful music rather than his more obscure music.

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Invierno Porteño - Pitango Quartet

2011-11-09T09:07:00.002-05:00

Who you gonna call? If you have a ghost problem, you call Ghostbusters. If you want an arrangement of a Piazzolla tune, you call Norberto Vogel. That is who the Pitango Quartet called when offered the opportunity to perform with the Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra. The very successful result of that call can be sampled in today's video of Invierno Porteño.

The Pitango Quartet is one of the leading tango ensemble in Israel. The group, formed by classically trained musicians, has been in existence since 2003 and provides tango "shows" as well as performing as a chamber group and with symphony orchestras as in today's video. Their repertoire covers the full range of tango music which they present with respect and authenticity. Members of the group are Amijai Shalev on bandoneón, Hadar Cohen on violin, Shachar Ziv on piano and Rinat Avisar on contrabass. I believe that all but the violinist are part of the original 2003 quartet. Pitango has recorded two CD's of tango music but they are difficult to find outside of Israel. You can find and purchase a limited selection of their music at their myspace website.

Invierno Porteño was the final of the four seasons composed by Piazzolla and the only one in which he purposefully inserted an hommage to Vivaldi. While originally composed for a quintet it is frequently played in orchestral arrangements, the most famous being those of José Bragato and Leonid Desyatnikov. The former is a bit formal but authentic; the latter is a delight to the ear but takes many liberties with the score. Mr. Vogel's is quite different and in many respects better than the others. It opens with beautifully written bandoneón solo - a perfect overture to the piece which captures both the Vivaldi and the tango essence embedded in the work. Mr. Vogel is a skilled bandoneónist himself and that skill shows in the this opening gem. The piece then moves alternatively but seamlessly between sections scored for full orchestra and for the quartet. The audience receives the full impact of an orchestral work but also has the opportunity to hear portions of the work in something closer to the original format. You will find Pitango and the Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra performing the other three seasons at the CarouselArtists YouTube Channel.

So, who are you gonna call? Mr. Vogel is an "arranger for hire" with a specialty in tango music. If you want a special arrangement of a Piazzolla work for your ensemble, give him a call at (011) 5197-6461 in Buenos Aires (or an email here).

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Campo, Camino y Amor - Episodio Trio

2011-10-22T09:25:00.007-04:00

It is an unlikely song writing pair: Astor Piazzolla and Atahualpa Yupanqui. But José Pons and his wife provided the opportunity for the two to work together and create the piece, Campo, camino y amor in their Paris home in 1974. The canción is rarely performed but a performance of it by the Episodio Trio is featured in today's video.

Héctor Roberto Chavero Aramburo was born in 1908 - his father a descendant of the indigenous people of Argentina, his mother from the Basque country of Europe. As a performer, he took the stage name Atahualpa Yupanqui to honor the names of two great Inca kings. Until his death in 1992, he was the most famous folk musician in Argentina and shared his music and the music of the country people of Argentina with the world. He challenged the political system of Argentina and spent time in exile and in prison as a result. While his music bears little relationship to that of Piazzolla, during their lifetimes they shared a common bond of rejection within their shared homeland. And, today they share a common veneration. That these two almost legendary figures created together the canción, Campo, camino y amor, is almost as remarkable as the fact that the canción remains an almost undiscovered gem today.

The story of their meeting in Paris at the home of Argentine architect, José Pons, himself an exile from Argentina, is well documented as a result of the publication of a small book, Astor Atahualpa: Los Caminos de la Identidad (the full text is at that link), written by Piazzolla's daughter, Diana, and Atahualpa's son, Roberto Chavero, with a third author,Fuentes Rey, describing the origin of today's featured song, Campo, camino y amor. The story of this canción as extracted in this blog is roughly this: Piazzolla and Atahualpa were both performing in Paris. They met as dinner guests at the Pons home and Atahualpa told the story of how his parents met. All present thought the story would make a good canción. Atahualpa agreed to write a poem about it and Piazzolla agreed to put the poem to music. Unlike many such ideas hatched over wine and good food, it actually happened that way. Hopefully, Piazzolla had a chance to introduce the canción to the Pons family but I find no evidence that he did. In December of 1974 at Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, the work was performed by Amelita Baltar, Piazzolla's vocalist, companion and presumed fellow guest at the Pons dinner. Ms. Baltar later recorded the work on the CD, Referencias. The only other recording of the work I find is by María Estela Monti on the CD, Solo Piazzolla.

And who are the Episodio Trio that perform the work in today's video? I don't know. There is no information accompanying the video and I can find no helpful reference to the group on the web. Hopefully someone reading this blog will recognize them and tell us a little more about them in the comment section below. Their performance, which is the only presentation of Campo, camino y amor on YouTube, is excellent - they deserve recognition.

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500 Motivaciones

2011-10-20T15:20:00.003-04:00

Piazzolla "plugged in" in the mid-70's with several versions of an Octeto Electronico. Influenced by Chick Corea's sound and with the encouragement of his son, Daniel, who was among the pioneers playing the electronic synthesizer, he gathered seven musicians, including Daniel, and "electrified" his nuevo tango sound. You can see a 1975 example of that group here.

In 1976, influenced not by Corea but by the young musicians who were bringing a rock sound to tango, he very significantly changed the sound of the music to bring the aggressive sound of rock into his neuevo tango. The young rockers applauded the move but the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, indicates that Piazzolla was not so sure it was the right sound for him. The piece, 500 motivaciones, may be the best example of that sound. The work was featured in a famous concert in December, 1976 at Teatro Gran Rex in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, the Piazzolla discography contains no recording of 500 motivaciones. But, rumors have long persisted that a recording was made at Teatro Gran Rex and this week, a recording of 500 motivaciones made directly from the mix board at the Gran Rex made its way to the web. You can hear that recording, at least as I write this you can here it, at this link. There are many Piazzolla fans who have waited for years to hear this recording.

The sound is a bit rough, in the sense that the music does not sound as well rehearsed as usual - perhaps that is part of aiming for a looser rock sound. There are places where it seems that the flutist just can't quite keep up with the group (note that the Luis Ferreyra had replaced the Octeto's original flutist, Arturo Schneider, at this time) but it is a relentlessly driving work that still clearly comes from the pen of Piazzolla. The Octeto was disbanded shortly after the Gran Rex concert only to be reassembled with an almost totally different set of musicians (only Astor and Daniel were in both groups) for a series of performances at the Olympia Theater in France which have been captured on a French LP, Olympia 77. 500 motivaciones was featured at those concerts and was well received. But things never really gelled with this second version of the Octeto and Piazzolla disbanded it and abandoned the "electrified" sound for the rest of his career.

To my knowledge there is only one commercial recording of the work and it is a quite good one by the Ensamble Nuevo Tango. In 1986, Piazzolla gave that group his original manuscript for 500 motivaciones so their performance, other than instrumentation, is quite authentic. Fortunately, they have provided a video of their performance which can be viewed below. The rough, rock edges have been removed and it is well rehearsed but it is still a relentlessly driving work. To me, their version sounds more like Piazzolla than Piazzolla's own Octeto Electronico version.

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Boulouris 5

2011-10-19T08:43:00.004-04:00

Many musicians play all the notes, only a few make beautiful music. Boulouris 5 makes beautiful music (and they don't miss any notes, either). This Lausanne, Switzerland based quintet is on my short list of groups I would like to see in concert. Their interpretations are unique and extraordinarily musical. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that they are Piazzolla specialists. They have issued four albums - three of which are virtually devoted to the music of Piazzolla. Part of their success is due to the fact that they understand and have mastered all of Piazzolla's musical gestures and can execute them not just with precision but with feeling. I could not decide which of two recently posted videos was best so have featured them both: La Muerte del Angel and Contrabajissimo. The videos are from a live performance at Vevey. The music from that performance is available for download from Amazon.com or iTunes.

The composition of the group is not what you would expect for Piazzolla specialists: Stéphanie Joseph on violin, Jean-Samuel Racine on clarinet, Anne Gillot on bass clarinet, Ignacio Lamas on guitar, and Jocelyne Rudasigwa on contrabass. Racine and Lamas do their arrangements. While I would be content to just listen to their Piazzolla, they do need to make a living and seem to be understandably reluctant to leave the Suisse Romande so they have packaged their talents into a series of eight musical spectacles which can attract much larger audiences. The most recent such spectacle, Newman Waits Here, covers the work of Tom Waits and Randy Newman. You can see examples of their vocal, mime and comedy talents in the fifteen videos posted on JeansamRacine's YouTubeChannel.

I prefer just the music and the two videos below illustrate why. If they do not appear below, click here and then here.

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Royal Command Whiskey

2011-10-18T17:01:00.003-04:00

I don't know if it was a labor of love or a simple opportunity to pick up a spot of quick and easy cash, but in 1979 Piazzolla made the television commercial for a local whiskey called Royal Command that is our featured video today.

According to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, the video was made shortly after his fifty-eighth birthday. The book provides this translation of his message: "The world is moving away from its roots. People are moving away from their origins. Everyone is searching for something."

So far as I know it is the only commercial ever made starring Piazzolla although his music has been and is still being used in a variety of unlikely television commercials.

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Le Grand Tango - Swing Sling Brass

2011-10-14T16:31:00.002-04:00

I would not think it easy to rearrange a work composed for cello and piano to a work played on two trombones, three trumpets, a french horn and a tuba but the Swedish trombonist and musical wizard, Lars Karlin, has done just that. Proof awaits in today's video of Swing Sling Brass playing Le Grand Tango.

Le Grand Tango is serious music. It was composed specifically for famed cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich - you can read background on the work and hear him play it here. On the surface, Swing Sling Brass are not serious musicians. They are entertainers and are more known for their on-stage hi-jinks, many of which you can enjoy in this video, than they are for concert grade music. However, as today's video shows they are very talented musicians and fully capable of addressing complex and technically challenging music. There are rough edges in the performance but the excitement and energy that are embedded in the score are delivered better in this performance than in just about any other I have heard.

There are other arrangements of Le Grand Tango. There is a good woodwind quintet arrangement and many musicians have moved the cello part to other instruments such as violin, viola. bassoon and even flute. The arrangements are safe and careful. Lars Karlin has exploded the work and reconstructed it for brass. Performances of the original often interpret it as a cello solo accompanied by piano - it is not that. It is a duet. The piano part is important and plays a role equal to that of the cello. Karlin has recognized this and captured both voices in a very sculptural manner. The trombone usually takes the main cello line - but not always. Trumpets usually cover the treble of the piano - but not always. The overall structure is true to the original with the exception of a trombone cadenza at approximately 6'40" into the video. Since there is no live video, I can't be sure, but I think the cadenza is played by Geir Anfinsen while the rest of the septet vamps behind the solo. In a little less than a minute, the group returns to the score. It is an interesting break - no harm was done. I am in awe of the quality of the arrangement. Libertango is a staple for brass ensembles but there is so much more Piazzolla which would be stunning on brass. I can hardly wait to hear what Mr. Karlin does with the rest of the Piazzolla catalog and I hope that Swing Sling Brass brings his arrangements to us sooner rather than later.

I encourage you to visit the Swing Sling Brass Music page. There is wonderful music there and you can appreciate their musical skills without the smiles interfering with your hearing. The performance of Le Grand Tango on that page is, I believe, different than the one in the video and is a little more polished but with no loss of excitement.

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Retrato de Milton - Novjaro Quintet

2011-10-11T15:05:00.004-04:00

It is difficult to imagine a connection between the shores of the Rio Plata, birthplace of the tango and of Astor Piazzolla, and the shores of a remote archipelago on the southern coast of Finland; but, for a day in July of this year, the Novjaro Quintet provided that connection with a concert of twelve Piazzolla compositions at the city hall of Hanko, Finland. Today's featured video of a performance of Retrato de Milton is from that concert.

Finnish tango is very interesting and has its own blog. But while Finnish tango may belong to the same genus as Argentine tango, it is a different species and the music of Piazzolla plays almost no part in Finnish tango. In the ten years of the existence of the Finnish tango blog, there is only one reference to Piazzolla. So it is surprising to find not one but two active quintets devoted to the music of Piazzolla in Finland, and perhaps there are even more yet to be discovered on YouTube. One of the most accurate reproducers of the Piazzolla quintet sound in the world is the Finnish group, Tanguedia. Today's featured group, Novjaro Quintet, does not have the authentic Piazzolla timbre of Tanguedia (an electric guitar and more use of the bandoneón would change that), but they provide a detailed, nuanced and musically compelling interpretation of Piazzolla.

Novjaro began in 1997, when students at the Sibelius Academy met to play Piazzolla together. In the year 2000, they won the Piazzolla Award in Castelfidardo, Italy. Violinist, Noa Nakai, and contrabass player, Julius Pyrhönen, are the only current members who were part of the original Novjaro. All the current members are superb musicians but Nakai's violin work in the featured video and in the video of Mumuki must be singled out and recognized as sublime. His sound is very close to that of Antonio Agri, violinist in Piazzolla's first quintet.

You can find all twelve performances from the July, Hanko concert on the Novjaro YouTube Channel. I chose to feature Retrato de Milton for two reasons: one, it is rarely heard and, two, it is the only one of the twelve to use bandoneón rather than accordion. I applaud Veli Kujala for his use of bandoneón in spite of his obvious lack of comfort on the instrument - I hope he will continue to work and play it more in the future. In 1969, Piazzolla composed Retrato de mi mismo which translates roughly as "Portrait of myself." In 1972, he met a young Brazilian musician and composer, Milton Nascimento, who so impressed him that when he rewrote Retrato de mi mismo into a more complex form, he retitled it as Retrato de Milton. There is perhaps a symbolic significance of Piazzolla recognizing himself in the young composer, Milton Nascimento, and converting his self-portrait into a portrait of Milton. Piazzolla recorded the work only once, in a July, 1973,live concert at the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires which can be heard on the readily available CD, Muerte del Angel.

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Note added 12 October, 2011: Noa Nakai was kind enough to provide me a list of additional Piazzolla bands in Finland. They include Otra Vez, In Time Quintet, Quinteto Fuego, Tango for Four and Tangueros Polares. It is not clear how many of these are still active bands.

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Escualo - Duo Kutrowatz

2011-10-09T09:25:00.003-04:00

It is difficult to decide whether the star of this video is Piazzolla's composition, Escualo, the arranger, Kyoko Yamamoto, or the performers, Duo Kutrowatz. The three certainly work together well.

Escualo (the title translates to Shark) was composed in 1979 and is one of the most rhythmically challenging of Piazzolla's works and one of my favorites - this is the ninth time the work has been featured in this blog. In a two year survey of the most frequently performed Piazzolla compositions, it was number 17. I think the challenge of the work keeps its performance frequency down. Piazzolla recorded the work four times. My favorite was captured live on October 13, 1983 in Lugano, Switzerland and can be heard on the readily available CD, Adios Nonino. A later but very similar performance by the quintet can be seen in this video.

It is a great challenge to capture the essence of that quintet performance in a work for two pianos but Kyoko Yamamoto has done an excellent job of just that. Ms. Yamamoto is a classically trained pianist from Kobe College but her fame has not come from her work as a pianist but rather as an arranger of the works of Piazzolla for piano - both solo and duo piano. You can find many pianists playing her arrangements on YouTube. The Yonezawa Piazzolla score list references 31 pieces Ms. Yamamoto has arranged and I believe there are even more which have not yet been made commercially available. Many young musicians receive their first exposure to the music of Piazzolla through her arrangements. She is an important person in the Piazzolla world.

Ms. Yamamoto has been fortunate to have attracted the attention of such superb pianists as Eduard and Johannes Kutrowatz. The Kutrowatz brothers were trained at Josef Haydn Conservatory in Eisenstadt and at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. They have performed professionally as a duo since 1986 and have an uncanny rapport at the piano. They have toured the world and made a name for themselves particulary with the works of Liszt. Their attention to Piazzolla is relatively recent but they have clearly been captured by his music. Their latest recording, Tango Nuevo, is devoted entirely to the works of Astor Piazzolla as arranged by Ms. Yamamoto. Escualo is included on that recording. You can find a video of their performance of Michelangelo '70, also on that recording, here. Escualo is rhythmically challenging and it a credit to the Kutrowatz brothers that they are in perfect synchronization throughout the performance. I think their performance does capture the compositional creativity of the work but it moves forward with Teutonic certainty rather than with the Latin swing that Piazzolla's quintet brought to the work. That swing may be impossible to capture on two pianos, it is largely due to accent pattern - which is different for each instrument in the quintet - and the subtle moving of those accents before and behind the beat. I am curious what a pair of truly canyengue pianists like Pablo Ziegler and Mario Parmisano would do with Ms. Yamamoto's arrangement of Escualo. Could they make it swing?

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Libertango - Hiba Tawaji

2011-09-30T20:37:00.002-04:00

Unless you count ba-dum-ba-da-pee-dum as a lyric, there is only one recognized set of lyrics to Libertango and those were written by Grace Jones and are known as I've seen that face before. Today's video, unfortunately not a live performance, provides some new lyrics written by Ghadi Rahbani and sung by Hiba Tawaji. The arrangement is by Ghadi's brother, Oussama Rahbani. The lyrics are in Arabic but the video provides an English translation.

The lyrics are striking but it is the musicians involved which make the video noteworthy. The Rahbani family, although largely unrecognized in the West, is one of the most important and successful musical families in the world. The father of Ghadi and Oussama was Mansour Rahbani who along with his brother, Assi, revolutionized the world of Arab music with their theater work - perhaps more appropriately labeled as opera work. They were poets and musicians who did not shy from illustrating the socio-political problems of their Lebanese homeland. Both Assi and Mansour had sons who continued in the musical world with Oussama perhaps becoming the most famous of the second generation Rahbani's. He introduced the remarkable singer, Hiba Tawaji, to the world. Together, they have recently issued an album titled La Bidayi Wala Nihayi which contains the version of Libertango featured today. Ms. Tawaji's voice transcends the usual cultural barriers which seem to increasingly separate the Arab world from the West and I expect we will hear more from her in the future.

Ghadi Rahbani has taken the title of Libertango quite literally and provided lyrics of liberty which like most good poetry can be understood at several levels. Perhaps the lyrics refer to past chapters of Argentine history, perhaps to chapters being written today in Arab history. Haneen, who posted the video from Benghazi, Libya, may indeed be part of that history.

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Libertango - Bagpipe Version

2011-09-27T20:45:00.003-04:00

We shall wait a bit longer for the Dixieland jazz version and the Cajun version of Libertango but the long wait for a bagpipe version has been ended with today's video of a performance by Galician piper, Daniel Bellón, with the group BellónMaceiras Quinteto.

If you are expecting Highland Pipes in the video you will be disappointed but bagpipes were in Spain long before they were in Scotland. The earliest drawings which contain bagpipes come, in fact, from the thirteenth century Galician Cantigas de Santa Maria. In Galicia, the pipes are know as gaita and Bellón is one of the young masters of the instrument. The folk fusion music of the BellónMaceiras Quinteto reflects much of the Galician folk music sound which shares Celtic roots with Brittany and Wales although Libertango is not the best choice for finding Celtic roots. If you want to hear more, I suggest you download a copy of their CD, FolkFusion, which does not contain Libertango but does contain some more representative samples of their work.

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Note added 8 October, 2011: There is a second bagpipe version of Libertango created through the magic of multi-tracking by Bulgarian piper, Evtim Ruskov. You will find it here.

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Libertango - Dame Evelyn Glennie

2011-09-11T14:17:00.002-04:00

Eric Sammut created an arrangement of Libertango for marimba that almost every advanced student of that instrument plays at some point in their studies. It is so pervasive that I was quite surprised to hear an alternative arrangement - and a spectacularly good arrangement at that. The arrangement and performance is by Dame Evelyn Glennie and it is the featured video for the day.

The initial part of the arrangement suggests a familiarity with the Sammut version - the same weighted triplet form replaces the straight eighth notes of the ground - but it quickly moves on in directions never contemplated by Sammut. The syncopation in the latter parts of the first section catches the ear with its unexpectedness but it is the elegiac beauty of the middle section of her arrangement which is the highlight for me. Throughout, Dame Glennie plays with a wider and more variable volume (loudness) than most percussionists and the result is a heightened sense of musicality.

Remarkable as the music is, those who know the work of Dame Glennie know that the musician is even more remarkable. She became profoundly deaf at the age of twelve but went on to graduate with honors from the Royal Academy of Music in London and to successfully pursue a career as a percussion soloist appearing on stages around the world. In 2007, she was awarded Dame Commander of the British Empire, for her service to music and, in part, for her work toward extending education opportunities for physically limited students. Many find the talk she gave at a TED conference in 2007 to be a source of inspiration. I have included a video of that talk below today's musical video and encourage you to watch it.

I wondered how unusual it is to be a deaf musician. Ask a music lover to name a deaf musician and they will say "Beethoven." Ask Wikipedia and you will get a list of eighteen people (including Beethoven but not including Mozart who, inexplicably, is on the list). But when I checked each of those eighteen, it turns out that all but one had either lost hearing after a successful career as a musician or were "only" partially deaf. Guitarist Charles Mokotoff and Dame Glennie appear to be extremely unique in that they built careers as musicians while profoundly or severely deaf.

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Una Nostalgia Pura - Magdalena León

2011-08-28T15:47:00.004-04:00

What is the story behind Una nostalgia pura? Did Piazzolla really compose it or is at forgery? You won't find it on any list of Piazzolla compositions. I am hoping that Magdalena León who sings Una nostalgia pura in today's featured video knows the answer and will share it with us. All internet references to the song refer to Ms. León singing it - it is apparently exclusively hers.

My guess is that it is authentic. The lyricist is reported to be Eladia Blazquez, a good friend of Piazzolla and a very talented tango artist. The Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, reports that Ms. Blazquez was a frequent guest to the Piazzolla household, that she played impromptu piano/bandoneón duets with Piazzolla, played scrabble with Piazzolla and even went shark fishing with Piazzolla. She provided lyrics, approved by Piazzolla, for the instrumental works Adios Nonino and Invierno Porteno and collaborated with Piazzolla to create Siempre se vuelve a Buenos Aires. That same book reports that Piazzolla recruited Ms. Blazquez and Horacio Ferrer to provide lyrics for some hastily composed songs for a 1982 concert with Roberto "El Polaco" Goyeneche. Those songs were never used (you can hear the songs that were used on this recording) and I speculate that Una nostalgia pura was originally composed for Goyeneche to sing at that concert and went unsung until Ms. León somehow found the work.

Ms. León was born in Spain but moved to Buenos Aires at age twelve. She established a career as a singer of latin music, not just tango, and notably once sang with the Buenos Aires 8. She is perhaps better known today as a vocal coach, a music educator and author of the book, El Arte de Respirar. She remains a wonderful singer, as this video attests, and you can find Una nostalgia pura and seventeen other canciones on her CD, Entre Amigos - En Vivo.

I don't think Una nostalgia pura has the enduring qualities to become a significant Piazzolla work but I am grateful that Ms. León has rescued it from obscurity.

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Note added 11 September, 2011: Ms. León responded to my request for more infomation about Una nostalgia pura with the following message as translated to me by her artistic manager, Daniele Morganti:

The song is from Eladia Blazquez and A. Piazzolla, and it's one of the last they composed together. It is not a famous song, and - so far I know - I am the only person who has recorded it. This song has a huge vocal range and that's the reason that makes it so difficult to perform "Una Nostalgia pura." Piazzolla never wrote easy music, but always beautiful.

I decided to perform this song while I was recording my album Magdagrafias. Eladia herself invited me to have a look at some of her songs, between them I found "Honrar la vida" and "Una nostalgia pura". I decided to record them in the same album, but the label Warner Music - which I worked with in those years - chose not to put "Una nostalgia pura" in that album - due to the high number of songs already there.

So, finally, "Una Nostalgia pura" was put in the next album, with the arrangement of the Maestro Roberto Lopez, my music director.

My thinking is that "Una Nostalgia Pura" is a sort of continuum of the thought exposed by Eladia Blazquez in the earlier song "Honrar la vida". She was a Galician and was very talented, a wonderful person who always bet on life.

Ms. León's comments about the vocal range demanded by the song suggest that I was wrong in my speculation about the song being written for Goyeneche. Goyeneche's vocal range had become limited at that stage of his career and Piazzolla would not have composed such a demanding song for him.

My thanks to Ms. León and to Daniele Morganti for providing this important additional information.

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Kicho - DeContraBando

2011-08-23T10:38:00.005-04:00

Piazzolla's career is neatly book-ended by two bassists: Kicho Díaz and Héctor Console. He composed works to showcase the skills of both and today's featured video showcases the work titled Kicho in a minimalist performance by the duo DeContraBando comprised of Diego Zecharies on contrabass and Alejandro Szabo on bandoneón.

Enrique "Kicho" Díaz was probably there the night Piazzolla joined Anibal Troilo's band in December, 1939. He certainly was a member of Troilo's band during most of the five years that Piazzolla played with Troilo. When Piazzolla formed his first quintet in 1960, Kicho left Troilo's band to join Piazzolla. While other members of the quintet changed, Kicho was the only bassist the group ever had and he appears on every recording made by the first quintet from 1960 to 1973. He was the preeminent tango bassist of his time. The work, Kicho, came relatively late in the history of the first quintet and was recorded only once, on the 1970 live recording, Piazzolla en el Regina.

Kicho was composed for quintet and it is not possible for the bandoneón/contrabass duo of Szabo and Zecharies to capture all of the nuances of the piece but Szabo has done an excellent job of capturing the essence of the missing three members of the quintet. On the bass, Zecharies' phrasing and intonation is superb and he brings more musicality to Kicho than Kicho did himself in the live recording at the Regina. Zecharies was born in Uruguay and currently lives in Spain. He is a classical contrabassist but no stranger to Piazzolla's music. With Hugo and Juan Lucas Aisemberg, he recorded TRioPlatense: Vayamos al Diablo. His YouTube performances of Le Grand Tango and Contrabajeando (also composed for Kicho Diaz) are excellent. Szabo, the bandoneónist, was born in Buenos Aires but currently also lives in Spain. The breadth of his skills are perhaps better seen in this DeContraBando demo video. Szabo has also done some excellent work as a duo with guitarist, Gabriel Silvera.

To return to the book-end image, just as Kicho was there for the first part of Piazzolla's career, Héctor Console was there for the last. He joined Piazzolla in 1979 with the second quintet and was there for Piazzolla's final ensemble recording, Live at the BBC, in 1989. The two bassists covered the most important twenty years of Piazzolla's performance career and together, appear on almost 80% of those Piazzolla recordings which included a contrabass player. There were remarkably few bassists in Piazzolla's recording career. According to Mitsumasa Saito's excellent discography, the other bassists include Valentin Andreotta (from Piazzolla's orquesta tipica), Hamlett Greco and Juan Vasallo (from the octet), Chet Amsterdam and George Duvivier (from NYC studio recordings), Giuseppe Prestopino (from studio recordings with Gerry Mulligan), Andy Gonzalez (from Pablo Zinger's Tango Apasionado ensemble) and Angel Ridolfi (who subbed for Console with the Sextet for the Lausanne concert recording).

Diego Zecharies would have been a worthy addition to that list.

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Revolucionario - A Piazzolla Original

2011-08-18T16:15:00.004-04:00

I missed this video when it first appeared on YouTube in April of this year but alert blog reader, Gabriel Caprav, noticed that I missed it and brought it to my attention today. It is an important video - perhaps the earliest video of Piazzolla's first quintet and they are playing what must have been at the time, one of the more controversial of Piazzolla's works: Revolucionario.

The video appears to be from Argentine television and Gabriel speculates it is footage from one of the Quintet's appearances on Tato Bores' show in the mid- to late 1960's. That would correspond roughly with the studio recording of the work in 1967 on the rare Polydor 10092, 33 rpm record which you can hear here. Members of the quintet on that recording were Piazzolla on bandoneón, Osvaldo Manzi on piano, Antonio Agri on violin, Kicho Díaz on contrabass and Oscar López Ruiz on guitar. I believe the musicians in the video are the same although I am not sure that is López Ruiz on guitar. Perhaps a more knowledgeable reader can confirm identities. The piece was recorded a second time by the First Quintet in the live performance recording, Piazzolla en el Regina.

For an Argentine tango fan of the period, Revolucionario, must have been difficult to comprehend and the title suggests that was, perhaps, the intent. It is contrapuntal and modal and it is easier to find Stravinsky than De Caro in the work. Interestingly, Piazzolla apparently never featured the work with his second quintet - perhaps because its ties to tango were too tenuous.

My thanks to Gabriel for bringing this video to my attention. In return, may I suggest you give some of your attention to one of Gabriel's creations - you may recognize the music.

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Invierno Porteño - Nuevo Tango Quintet TM

2011-08-16T16:52:00.004-04:00

It is only 63.4 km from Sânnicolau Mare to Timișoara. Sânnicolau Mare is the birthplace of Béla Bartók, whose portrait hung above Piazzolla's bed and who was in many ways a guiding musical presence for Piazzolla. Timișoara is the birthplace of the Nuevo Tango Quintet TM, a remarkable new, Romanian tango ensemble for which Piazzolla is clearly a guiding musical presence. Rarely have I heard a new quintet capture the spirit of Piazzolla's music as well as the Nuevo Tango Quintet TM and that they can do so without so much as a visit to Buenos Aires or a bandoneón player suggests some mystical Bartókian connection has been formed between this quintet and Piazzolla's music. As an example of their work, today's video highlights their performance of Invierno Porteño. I could have chosen any of the other eight Piazzolla works which have been posted on Alin Stoianovici's YouTube channel - they are all well performed.

Piazzolla chose the musicians for his quintets from the classical world, from the jazz world and from the world of the popular tango music of Buenos Aires. The important thing was not their training but rather that they could feel and "swing," in a canyengue sense, the music. Similarly the musicians of the Nuevo Tango Quintet come from varied backgrounds. Pianist, Roxana-Yvonne Coşereanu, and violinist, Sascha Bota, are from the classical world. Guitarist, Ionuţ Dorobanţu, and contrabassist, Johnny Bota, are from the jazz world. And accordionist, Alin Stoianovici, comes from the pop music world having played previously with such groups as Anca Pop and Neurotica. The group came together for a onetime Anivertango performance in celebration of the 90th anniversary of Piazzolla's birth. That concert was held on March 9, 2011 at the Operei Romane din Timisoara and the featured video comes from that concert. Considering that the musicians have quite possibly never even heard the word, canyengue, they are well on their way to capturing it.

It is clear that these musicians have listened carefully to Piazzolla and are working from something close to original quintet scores. They are striving for authenticity in their sound. And, in their tempo, dynamics and phrasing they have succeeded remarkably well; but, they have work remaining to do. Most of the work needs to be done by Stoianovici who either strays from the score or needs to do some transcription work to improve the score and get closer to the Piazzolla original. A particularly egregious example of straying can be found at 5'30" into the video where Stoianovici plays a very un-Piazzolla-like chromatic run. It doesn't sound bad, but it is not Piazzolla. Purists will also note that the accordion is no substitute for a bandoneón but realists will point out that finding a bandoneónist in Timișoara is about as likely as finding a Cobza player in Buenos Aires. While still quite new as an ensemble, this group has the potential to become one of the best Piazzolla-style quintets in Europe. Let's hope they stay together long enough to record and tour and maybe Alin Stoianovici will even take up the bandoneón in the future.

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Adios Nonino - Conjunto 9

2011-08-07T18:01:00.002-04:00

A rare treat today - a new (to YouTube, anyway) video of a 1972, original Piazzolla performance of Adios Nonino. The performance is by Piazzolla's Conjunto 9, also know as the Nonet, playing at the Teatro Colon. The arrangement of the piece is one of Piazzolla's most interesting - starting with a violin solo by Antonio Agri backed by the quiet guitar of Oscar López Ruiz, then a cello solo by José Bragato (backed by Lopez-Ruiz), then a lengthy and wonderful solo by López Ruiz. Finally at roughly the four minute mark, drummer José Corriale loudly announces his presence and Piazzolla's bandoneón is finally heard. The next three minutes are full of Sturm und Drang as Piazzolla takes full advantage of the complex musical capability of nine part music. Then at a little over seven minutes, calm returns with a beautiful bandoneón solo - Piazzolla at his very best. I believe it is this solo which inspired the arrangement of Adio Nonino that Carel Kraayenhof made famous at the wedding of Prince Willem Alexander and Maxima Zorreguieta. The solo is followed by a moving duet with Bragato and a fittingly full conclusion. In my view, this video is a treasure. The quiet, beautiful parts more than make up for the bombast which Piazzolla, himself, seems to suggest are "too much" in the interview.

The video is actually a video within a video. Piazzolla is viewing the 1972 video as part of an interview by "Pinky" in what is probably an early 1980's television broadcast. "Pinky" is well known in Argentina but the rest of us will be interested to know that "Pinky" is actually Lidia Elsa Satragno. Once known as Ms. Television because of her ubiquitous presence on television in roles ranging from actress, to news anchor, to variety show host. She reportedly has spent 34,000 hours in front of TV cameras - enough to put her in the Guiness book of records. Later she entered politics and was elected a member of the Cámara de Diputados, the lower house of the Argentine Congress, where she continues to serve today as the oldest member of that body. Interestingly, Ms. Satragno was married to Raúl Lavié during the period in which he was a vocalist for Piazzolla. Further, it has been reported that Ms. Satragno has an original score of Adios Nonino framed and hung on the wall of her house. "Pinky" is not just an interviewer in the video - she was a friend and is an admirer of Piazzolla.

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Tanti Anni Prima - Jing Zhao & Yasuji Ohagi

2011-07-22T13:00:00.005-04:00

Among the handful of Piazzolla compositions which most would agree qualify for the descriptor, "beautiful," must be included Tanti Anni prima, which is featured in today's video. The performers in the video, Jing Zhao, on cello, and Yasuji Ohagi, on guitar, contribute to the beauty with the perfection of their playing.

Jing Zhao was born in China and received her early music training there before moving on to Japan and Europe for further training by Ryosuke Hori, Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma. Such artists reserve their teaching time for only the very best and Ms. Zhao obviously qualifies. Listen to the complex dynamics within almost every note she plays and you will understand part of what makes her such a great cellist. Yasuji Ohaji is less well known than Ms. Zhao but he is a worthy partner in this performance. His articulation is clean and his feel for the music perfectly matches that of Ms. Zhao. There is nothing which could be done to improve this performance.

The video is from a rare, and now now discontinued DVD titled, Le Dix Cordes Live, and I believe the audio may be found on an equally rare CD of the same title. The video has appeared before on YouTube and has been removed so this is another video you should watch now while it is available.

The piece, Tanti Anni prima, is from Piazzolla's score for the movie Enrico IV. You can see the piece in the context of the movie at 4'40" into this video and read more about the story behind the music and it's twin, Ave Maria, in this earlier Piazzolla on Video blog. I am guessing this is their own arrangement - I find no other cello/guitar versions of the piece.

It is no accident that I have uploaded this blog of calm and beauty at the same time I uploaded the blog of chaos and cacophony of F & F Project's interpretation of Libertango. It helps to keep things in balance, don't you think?

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Libertango - F & F Project

2011-07-22T11:12:00.005-04:00

The title in today's video says it is Libertango, Piazzolla's most often played melody but to my ears it sounds like Oh! Susana, Stephen Foster's most often played melody or maybe Felix Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture. It could be anything, really. When you deconstruct music as far as F & F Project do, everything descends to a primordial, atomic level where discernment of simple things like melody and rhythm are simply not possible. Their deconstructed, "experimental version" of Libertango is surprisingly similar to the "Stoner Version" of Libertango which I claimed in a blog earlier this year to be the worst Piazzolla I had ever heard. (Interestingly, I have had more comments on that blog than on any I have written).

F & F Project is Hector Fiore and Omar Farías. Farias provides percussion. Fiore, a flute player by training, plays a Yamaha wind MIDI controller in this video and, I believe, does the computer work and arranging of their works. In the world of electronic music, these gentlemen are relative stars who have performed around the world and whose creations are played by other electronica musicians.

F & F first performed Libertango as part of their work, Popurrí, in 2001. A later version was used as a dance score in a 2009 YouTube Video. I have not heard the 2001 version but the 2009 version still retained the essence of Libertango which was successfully eliminated in today's video.

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Milonga del Ángel - Rosewood, Fire and Steel

2011-07-20T20:49:00.003-04:00

I don't know how today's video of Milonga del ángel ends. Call me squeamish but the swords got so long, I had to stop watching.

Every month through 2009 and 2010, I picked the most bizarre Piazzolla video of the month. If I were still carrying out that practice, today's video by the duo, Rosewood, Fire and Steel, would no doubt win for July, 2011. It is not the music that is bizarre - Phil Weaver plays a tasteful version of Milonga del ángel. It is the young lady, Patricia Forrest, swallowing steel swords of ever increasing lethality.

I assume she survived to film the next part of their act - swallowing (surprise!) fire while Mr. Weaver plays Classical gas.

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Libertango - Pablo Ziegler Quartet

2011-07-20T10:33:00.002-04:00

Birdland, the legendary New York City jazz club, was born on Broadway in 1949 and supposedly named after its first headline performer, Charlie "Bird" Parker. Rock-and-roll killed Birdland in 1965, but like the phoenix, it reappeared in a new uptown location in 1986 and in 1996, it returned to Broadway where it has been headlining the best jazz has to offer ever since. Today's video captures one of today's best, Pablo Ziegler and his quartet, in a performance of Libertango last week on July 15 at Birdland. Birdland has the usual "no video" rule but some fan ignored the rule until he was caught and the video was ended before the song was ended. I suggest you watch the video now before the true owners of the performance have it removed from YouTube.

Pablo Ziegler is no stranger to readers of this blog. He was the pianist in Piazzolla's second quintet. He is a fine composer on his own part but has continued to perform much of Piazzolla's work in his own heavily jazz tinged style. This blog has recently covered Ziegler in performances with Branford Marsalis and with Regina Carter but in both of those performances, Ziegler accepted some compromise in his style to accommodate his headliner sidemen. There is no need for that in today's video - we get pure Ziegler and his quartet. Members of the quartet are not identified in the video but I believe they are Hector Del Curto on bandoneón, Pedro Giraudo on contrabass and Jisoo Ok on cello. Libertango has become so widely played (and abused) that I know some Piazzolla fans refuse to listen to it anymore but this one deserves your time.

Ziegler did have a guest star that evening: Argentine vocalist, Sandra Luna. You can view a bit of Ms. Luna's performance in this bootleg video from the same concert.

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Retrato De Mi Mismo

2011-07-18T15:25:00.005-04:00

Q: What do Astor Piazzolla, Alfredo Gobbi and Milton Nascimento have in common?

A: Each was the subject of a musical portrait (retrato) created by Astor Piazzolla.

Retrato de mi mismo (which translates as Portrait of myself) is by far the rarest of the three retratos composed by Piazzolla. There are only two versions on YouTube and virtually no available recordings of the work. I have chosen to feature both of the available videos today.

The first video is an interesting and well done video montage which uses the recording made by Piazzolla's first quintet in 1967, as a sound track. Joining Piazzolla in that quintet are Jaime Gosis on piano, Antonio Agri on violin, Kicho Díaz on contrabass and Oscar López Ruiz on electric guitar. That 1967 recording is to be found on the very rare LP titled Astor Piazzolla - Egle Martin which is now only available on the Japanese reissue Piazzolla Para Coleccionistas. This video provides you an opportunity to hear a very rare Piazzolla recording.

The second video is the only live performance video of the work available on YouTube. The performers are Marcelo González on violin, Vera Pavlova on piano and Omar Massa on bandoneón. If the score to Retrato de mi mismo were readily available, many groups would no doubt play it. The arrangement is the work of Ms. Pavlova, and I suspect she is also the one who went to enormous effort to transcribe the work by listening to the original. A superb job was done on the transcription - the original comes through strongly and authentically. Pavlova and González are well known for their authentic covers of Piazzolla's works in the group Quinteto Nuestro Tiempo and they have extended the authentic sound to this trio. The bandoneónist, Omar Massa, is not the usual bandoneónist for Quinteto Nuestro Tiempo but is a well known free lance bandoneónist. His recent work includes an appearance with Plácido Domingo which was captured in this delightful video. I express my appreciation to the musicians in this video. They have provided an important gift to the Piazzolla community by resurrecting this work. I hope they will record it and share the score with others in the future.

If this was truly a musical self-portrait capturing the way Piazzolla imagined himself in the mid-1960's, my interpretation would be that it was time of melancholy, steady toil at difficult tasks and eventual triumph. Others will no doubt read the emotion of the music differently - comments relating your interpretation are welcomed below.

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Bandoneón - Michael Zisman

2011-07-16T19:49:00.003-04:00

The recent blog which featured Zita from Suite Troileana provides a good excuse to turn the calendar back to January, 2008 when today's video of Michal Zisman playing Bandoneón, the first movement of Suite Troileana, was first posted on YouTube.

The video is one of a set of 8 videos from a concert of solo bandoneón music performed by Zisman at the Theater Rex in Wuppertal, Germany as part of a tango festival held there. I believe the set of videos represents the finest collection of bandoneón music on YouTube and, in fact, is better than any recording of which I am aware. If you enjoy bandoneón music, you must watch all of these videos. You will find them on guidogayk's YouTube Channel. Today's video represents the only Piazzolla composition of the eight but there are two classic tangos played in arrangements created by Piazzolla: Juan Carlos Cobian's La casita de mis viejos and Joaquin Mora's Margarita Gautier. You can hear Piazzolla play these bandoneón solos on the CD, Concierto para quinteto. Arguably, Zisman does a better job on them than Piazzolla - there is more feeling in his performance.

Michael Zisman is a resident of Bern, Switzerland but Argentina is, literally, his fatherland. His father, Daniel Zisman, a well known classical violinist, was born there but as an adult split his time between Buenos Aires and Berne, Switzerland where he was the conductor of the Berne Symphony Orchestra. I don't know in which country Michael was born but he studied bandoneón with Nestor Marconi in Buenos Aires and at age 11 appeared on stage as a bandoneónist with Leopoldo Federico - both legends in the tango world. The elder Zisman is also a fine tango musician and is the founder of 676 Tango Ensemble which includes Michael on bandoneón. The young Zisman has recorded extensively - you will find his music for download at iTunes or Amazon.com. Zisman is a master technician on the bandoneón - fleet of finger and in total control of the bellows - but it is the nuanced emotion that he brings to the music which makes him one of today's best bandoneónists.

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Zita - Sung-ho, Gatto, Argerich and Song

2011-07-13T11:18:00.010-04:00

It is not well known that Niccolò Paganini, one of the most famous violin virtuosi of his day, was also a guitarist. He, in fact, composed for both instruments. So it makes some sense for Lorenzo Gatto and Denis Sung-ho Janssens, virtuosi on violin and guitar, respectively, to collect a couple of friends and put together a concert titled Travelling Paganini. But why should such a concert include Piazzolla's Zita as captured in today's featured video? The answer is to be found in the story of Denis Sung-ho Janssens.

Sung-ho was born in Korea and raised in Belgium. It is in that country that he studied guitar with Odair Assad at the Conservatoire royal de Mons and with Sérgio Assad at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles. His teachers, the Assad brothers, were the guitarists for whom Piazzolla composed Tango Suite. They are renowned for the performances and arrangements of Piazzolla's music. The Assad's recording, Sérgio & Odair Assad Play Piazzolla, is a classic. They no doubt sparked Sung-ho's interest in Piazzola and Sung-ho, no doubt encouraged the incorporation of Piazzolla in the Travelling Paganini concert.

Lorenzo Gatto also studied at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles, probably meeting Sung-ho there. I first became aware of their joint interest in Piazzolla in a video of the two performing Concert d'aujoud'hui at break-neck speed which was featured in this blog (unfortunately, the video has been removed from YouTube). For the Travelling Paganini concert, the pair added Song Young Hoon on cello and Lyda Chen Argerich on viola. Interestingly, Mr. Song performed Piazzolla's Le Grand Tango in his Carnegie Hall debut in 2005 so he too has Piazzolla interests. Ms. Argerich is the daughter of famed Argentine pianist, Martha Argerich, so an interest in Piazzolla might also be expected there. They are remarkable young musicians and we are fortunate that, for whatever reason, they have chosen to apply their talents to the music of Piazzolla.

Skilled as they are, it was not their musicianship that attracted me to the video; rather, it was the arrangement of Zita which, unfortunately, is not credited but I am told that the arranger is Korean. Zita is one of four movements in Suite Troileana which Piazzolla composed in 1975 to honor his friend, mentor and former boss, Anibal Troilo. The four movements are related to the four loves of Troilo's life: Zita (his wife), Bandoneon, Whiskey and Escolaso (gambling). The four represent some of the best music composed by Piazzolla in the 1970's. You can hear Piazzolla's performance of Zita here and hear what may be the inspiration for today's video in this performance by the Assad brothers and Yo-Yo Ma. The guitar work in today's video sounds very derivative of the work of the Assad's until those wonderful "bent" Asian notes at 1'25" into the video. But the bowed string work in this video is much more important - the arranger has done a superb job in converting the music into string trio format. Suite Troileana has always had classical potential but this is the first time that potential has been fully met. Let's hope the unknown arranger will undertake the other three movements of the work and if the four young musicians should perform those for YouTube, let's hope the camera is moved in a little closer.

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If you enjoyed this, give their Paganini video a look also.

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Adios Nonino in Kansas City

2011-07-08T19:52:00.003-04:00

There is much to admire about Elizabeth Suh Lane. She is a world class violinist who, inspired by the sounds of Bach in New York City, returned to her home in Kansas City, Missouri to found the Bach Aria Soloists in 1999. That group has thrived and become the center of chamber music in the city. But Ms. Lane's interests are much broader than just chamber music. Under the sponsorship of the Bach Aria Soloists she has expanded their concert series to include notable jazz artists and in February of this year, a Night of Tango with a focus on the music of Astor Piazzolla. Today's featured video of Adios Nonino comes from that concert.

Ms. Lane imported two of the best tango musicians in New York City for the evening - Gustavo Casenave on piano and Hector Del Curto on bandoneón. To her violin, she added two Kansas City musicians, Beau Bledsoe on guitar and Jeff Harshbarger on contra-bass, to form a classic Piazzolla quintet. The night included eight Piazzolla works for quintet and you can see them all on Beau Bledsoe's YouTube channel. Their sound is authentic. I believe they are playing directly from Piazzolla's quintet arrangements and they play them well. The people of Kansas City had a treat rarely available in the United States - Piazzolla's quintet music performed in an authentic manner.

Much of the credit for the success of the night must go to Del Curto and his bandoneón. Del Curto is not as flashy as some young bandoneónist but his playing is sensitive, fluid and nuanced in a manner which suggests he has put time into listening to Piazzolla's bandoneón. In addition, he surely benefits genetically from a grandfather and great-grandfather who were famous bandoneónists in Buenos Aires. He is almost certainly the best bandoneónist in the United States today and arguably one of the best in the world. But the reason I chose the video of Adios Nonino was not because of the bandoneón. It was because of the piano work of Casenave.

Gustavo Casenave was born in Uruquay, which shares claim with Buenos Aires as the birthplace of tango. His canyengue is the result of birth and nurture. He also studied jazz at Berklee College of Music and has played with some of the best tango ensembles and best jazz ensembles in the world. You can see all that background and experience come together in the piano cadenza he created to open Adios Nonino. Starting Adios Nonino with a piano cadenza is a tradition started by Piazzolla who wrote at least three such cadenzas - all of them stand on their own as piano compositions and are played on stage as such. An in-demand tango pianist like Casenave must have many chances to polish such an opening cadenza which made it very surprising to me to find this video of a concert less than six months before Kansas City where Casenave plays an equally long, equally complex cadenza and it is almost completely different. I could be wrong but I suspect that Casenave, consummate jazz artist that he is, creates the cadenza anew at every concert - no doubt preserving some of the best from concerts past but always adding something new to keep it fresh. I counted a dozen musical ideas in his cadenza and with the exception of the rocking octaves and rapidly repetitive chords that run from 3'20" to 4'25", they all worked. I do sincerely hope that the section from 4'00" to 4'25" will be viewed as an interesting but failed experiment. That moment aside, it is Casenave's cadenza which elevates this performance of Adios Nonino above most others.

While I am complaining, there is one other problem in the performance and that is the stage set-up which relegated the guitarist to a spot hidden, at least to the camera, behind Ms. Lane and her violin. Piazzolla always wrote for the guitar as a full voice in his quintet and the instrument deserves a seat in the front row. Piazzolla normally placed the guitarist to the stage right of the pianist and Ms. Lane should have done so here. The guitar is also too low in the sound mix. When I could hear him, it was apparent that Mr. Bledsoe was doing an excellent job but few could see or hear him.

This is a concert I would have thoroughly enjoyed. I encourage you to watch some of the other videos from the concert but if you can only watch one other, watch Escualo. Ms. Lane's violin work on this difficult work is superb.

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Los Pàjaros Perdidos - Patty Trossèl

2011-07-07T08:17:00.002-04:00

Maybe the title should be Los Pàjaros Perdidos - La Pat? I am not sure, the hat confuses me. The voice sounds like Patty Trossèl but the hat reminds me of La Pat. Regardless, she sings a wonderful version of Los Pàjaros Perdidos in today's featured video. Accompanying her on piano is the very able Dutch musician, Bert van den Brink.

Wikipedia says that Patty Trossèl has a range of four octaves, possibly true, but it is the bottom two octaves which gives her a rich contralto perfect for the canción of Piazzolla. Like Milva, Amelita Baltar and Roxana Fontán, she has a touch of huskiness in her delivery that hints of cabaret and late nights and experiences on the dark side of life. That matches rather well the character of La Pat, the persona adopted by Ms. Trossèl throughout her early career. It also matches rather well with the character of most of Piazzolla's canción. With a voice which is such a perfect match for Piazzolla's songs, it is surprising that it has taken nearly 30 years for her to begin including works by Piazzolla in her performances - but better now than never. She has never recorded Piazzolla and to my knowledge, only began including Piazzolla in concert appearances in 2009 when Balada para un loco became part of her stage repertoire - fortunately viewable on YouTube at 4'40" into this video. She is making up for lost time by including three Piazzolla numbers in her current show - not only Balada para un loco and today's featured Los Pàjaros Perdidos but also Che Tango Che. The current stage performance also includes a wonderful piece composed by Trossèl, Ich suche deine Sterne, and some beautifully sung works by Gabriel Fauré. You can see them all on Trossèl's YouTube Channel.

The featured work, Los Pàjaros Perdidos, was composed in 1973 and the lyrics are by Argentine poet, Mario Trejo, not by Horacio Ferrer as many assume. Trejo also provided the lyrics for one other lesser known Piazzolla canción, Violetas populares. It was first recorded by Piazzolla in 1975 on the Trova LP, Balada para un loco, with José Angel Trelles as vocalist. That album is very rare but fortunately is available in a reissue titled Piazzolla & José Angel Trelles.

I must admit that I was not a fan of La Pat when she was at the peak of her fame in the 1980's, but as today's Patty Trossèl, I am a huge fan and hope that she will soon devote some recording time to the music of Piazzolla.

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Chiquilín de Bachín - Amelita Baltar

2011-07-06T15:53:00.003-04:00

Piazzolla wrote the music, Horacio Ferrer wrote the lyrics but it wasn't a canción until Amelita Baltar sang it. The three were inseparable for a while during the creation and premiere of the operita Maria de Buenos Aires and they often dined together at a traditional porteño restaurant, Bachin. Inspired by the presence of a young boy selling roses at the Bachin, Piazzolla wrote one of his few waltzes and Ferrer found just the right poetry to capture the poignancy of the situation to create Chiquilín de Bachín. Amelita recorded it in 1969 on a 1969 Trova LP (TS 33-741). That version is difficult to find but a second version, recorded the same year, is available on the CD, Amelita Baltar Interpreta Piazzolla y Ferrer.

Amelita Baltar and Piazzolla were together for seven years, 1968-1975, and those years included the most productive period of collaboration with Ferrer (there was a second short period of collaboration in 1981, with Jairo turning their efforts into canción). Baltar has had a long and successful career as a singer and fortunately has continued to give the works of Piazzolla and Ferrer a prominent position in her repertoire. You will find many of her performances of their works on YouTube but today's featured video is new to YouTube and presents her singing Chiquilín de Bachín on an undated Argentine television production.

She sings the song as if she owns it and, in a sense, she does. She was certainly there at its birth.

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Midsummer Night Swing

2011-07-03T19:39:00.003-04:00

It must be one of the longest running dance parties in the world - the Midsummer Night Swing held at New York City's Lincoln Center every year since 1989. The event lasts three weeks with dancing in the plaza in front of Lincoln Center almost every night. Great bands can be expected and they cover the full dance spectrum from swing to salsa to big band to Irish to soul and, yes, to tango. This year's tango night fell on June 30th and the band was Héctor Del Curto's Eternal Tango Orchestra. You would hope that Piazzolla would be heard at the event and he was. Today's video shows the last dance of the evening and it was, the perhaps inevitable, Libertango.

I don't know if there was a night devoted to tango in that first year, 1989, but I do know that there has been one ever since 1991 - that is twenty years of tango at Midsummer Night Swing. In 1991, music was provided by Raúl Jaurena (recently featured in this blog) and Marga Mitchell - both still active in the tango world. I have not found a complete list of all the tango groups since 1991 but other featured tango artists have included the New York - Buenos Aires Connection in 1994 and 1995, Pablo Merinetti in 2001, Tanguardia in 2002, Avantango in 2004, Quintango in 2006, Orquesta Tipica Imperial in 2008, Otros Aires in 2009 and Narcotango in 2010. Héctor Del Curto, leader of this year's band, has also made appearances in 2003 with the Eternal Tango Quintet with Roxana Fontán and in 2005 and 2007 with the Eternal Tango Orchestra. That makes Del Curto and his musicians the closest thing there is to a house band for tango at Lincoln Center.

Héctor Del Curto is very definitely the go-to man for tango music in New York City. The bandoneón is in his genes - both his grandfather and his great grandfather were famous Argentine bandoneónists. At age 17, Héctor was already a world class bandoneónist who was invited to play with the legendary tango master, Osvaldo Pugliese. He has since played with many of the legends of tango including a twelve year stint as bandoneónist for the various ensembles put together by Pablo Ziegler, pianist from Piazzolla's last quintet. You have seen him in this blog in the past and you will see him again in the future.

Membership in the Eternal Tango Orchestra has changed over the years but according to their Facebook page, the current members are
Hector Del Curto, Gustavo Casenave, Pedro Giraudo, Jisoo Ok, Sami Merdinian, Nick Danielson, Sergio Reyes, David Hodges, Katie Kresek, Machiko Ozawa, and Marcelo Kazanietz. While today's video captures the spirit of the evening at Midsummer Night Swing, it does not capture the Eternal Tango Orchestra very well so I encourage you to watch their promotional video to enjoy their full effect.

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Libertango - Carillon Version

2011-07-03T13:43:00.002-04:00

Once you start, it's hard to stop. Regular readers of this blog have suffered through Libertango in many versions including: Stoner, House Music, Glass Harmonica, Single Charango, Double Charango, Theremin, Tzigane, Kannel, Gugak, Bass, Mechanical, 55Ewcia, Recorders, Tche-tchet-ka!, Ocarina, Erhu and believe it or not, there were others. One more couldn't hurt.

Today's video adds a performance of Libertango on a carillon to that long list. The particular set of bells in this carillon are to be found in the town hall of Leiden, formerly best known as the birthplace of Rembrandt and the capacitor but now destined to become known more for the performance of Libertango on it's carillon by noted composer and carillonist, Magdalena Cynk on June 25, 2011.

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Escualo - Escalandrum

2011-06-30T13:17:00.005-04:00

A recent blog highlighted the group, Escalandrum. I encourage you to read that blog but the short message from it is that the jazz combo formed by Piazzolla's grandson, Daniel "Pipi" Piazzolla, is called Escalandrum and they have a new recording, Piazzolla Plays Piazzolla, featuring the music of Piazzolla (the grandfather, Astor) and that the CD has been named by Piazzolla on Video the best Piazzolla CD of the year (even though there are six months to go in the year, I am confident no one will top it). The video accompanying that blog was from the Bridgestone Music Festival in São Paulo, Brazil.

On June 15, Escalandrum took their show to one of the most important venues in Argentina, the Teatro Gran Rex in Buenos Aires. Given the fame of the Piazzolla name in that city it must have been a nervous time for Pipi and his band. They need not have worried, reports are uniformly positive about the show. I recommend this excellent review of the show from Martín Vergara of the Jade Jazz y otras músicas blog who was fortunate enough to be there.

The piece featured in today's video is titled Escualo (which translates as "shark") and is both a salute to Piazzolla's hobby of shark fishing and part of the source of the name for the group Escalandrum. It was composed in 1979, and is one of Piazzolla's most rhythmically interesting compositions. It is a favorite of jazz musicians and an absolutely perfect vehicle to demonstrate the improvisational skills of Escalandrum. This is one of the best jazz covers of the work you will find anywhere.

Hopefully, more video from the Gran Rex performance will be available soon. While you are waiting for more, I encourage you to go to iTunes or Amazon and download the music.

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Note added 3 July, 2011: More videos from this concert have now been released on YouTube. To get a good overview of the evening, watch this one.

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Lo Que Vendrá - Orquesta Típica "Central" del CSMA

2011-06-29T11:04:00.004-04:00

It's not typical - the free reeds are accordions, not bandoneóns, but it would be a terrible mistake to dismiss the Orquesta Típica "Central", featured in today's video, for such a shortcoming. "Central" is an orquesta típica that deserves time on the world's better stages not just on the stage of the Auditorio Eduardo del Pueyo at Conservatorio superior de música de Aragón where the "Central" orquesta members are students. "Central" is new, their first performance was in March of last year but rarely have I heard a contemporary orquesta típica play with such precision and rhythmic certainty. The string section has discovered the secret that in tango, the dynamic envelop does not encompass a measure or two - it often encompasses only a single note or two. And they synchronize their management of those dynamics remarkably well as a unit. That a group of students in Spain who are supported but not led by faculty can have such an authentic sound, even with those accordions, is simply astonishing.

The orquesta típica, with its banks of bandoneóns and strings, represents the peak of the arc of classic tango. Piazzolla began his professional musical career as a bandoneónist and arranger for the orquesta típica of Anibal Troilo. Later he led his own orquesta típica before leaving the arc to create his tango nuevo. He composed a few classical tangos during and after that period. Lo Que Vendrá, the subject of today's video, is one of the best of those. It was composed in 1955 or 1956 and first appeared on the rare LP, Tango Progresivo.

Today's video comes from a concert which "Central" gave on December 15, 2010 in celebration of the 5th anniversary of Aragón Radio. The video is one of fourteen videos from the concert, all of which can be found on the CSMA Youtube Channel. The videos contain performances of three other Piazzolla classic tangos: Chau Paris, Triunfal and Prepárense as well as Piazzolla's arrangement of Tierra querida. There are a few of the fourteen pieces that could benefit from a little more rehearsal time but the choices of pieces to be played is wonderful and the overall level of performance is something that would be applauded even by the demanding audiences at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

There are no weak musicians in "Central" but I feel compelled to single out the pianist, Ms. Pilar López, for special recognition. She seems to have a remarkable feel the music - a natural sense of canyengue. Her touch is precise and the subtleties of her timing are, in part, responsible for the authentic sound of the group. It is also worth recognizing the two solo violinist, David Merlin and Daniel Hertado - who are the founders and the source of musical inspiration of "Central." It is my understanding that "Central" is their creation and that they provide the tango insight to the group with technical support from CSMA staff member, Rolando Prusak. You can see their musical chemistry together (although one moves to piano) in the duet version of La Camparsita. Surely one or both of these young musicians grew up closer to Buenos Aires than to Aragón to bring such authenticity to the music.

I believe most of the students in the orquesta are training to be classical musicians but I hope and expect this experience with tango will change their lives. Perhaps some of the accordionists will even give the bandoneón a try.

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Adios Nonino - Raúl Jaurena

2011-06-28T20:22:00.002-04:00

A lifetime of immersion in the sound of Adios Nonino is captured in the bandoneón solo by Raúl Jaurena in today's video. For those new to Adios Nonino, this is not a performance of that work. It is a fantasia on a theme from Adios Nonino created by a master of the bandoneón, a composer, a student of the tango and a dedicated admirer of Piazzolla. There are other such fantasias but this captures the elegiac portions of Adios Nonino better than any I have heard. It is very original in concept (yes, I know the Bach is there and I think Piazzolla would appreciate the salute) but faithful to the emotion of the original and the execution has a spontaneity about it which is surprising - one feels this is the first time he has played it this way, yet, surely it the work of much practice. It is a wonderful work that holds up well to repeated listening.

Juarena has recorded extensively and has performed with many of the best tango musicians in the world. His biography indicates he has been playing the bandoneón since he was a child and was playing in a tango orchestra when he was eight. The biography also refers to his playing with Piazzolla at the Montreal Jazz Festival - something which I cannot confirm. In fact, some references refer to a teenage Juarena performing with Piazzolla at the Montreal Jazz Festival. That is highly unlikely since Juarena, born in 1941, was 39 years old when the Montreal Jazz Festival began in 1980 and 43 years old when Piazzolla played there in 1984. Surely their paths crossed - Piazzolla had a home in Juarena's native Uruguay and the world of bandoneónists is pretty small - but perhaps some stories have been conflated to create the Montreal Jazz Festival connection.

While he has recorded extensively, Juarena tends to record his own compositions or classic tangos rather than the works of Piazzolla - a recording of solo bandoneón interpretations of Piazzolla would certainly be welcome based on the evidence of today's video.

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Tango Suite - Assad Brothers

2011-06-01T11:25:00.003-04:00

Is it addition or subtraction? Either a minute of music was added to the original Tango Suite to create the standard work with which we are familiar or a minute was subtracted to create the performance in today's video of the Andante and Allegro sections of Tango Suite as performed by brothers, Odair and Sérgio Assad. Available data strongly suggest the latter.

Piazzolla first met and was impressed with the Assad brothers in Paris in 1983. This was early in the Assad's career but they had already received enough recognition to leave their native Brazil and tour Europe. In 1984, Piazzolla composed Tango Suite specifically for the Assad's. According to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, Piazzolla's guitarist, Oscar López Ruiz, reviewed the score before it was sent to the Assads and pronounced it "difficult and complicated but perfectly playable by virtuosos like the Assads." There are three parts to the suite: Deciso, Andante and Allegro, with the latter two normally played as a single unit. The Assads first recorded it in 1985, on the LP, Latin American Music for Two Guitars. They also recorded it with Yo-Yo Ma in 1997, on Soul of the Tango but their definitive performance appears on the wonderful CD, Sérgio & Odair Assad Play Piazzolla. That performance was recorded in Brussels, now home to Odair Assad, in 1999.

Today's video appears to be from a 1989 Brazilian television production. I believe it is the earliest video record of a performance of Tango Suite and for that reason, it is important. Curiously, in today's video the Assads have omitted a minute of music from the original version of the Andante section. The original consists of an A and B section, which are repeated and then followed by an extended bridge section before recapitulating A and B to end the piece. Today's video eliminates the extended bridge which in most performances fills the work from roughly the two minute to the three minute mark. Perhaps this was an experiment or perhaps it was done to meet some scheduling demand in the television programming - we may never know. There is another YouTube performance of the work by the Assads here. It is a 1997 performance from Japanese television and it is contains the missing minute although I much prefer the 1989 performance of today's video because it conveys more emotion and has a freedom of motion that is missing in later performances.

Unfortunately, I find no video record of the Assad's playing the first movement of the suite, Deciso. Let's hope it exists and will appear at a later date.

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Libertango - Colburn Chamber Orchestra

2011-05-14T17:00:00.005-04:00

Dear Reader,

I don't want you to read this blog posting, at least not all of it ... yet. First, please use the "click here" link at the end of this paragraph to trigger the video. As soon as the video starts to play, pause it and move the play cursor to the one minute mark. Now restart it and enjoy the performance. When it is done, please return and continue reading. Now, click here.

Now that you have enjoyed today's video of Libertango, can you believe that the arrangement was done by a seventeen year old student, Matthew John Ignacio? I have viewed, at least in part, more than 3,000 YouTube videos of Libertango performances in the past two years and can confidently say that this is one of the best chamber orchestra arrangements of the piece in existence. It is not just the arrangement that makes the video special, it is also the performance. Did you note the left-hand finger snaps used by Ignacio to start the piece? I don't know if this was a conscious tribute to Piazzolla or not but that is exactly the way that Piazzolla would set the beat and trigger the opening for his quintet in rehearsal and, frequently, in performance.

The musicians are from the Colburn School in Los Angeles, California and if you go back and watch that one minute introduction that I asked you to skip, you will learn that Libertango was developed and rehearsed by the Colburn Chamber Orchestra themselves - off of regular rehearsal times. Their performance is flawless - synchronized as if they shared an implanted timing chip - and in perfect balance. Maxim Eshkenazy usually conducts the group but it is apparent here that they are performing without a conductor - something only the best chamber orchestras can do. Colburn School has appeared in this blog once before. It is a remarkable institution and you will see the musicians here in the future on concert stages around the world. Although Colburn's focus is on college level conservatory training, they also provide musical training for children and adults.

I enjoyed Ignacio's creative use of pizzicato in the arrangement, the early syncopation in the theme, the steady habanera rhythm in the bass and the overall feeling of movement throughout the piece. That an arrangement of this sophistication could be done by a seventeen year old student is astonishing. Not that Ignacio is your typical student. At age 14 he was a graduate of Cerritos College. He is a mathematician and in addition to being a cellist and a pianist - in fact, I believe the piano and the computer are his primary instruments. He has a centered view of life which is well stated in the profile he provides on his YouTube channel. Among his many gifts, I believe composing and arranging may be his greatest and I hope he exercises that gift to create music of his own and to arrange more of Piazzolla's works in the future.

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Invierno Porteño - Arrangement by Tei-Ho

2011-05-14T09:39:00.003-04:00

Do they roast chestnuts in Buenos Aires? The young man smiling in this photo evidently thinks so. I could be wrong, but I believe that smiling young man provides arrangements of Piazzolla's works under the name of Tei-Ho or Teho which is perhaps the anglicized version of 啼鵬, his given name (although Google translate would suggest a pronunciation something more like Che Kung). Tei-Ho has a degree in music composition and is a multi-instumentalist whose instrumental mastery extends to include the bandoneón. He is a skillful bandoneónist with an authentic sound as can be seen in this video. He is clearly an admirer of Piazzolla's music.

Tei-Ho is also a musician who enjoys a challenge. Why else would he create an arrangement of Invierno Porteño for the unlikely ensemble of string quartet, two guitars and a harmonica? Today's video captures the world premiere (and given the unusual nature of the ensemble, perhaps the only performance) of the work in the Taipei National Concert Hall in December, 2007. The musicians are a notable bunch led by well known Japanese guitarist, Shin-ichi Fukuda and chromatic harmonica player, Yasuo Watani. The second guitarist is Shih-yu Liu. The string quartet is not identified but are clearly serious and talented musicians.

Tei-Ho's arrangement begins as normally as a classical piece with a harmonica lead could - sounding much like an arrangement which would flow from the pen of José Bragato, the original source of almost all of Piazzolla's quintet works converted to classics. Then at 2'18" into the work, Vivaldi enters the piece. Intertwining Vivaldi into Piazzolla has been fair game ever since Piazzolla himself added a little Vivaldi to the end of Invierno Porteño. Leonid Desyatnikov inserted Vivaldi into Piazzolla's other three seasons for Gidon Kremer and created a healthy revenue stream for himself as those have displaced Bragato's to become the standard orchestral arrangements. Tei-Ho skillfully escorts Vivaldi out of the piece a minute or so later. But, at four minutes, in an arranging masterstroke, Tei-Ho inserts the 1946 popular Christmas song by Mel Tormé and Robert Wells, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. To me, this is marvelous musical humor but the musicians don't smile and the audience doesn't titter - I think they would in Chicago. Piazzolla resumes just at the point where Piazzolla injects Vivaldi and the piece flows to a beautiful ending. The ensemble gets well deserved applause and I applaud Tei-Ho.

As to roasting chestnuts in Buenos Aires - the answer is, they do (search for "chestnuts" on this page).

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Lost Tango - Ute Lemper & Piazzolla Sextet

2011-05-11T20:29:00.000-04:00

In March, the attendees of the 2011 39th Hong Kong Arts Festival were fortunate to see Lost Tango, a program of Piazzolla's music performed by German chanteuse, Ute Lemper, and a group billed as the Piazzolla Sextet. The importance the promoters of the festival assigned to the performance was signaled by the fact that it was the finale on each of the three days of the festival. There was an early teaser video for the concert on YouTube but until today's video appeared, there has been no way the rest of us could get a glimpse of the program. The video is disappointingly short of musical highlights but there is enough there to suggest it was quite an evening.

Ute Lemper does not quite have the drama of Milva or the direct lineage to the music of Amelita Baltar but she certainly comes from the same mold as those two well established Piazzolla vocalists. She has recorded some Piazzolla in the past but this appears to be the first time she has devoted a full concert to the music of tango and, apparently, mostly to the music of Piazzolla. She sings in English in the video but a review of the concert indicates she also sang in Spanish, French and German. The Piazzolla Sextet features two veterans of Piazzolla's quintets - Hector Console on contrabass and Fernando Suarez Paz on violin. They are joined by Ricardo Lew on guitar, Marcelo Nisinman on bandoneón and a pianist who is not identified but is probably Nicolas Ledesma who frequently performs with Nisinman, Lew and Suarez Paz. The final member of the sextet is Daniel "Pipi" Piazzolla, Astor Piazzolla grandson and founder of the wonderful tango/jazz group Escalandrum. The video has interviews with Nisinman, Suarez Paz and Piazzolla but unfortunately very little music from the Sextet.

Lost Tango was assembled by British music producer Pablo Farba and is going on the road. A number of appearances have been scheduled in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland in November and December of this year with, hopefully, more to come. The scale and nature of the program suggest a DVD or at least an audio recording could be on the way.

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Adios Nonino - Raúl di Blasio

2011-05-10T09:46:00.003-04:00

What is the difference between Raúl di Blasio and Yanni? Nothing, most would say - in fact, they may actually be the same person. The hair, the doleful looks, the puffy satin shirts, the music created for Cialis® commercials - they all make a good case for that point of view. However, to my knowledge, Yanni has never played Piazzolla and as today's video of Adios Nonino demonstrates, Raúl di Blasio has.

Di Blasio was born in Zapala, Argentina in 1949. In 1969, he moved to Buenos Aires and reportedly practiced the piano 12 hours a day. He surely was aware of Piazzolla and his music at that time. It is tempting to dismiss di Blasio today as a new age pianist tapping the maudlin tastes of middle-aged women for cash but there is more to the man than that. He is a capable and serious musician who moved his talents through classical, jazz, and pop music before developing his own characteristic sound. He has played in clubs, stadiums and concert stages around the world. He is not just a technically skilled pianist - he is an arranger, an improviser and a composer. There are many parallels between Piazzolla and di Blasio as performers, but not as composers. Even di Blasio's best work, perhaps Corazon de Niño, is unlikely to tempt the classical musician.

It is as a performer that di Blasio has made his mark and the reasons for that are evident in today's video. He has a remarkable capability to bring emotional shape to music as demonstrated in his fluid and idiosyncratic version of Adios Nonino. Surely this arrangement was born during those 12 hour practice days in Buenos Aires. This video was made nearly twenty years ago and di Blasio has adopted a somewhat more austere style as evidenced in his most recent release, Primavera, but the flourishes and ornamentation which are rampant in the video still emerge as part of the emotional appeal of his music today.

So, until Yanni discovers Libertango, we have a way to tell the two men apart. If today's video does not appear below, click here.

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See The Light - Verano Porteño

2011-05-07T08:43:00.002-04:00

Sometimes it's puppies, sometimes it's an old man smoking a pipe but usually it is paintings of tango dancers or holiday photographs of Buenos Aires. I am talking about the visuals that accompany Piazzolla's music in the 30% of YouTube Piazzolla videos which do not include live musicians. There were roughly 4,300 such videos in the past two years and essentially all of them were ignored by this blog which is focused on live performances. But every once a while, such a video is so striking that it wins a place in this blog. Such is the case for today's video which includes the music of Verano Porteño and the visuals of a custom animation.

The video is titled See the Light. There have been other custom animations on YouTube utilizing Piazzolla's music but this is by far the most imaginative in concept and the most professional in execution of any I have seen. The art work is surrealistic and tells a story rather than appearing to be an scholarly exercise or an experiment. The music complements the art in a way that makes it almost seem like the music was composed for the animation rather than the opposite. The creator of this animation deserves credit and recognition but the only information about the video is in the Korean credits at the end of the video and my Korean friends are, at the moment, unavailable. The only name appearing in western orthography is Lee su Hyeon and the logo of Chosun University appears at the end. It is tempting to speculate that the work is the product of students at Chosun University led by Lee su Hyeon but, rather than speculate, I am hoping that some reader of this blog will provide more information in the form of a comment below.

The YouTube music copyright recognition software has credited the music to Raul Garello's CD, Dancing Tango, but after listening to samples of the cited tune, I am not fully convinced the software has properly identified the source.

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Cafe 1930 - Sureste Trio

2011-05-05T15:02:00.002-04:00

Authentic has often been used in this blog as a synonym for "good" with respect to Piazzolla's music. Today's video of Cafe 1930 by Germany's Sureste Trio is not authentic but it is unquestionably good, in fact, very good. The authentic version of Cafe 1930 was composed for flute and guitar - it is played by Sureste on clarinet, guitar and contrabass. The authentic depicts tango music as it might have been heard in a San Telmo cafe in 1930 - Sureste retains some hints of tango but adds a bit of swing, a touch of gypsy and a touch of klezmer. The cafe feels more Barcelona or Paris or Berlin than San Telmo.

That this is something different is tipped off by the guitar introduction which moves quickly from flamenco to jazz to bossa nova before the familiar descending notes of Piazzolla's opening arrive. The introduction is the creation of Angel Garcia Arnès, the guitarist and arranger for Sureste. All the musicians in Sureste are good but the guitar work of Arnès is simply superb - deft, clean, flowing, creative. Among the best I have heard. The clarinet covers the flute part - it doesn't just play the flute part, it recaptures it in a clarinet appropriate way. The klezmer touch and swing of clarinetist, Witek Kornacki, is very reminiscent of another clarinetist famed for his interpretations of Piazzolla, Giora Feidman. The work of bassist, Guido Jäger, is pitch perfect, understated and absolutely necessary to the tight sound of this trio. If you enjoy the interlude between Arnès and Jäger at the four minute mark of today's video, then you will really enjoy the duet they provide in their video of Contrabajeando. The virtuosity of these two musicians is quite apparent in that video.

There is also a YouTube video featuring the trio playing Piazzolla's Meditango. The meditative part of this piece which begins around 3'35" into that video has never been played better. Far too many musicians never recognize the essence of the work at that point - Arnès feels the music. And if you want more of the Sureste Trio, I strongly encourage you to buy their CD, Soledad.

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Ausencias - Donal Fox Quartet

2011-05-03T09:50:00.004-04:00

Donal Fox is a composer, a jazz pianist and a professor at MIT. His interest in the music of Piazzolla has been discussed earlier in this blog in connection with his Piazzolla to Bach project. Today's video features a brand new arrangement of Ausencias by Fox and his quartet. The performance is at Sculler's Jazz Club in Boston and the notes indicate that it is his first public performance of the work. I believe the performance was yesterday, May 2.

Ausencias was composed by Piazzolla in 1984 for the Fernando Solanas movie, L'Exil de Gardel. In 1985, the score for the movie was awarded a César - the national film award of France. It is a mellow work and contains a sublime duet between electric guitar and bandoneón. Piazzolla's performance of the work can be found on the CD, Tanguedia de Amor.

Three-fourths of the Donal Fox Quartet performance met my expectations. Bass player, Professor John Lockwood, lays down a rock solid clave and root progression. Fox's piano and Warren Wolf's vibraphone have a quiet conversation that captures much of the elegance of the bandoneón/guitar duet in the original (Wolf gets a pass for his one quickly stopped clam - it was, after all, the first performance). But the work of the fourth member of the quartet, Dafnis Prieto on drums, is horrible. Perhaps, Prieto, like a dog who hears frequencies above human hearing, hears complex poly-rhythms that are outside of most human's hearings or perhaps he is just hunting for the right groove and never finds it. But, the result is an apparently random laying on of various drums and cymbals that destroys the flow and integrity of the piece. Next time, give the man a brush and one drum or ask him to sit out the piece. I would be very interested to hear what Fox's other drummers, Terri Lyne Carrington or Yoron Israel, would do with the work. There is potential here, but until the drum work is fixed, the piece should go back to the practice studio.

Donal Fox fans should be aware that next week on May 10, there is an important New York premier of his work, Hear De Lambs A-Cryin, at Carnegie Hall. I believe there will be a live web broadcast.

Embedding has been disabled for this video so to see it you will have to click here.

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Lo Que Vendrá

2011-05-02T09:12:00.002-04:00

Will the real Lo que vendrá please stand up? Today's video, a bandoneón solo version of the piece played by Damián Foretic is certainly not the real one although it is lovely. The quality of the videography is excellent (see a bandoneón up close), the quality of the sound is excellent, and Mr. Foretic is a good bandoneónist who plays with feeling and musicality. But we know it is not the real Lo que vendrá - it is an arrangement for solo bandoneón by Néstor Marconi. You can see and hear Mr. Marconi play it himself here. Many bandoneónist play this arrangement. No one, including Mr. Foretic, play it remotely as well as Marconi.

Lo que vendrá was composed in the mid-50's, quite probably in Paris while Piazzolla was studying with Nadia Boulanger. When Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires from Paris, he organized the Octeto Buenos Aires and in 1956, they recorded their first LP, Tango Progresivo. In that recording, Piazzolla showed Argentina for the first time, his ideas on "new" tango. The record contained six tracks - five were Piazzolla's "new" arrangements of classical tangos by other other composers and one was his new composition, Lo que vendrá. It is clear that the outline of a nice piece of music is there but to my ears, this version of Lo que vendrá is hesitant and confused. It is a little classical, a little orquesta típica, a little jazz and a little "new" tango. You can hear this first recording of the piece here. It is the first Lo que vendrá but is it the real Lo que vendrá?

The work was apparently a favorite of Piazzolla. In the next five years he recorded it five more times and each time, it was a little more coherent and different. In 1958, he used the piece as the main theme in the sound track for the movie, Dos basuras. According to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, at a lecture in October, 1961, Piazzolla played a recording of Lo que vendrá to demonstrate the "new" tango. The last time he recorded it was in 1963, for the LP, Tango Contemporaneo. As in the original recording, this one again was made by an octet, the Nuevo Octeto. This version can also be heard here on YouTube. Perhaps this is the real Lo que vendrá. It retains the classical sounding violin solo but now takes almost entirely the form of tango nuevo.

The story could be conveniently ended there but Le Grand Tango has one more interesting observation. Lo que vendrá had enough orqesta típica style in it to attract Piazzolla's earlier boss and mentor, Anibal Troilo. Troilo recorded his own version, which you can hear here. In 1961, Piazzolla and Troilo appeared together on Channel 11 in Buenos Aires and Troilo invited Piazzolla to join him in playing Lo que vendrá. If video of that program still exists, it is in it, perhaps, that we will find the real Lo que vendrá.

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Le Grand Tango - Peng Diao

2011-04-28T20:25:00.002-04:00

How many musicians in the world do a Charlie Chaplin entrance on stage? How many musicians in the world play Piazzolla on a dizi? And, how many of those would play Le Grand Tango? Today's video provides the answer and the answer is one and his name is Peng Diao.

Peng Diao has appeared before in this blog playing Nightclub 1960. The focus of that blog was on the Chinese folk flute known as a dizi. It is, after all, not a big stretch to go from a Boehm flute to a dizi on a piece composed for flute. The playing was competent but it was the dizi that attracted me. But it was the music that attracted me to today's video. Mr. Diao is not only a showman (see hair, white gloves and greasepaint mustache), he is also a remarkably talented musician. His interpretation is excellent. His technique is flawless. He plays with flair and feeling. And, remarkably, he plays the entire piece - ten minutes of music - without a score. I have watched many musicians play Le Grand Tango on YouTube and I do not recall ever seeing another one play the work from memory. I believe this is a recital performance at the National Taiwan University of Arts and Peng Diao's able accompanist is Yixin Wang but Google Translate is of limited assistance here.

The choice of flute for Le Grand Tango is unusual but not unknown. A commercial arrangement by Reiko Clement is available for flute and guitar - I am guessing that this is the Clement flute part and Piazzolla's original piano part combined. I believe this is the first time a flute version of the work has appeared on YouTube and I am surprised how well it works. The work was originally composed for Mstislav Rostropovich to be played on cello with piano accompaniment. You can read background on the work and hear Rostropovich play the work in this earlier blog posting.

Peng Diao is a remarkable young musician - the Yo-Yo Ma of the dizi. If his video does not appear below, click here. If you find his showmanship interesting, take a look at this.

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Tango Suite - Santiago Cimadevilla & Marcos Di Paolo

2011-04-25T20:37:00.003-04:00

Others have marveled that Piazzolla, a bandoneón player, could write music so naturally for the guitar. Tango Suite is a perfect example. The piece was composed in 1984 for guitar duo, Sérgio and Odair Assad, and is a standard in the repertoire of guitar duos. Perhaps there is a clue to Piazzolla's view of the guitar in the deconstruction and reassembly of the piece for bandoneón and guitar in today's video of Tango Suite. Piazzolla's voice is so clear in the bandoneón part of this video that one is tempted to think that Piazzolla wrote a bandoneón duet and transcribed it for guitar. Could that be the secret of his success with guitar?

This bandoneón/guitar version of Tango Suite is the result of some remarkable insight on the part of Santiago Cimadevilla and Marcos Di Paolo, both of whom are credited with the arrangement in the notes to the video. Most players follow the Assad model very assiduously - Cimadevilla and Di Paolo do not. They feel free to choose their own pace and their own phrasing. Di Paolo's guitar work is, as best I can follow it, directly from the score and his phrasing and touch is absolutely perfect. But the transfer of the other guitar voice to bandoneón is a significant work of musical creativity. It is not a transcription. It is an understanding of the musical message and translation of it into the voice of the bandoneón. Cimadevilla must be a careful student of Piazzolla's bandoneón technique. He has captured the ornamentation and nuanced phrasing of Piazzolla so well that I could swear it is Piazzolla himself playing at times. The work sounds totally natural as a bandoneón/guitar duet and, in a sense, has a more authentic Piazzolla sound than the original.

Based on my survey of Piazzolla works posted on YouTube in 2009 and 2010, Tango Suite is the 15th most performed work of Piazzolla. Most (76%) of the versions posted are played by a guitar duo but a significant number are versions which have been transcribed for other instruments - most commonly for two marimbas or vibraphone/marimba in a commercial arrangement by Kevin Super. There are also commercial arrangements for woodwind quintet and piano trio and performances by bassoon quartets, saxophone quartets and even saxophone and orchestra. All of these take the music a step away from authentic Piazzolla. The Cimadevilla/Di Paolo arrangement is the only one which takes the music a step closer to an authentic Piazzolla sound. Cimadevilla may not be the first to hear the bandoneón voice in the Tango Suite. In 1996, Al Di Meola asked bandoneónist, Dino Saluzzi, to join him on his interpretation of Tango Suites for the classic recording, Di Meola Plays Piazzolla. Saluzzi's work complements the guitar duo found on the Di Meola recording but in no way does it become a full voice in the musical dialog. The work by Cimadevilla and Di Paolo is unique and, I believe, the best of the alternate arrangements of Tango Suite.

There is a separate video for each of the three movements of Tango Suite. I have chosen to provide only the first below. I encourage you to also watch the second movement, Andante, and the third movement, Allegro. If the first movement, Deciso, does not appear below, click here.

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Vayamos al Diablo - Escalandrum

2011-04-17T17:40:00.005-04:00

"There you go, kid! Be a musician, be poor but be happy!" With those words, Astor Piazzolla blessed his grandson's decision to drop out of University and pursue a life as a drummer. He had started him on that path much earlier by giving him a supermarket bag filled with cash to buy his first drum kit and he would be quite proud today if he could witness his grandson's performance in today's video of Vayamos al Diablo.

To his immense credit, that grandson, Daniel - known to most as Pipi, did not trade on his grandfather's name. He was a serious student of the drum. He built his craft working with a variety of groups and developed enough skill to be recognized as an outstanding latin drummer in New York City. About ten years ago, with musician friends, he formed a band and named it Escalandrum - a salute to his drums and to the sharks (escualo) that he used to fish for with his grandfather. Like many start-up bands, Escalandrum struggled as they explored and developed their own sound - a mixture of funk and latin jazz. But their hard work was recognized with a steadily growing band of fans and a series of successful recordings. Recently, the band decided to further explore their Buenos Aires musical roots and what better way to do that than to study and perform works by Astor Piazzolla. The final result was the release of an album last month, Piazzolla plays Piazzolla, and a series of touring appearances promoting the album. The full story of the evolution of Escalandrum is very well told in an excellent video.

In addition to Pipi Piazzolla, Escalandrum includes Nicolas Gueschberg on piano, Damian Fogiel on tenor sax, Martin Pantyrer on baritone sax and bass clarinet, Gustavo Musso on alto and soprano sax and Mariano Sivori on double bass. The three reeds play like brothers and give the group a unique sound. The work on Piazzolla plays Piazzolla is clearly jazz but it is perhaps the most respectful-to-the-original-quintet jazz I have ever heard. Every musician is top-of-the line and the arrangements are tight and well rehearsed with enough room for improvisation to keep the listener involved. There are ten tracks on the new recording and every one of them is excellent. Today's video is from a live performance at the Bridgestone Music Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The live performance adds about a minute to the drum/bass/piano break found in the recording and gives you a good chance to witness Pipi Piazzolla's creativity.

I know it is too early in the year to make such a claim but I am ready to announce that Piazzolla plays Piazzolla is the Piazzolla Album of the Year for 2011. It is a gem. Pipi deserves to be both rich and happy as a result the music made by Escalandrum. You can help by buying the new album from iTunes or Amazon.com.

If the video does not appear below, click here.

Note added 18 April, 2011: A second video from the Bridgestone Festival has been added: Adios Nonino. A heartfelt interpretation - worth watching.

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Fugata - Vanessa-Mae

2011-04-16T11:32:00.002-04:00

There has always been more to music than what is shown on a score. This becomes quite evident when you compare Fugata, for example, as played by Piazzolla's quintet and by a classical string quintet. They may actually all play the same notes with the same timing but the timbre differences in the instruments leads to quite a different sound at ear level. Today's video illustrates an interesting hybrid of the classical and Piazzolla-style quintet playing Fugata. The leader of the effort, Vanessa-Mae, even alerts the audience to the "quite unusual instruments" - which turn out to be a midi keyboard, an electric guitar and a pair of percussionists who join Vanessa-Mae's violin, a piano and a contrabass. With the midi keyboard set to GM1 patch 24, tango accordion, the group has approximated a bandoneón and is poised to give the audience an almost authentic Piazzolla quintet experience.

And how did it come out? About half-baked, I would say. The electric guitar is nearly perfect - very well played. The guitarist has clearly listened to Oscar López Ruiz or Horacio Malvicino play the work. Piazzolla wrote a full voice for the electric guitar in most of his works and the classical world makes a significant error in not including an appropriate instrument to cover the part. Ms. Mae gains points by including it. The midi keyboard is less successful - no attempt is made to use the keyboard's aftertouch capability to emulate the bandoneón's sound envelope. The three traditional musicians - violin, piano and contrabass do well. The percussion is an unfortunate addition. It is not needed and is a distraction from the music. My mind keeps wondering which of Piazzolla's quintet should play the finger cymbals. It would have been so easy for Ms. Mae to hire a bandoneónist for the performance and give the percussionists the night off. Then the classical-leaning audience would not only have seen "unusual instruments" but also have heard an authentic quintet timbre.

It is not out of character for Vanessa-Mae to challenge the envelop a bit. She is the product of a tiger mom and was a child prodigy in the classical world who rebelled at age eighteen. She became estranged from her mother, played violin with Janet Jackson, recorded jazz fusion and dressed and undressed like a bimbo. And, made a lot of money in the process. She seems to delight in politely poking a finger in the eye of the classical world that nurtured her. If internet reports are to be believed, she is currently in training to join the Thai downhill ski team for the next winter Olympics instead of playing the violin. So much for Brahms and Paganini.

Classical musicians respect Fugata. It starts with a well constructed fugue and carries the theme from that fugue in a smooth and unexpected way to a surrealistic cityscape ending that could have been written by Stravinski. Piazzolla composed the work in 1969 and recorded it twice. First on the famous 1969, Trova label, Adios Nonino, and second, twenty years later, on the almost as famous Kip Hanrahan produced recording, La Camorra. Piazzolla modified the ending for the Hanrahan version but otherwise it is unchanged. Ms. Mae chose to perform the original 1969 version.

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Sobre Héroes y Tumbas

2011-04-14T14:13:00.002-04:00

Complexities abound. Today's video features a film made by Mario Sabato with a musical score by Piazzolla. The film mixes fact and fiction about the writing of the novel, Sobre Héroes y Tumbas, by Ernesto Sabato, father of the film maker. You will see Ernesto Sabato, himself, speaking at the beginning of the film. He is still living, turns 100 this year and is a most interesting man. He is one of the world's most famous human rights activists, a former communist who studied in Moscow, a PhD physicist who worked at the Curie Institute in Paris and at MIT in the USA. However, in 1943, he gave up science and devoted himself to writing, in surrealistic terms, about his native Argentina. Sobre Héroes y Tumbas was his second book and is still viewed by many as his masterpiece although his most famous work must be the Nunca Más which set out the evidence of the disappearance of thousands under the military dictatorship of Argentina.

The movie was made in 1963, and the music featured throughout the short film is titled, Introducción a Héroes y tumbas (my thanks to Pedro-with-the-golden-ears for identification of the piece). The work can be found on the reissue CD, Tango Contemporaneo. On the CD, a reading by Sabato from his novel is included above the music at the end of the seven minute piece. The performance in both the movie and the CD is by the group referred to as the "New Octet" which included José Bragato - cello, Jaime Gosis - piano, Antonio Agri - violin, Oscar López Ruiz - electric guitar, Lee Jacobson - percussion, Jorge Barone - flute, Kicho Díaz - contrabass, and Piazzolla - bandoneón. The music is narrative in form but makes up in evocativeness what it lacks in structure. It is not dissimilar from other music composed for the new octet but it was, at the time, not popular - perhaps a bit too complex for the broader audience to which Piazzolla was beginning to appeal. But from today's perspective, the music was merely foreshadowing the depth of compositional skill which has made Piazzolla's music so attractive to the classical community.

There is another layer adding to the complexity of the story. The female lead in the movie is Egle Martin. According to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, Ms. Martin and Piazzolla began a personal relationship around the time this movie was made. It was Ms. Martin who in 1967, sketched out the idea which Horacio Ferrer and Piazzolla turned into the operita, Maria de Buenos Aires. She, in fact, was destined to play the leading role in the initial production until a personal crisis led Ms. Martin to return to her wealthy rancher husband rather than continue her relationship with Piazzolla. Amelita Baltar took Ms. Martin's place in both the personal relationship and in the role of Maria in the operita.

The movie is in two parts - both are provided below. If the videos do not appear below, click here for part one and here for part two.

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90th Anniversary Celebration

2011-03-13T11:49:00.005-04:00

Astor Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina on March 11, 1921. The occasion of the 90th anniversary of that day is leading to celebratory concerts around the world throughout the month of March. Today's featured video comes from one of the most important of those celebrations. It is from a concert held in Buenos Aires at the Eva Peron Amphitheater in the Parque Centenario. Some 1700 people were lucky enough to get one of the free tickets to the concert to hear two stars involved in the early success of Piazzolla: Horacio Ferrer and Amelita Baltar. Ferrer was the primary lyrical collaborator with Piazzolla and Baltar was the lead singer for Piazzolla from 1968 to 1975 and was Piazzolla's constant companion during that period. We are fortunate that Flavio Pigazzi captured most, perhaps all, of the concert on video and shared it on YouTube.

As this is being written, there are sixteen videos from this concert posted and perhaps there are more to come. The video I have chosen features Ms. Baltar performing the Piazzolla/Ferrer classic, Balada para un loco, which she first introduced to the world in 1969. You can find the other fifteen videos on Flavio Pigazzi's YouTube Channel. Ms. Baltar is backed in the video by the Orquesta del Tango de Buenos Aires which is led through the concert by a variety of conductors including Raúl Garello, Néstor Marconi and Juan Carlos Cuacci. The notes do not so indicate, but I believe that is Marconi with the baton in the video. Ms. Baltar owns this song and her performance here is spectacular. Note that at the end of the video, Horacio Ferrer, who wrote the lyrics, joins her on the stage. Mr. Ferrer performs a number of the works which he and Piazzolla created, singing them even, in other videos from this concert - don't miss them.

My thanks to Mr. Pagazzi for sharing the video and I encourage you all to visit his excellent blog, Hagan Ruido.

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Fuga y Misterio - The Folk Process

2011-03-11T09:18:00.005-05:00

Musicologists are fond of citing the folk process at work in such tunes as Barbara Allen or Fisher's hornpipe. The original tune or lyrics are transmogrified to something different as they pass aurally from musician to musician. Classical musicians think of themselves as "above" the folk process but it goes on there too - at least it does with Piazzolla's Fuga y misterio. Fuga y misterio began as incidental instrumental music for the operita, Maria de Buenos Aires. It is played as Maria leaves the suburbs, enters the city and wanders in bewilderment. The first video below features the audio track of the original version from the initial production of the work in 1968. Piazzolla himself opens the fugue on the bandoneón.

The great classical popularizer of Piazzolla's music, Gidon Kremer, plays a very literal interpretation of the work on his CD, Maria de Buenos Aires. Even the instrumentation remains the same. No folk process at work here. But then, vibraphonist Andrei Pushkarev, makes an astonishing creative leap and arranges a second version for Kremer which bursts with jazz energy. Arguably, it is a better piece of music than the original. Kremer and Pushkarev would call it "an arrangement", but it looks like folk process to me. That version is the second video below.

And then in another astonishing creative leap, Natalie Galstyan, has "transcribed and arranged" Pushkarev's arrangement for chamber orchestra and voices. "Transcribed" usually means "I don't have the original score but I listened carefully and wrote down the music for what I heard." In this case, Ms. Galsyan took the additional step of arranging it again. Sounds to me like the folk process at work. Arguably, it is a better piece of music than Mr. Pushkarev's. The "misterio" section now becomes a full blown, ragtime-gypsy-inspired celebration topped off with some Swingle singer type vocalization. The result is a real crowd pleaser that should be replicated in concert halls all around the world. That version becomes the third video posted below.

Pushkarev, one of my favorite interpreters of Piazzolla, has been featured in this blog before. Ms. Galstyan and her Dominatus Vox Orchestra are new to me and for such a unique and talented organization they deserve more attention - something like a world tour. I was unable to find much information about Ms. Galstyan but she is clearly both a creative force and a very confident, charismatic and photogenic musical leader. It would not surprise me to see her "discovered" and find herself on the fast track to fame. Armenia's loss would be the musical world's gain.

If the videos do not appear below, click here for the original -- here for the Pushkarev/Kremer version -- and, here for the Galstyan/Dominatus Vox version

The Original

Pushkarev/Kremer

Galstyan/Dominatus Vox

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Libertango - Ocarina Quartet

2011-03-09T19:54:00.004-05:00

We can perhaps thank Link from the land of Hyrule for inspiring today's video. Link is the hero in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series which hit its high water mark with the sale of approximately six million copies of The Ocarina of Time. The New York Times reported sales of ocarinas soared with the release of the video game. Members of the ensemble featured in today's video of Libertango are not, however, from Hyrule, they are from Taiwan. And, Libertango is just one of five ocarina quartet videos you will find on c601263's YouTube channel

There are places in this world where ocarinas are not unusual but for most of us, an ocarina is a bit of an exotic. The name comes from the Italian word for "little goose", no doubt because ocarinas were once made to closely resemble a little goose. You can still find those - in fact I once saw in Zurich a glass case filled with ocarina's in shapes of many animals, including a goose. But today, most of them are made in a shape which more closely resembles a root vegetable than a goose. In fact, a common name for the instrument in America is "sweet potato." The italian firm of Fabio Managlio still makes some of the best ocarinas in the world but there are hundreds of craftsman producing ocarinas all over the world. If you must have one for yourself, you can find them for prices of under $10 to nearly $2,000 at STL Ocarina and, I suspect, at a music shop near you.

Musically, the performance by the ensemble in today's video is not their best but it does deserve a place in our collection of "Libertango on unusual instruments."

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Te Quiero Tango - Eduardo Abramson

2011-03-08T17:25:00.004-05:00

Eduardo Abramson has been featured before in this blog as the organizer of an important tango celebration in Israel and as a bandoneónist. He is featured in today's video primarily as the arranger of Te quiero tango although he also appears in the video as a bandoneónist.

Te quiero tango is rarely performed. There are several commercial arrangements available, this one includes lyrics and since no arranger is listed, it is probably the original. I learned from Mr. Abramson that the Spanish lyrics are by Roberto Arrieta, an Argentine singer who performed with Piazzolla in New York in 1959. There are also lyrics in French credited to Jean Manou. To my knowledge, Te quiero tango has never been recorded and I believe this is the first posting of the piece on YouTube. The copyright date is 1958, which corresponds to the period in which Piazzolla formed the short-lived Jazz-Tango quintet in New York City and made a few recordings for the Ti-Co label. I would speculate that this piece was written for such a recording, perhaps Take Me Dancing, but was never used. It was a period of financial and artistic struggle for Piazzolla and most of the music he recorded during that period is totally uncharacteristic of his future work and totally forgettable. That does not mean it is unenjoyable as demonstrated in today's video.

It is the arrangement that makes today's video special. Somehow, Abramson recognized the choral potential of the work and has converted it into quite a nice performance piece. Abramson (on bandoneón) and members of his TangoBar quintet provide a traditional tango accompaniment while the members of the Ma'ayan Choir, the official choir of the Tel Aviv municipality, do a superb job with the harmonies and phrasing of the work. The leader of this choir, Anat Morag, is exceptionally graceful and clear in her conducting style. Choral performances of Piazzolla's works are quite popular and this arrangement deserves to join the family of standard Piazzolla choral works. I hope it is published and well distributed so others can enjoy it.

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Milonga del Angel - Anne Akiko Meyers

2011-03-07T19:52:00.002-05:00

On October 14, 2010, a violin sold for $3,400,000 - the highest on record for any instrument sold at auction. On January 11, 2011, Anne Akiko Meyers, the buyer of that instrument, filled it with the sound of Piazzolla's Milonga del angel in a concert at the Ruben Museum of Art in New York City. Today, you can see and hear the result in the featured video below.

The violin was constructed by Antonio Stradivari in 1697. The first owner is believed to have been Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1804, the violin came into the possession of Count Gabriel-Jean-Joseph Molitor and remained in that family until 1917. Hence the violin is known as the Napoleon/Molitor violin. For the next nearly 100 years, the violin changed hands several times and although it was heard in public, it has never been heard regularly in the hands of virtuoso performer. That is about to change.

Ms. Meyers is indeed a virtuoso performer whose talents were recognized by the age of seven and by eighteen, she was an international star. Among her many recordings you will find performances of Piazzolla's Introduccion et Angel and Milonga en re on her 2009 CD, Smile. There is also a YouTube video of her performing Ave Maria but today's video is, I believe, the first time she has applied her talents to Milonga del angel. In all four of these, Ms. Meyers has chosen pieces with flowing, sustained lines which best show her gorgeous tone and finger-tip mastery. It is impossible to judge the quality of sound from her new Stradivarius with the compressed sound available on YouTube but the performance is superb and deserves one of the best instruments in the world. Milonga del angel has never sounded better. While it is difficult to pull your ear away from the sound of the violin, one should also note the excellent job being done by her accompanist, Reiko Uchida.

It is an honor to the music of Piazzolla to be chosen to share the stage with this star violin and star violinist, but it is an honor well deserved.

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Concert d'aujourd'hui - Marimba Duo

2011-03-06T08:40:00.004-05:00

On April 17, 2010, this blog issued a challenge to vibraphone and marimba players for a performance of Concert d'aujourd'hui. That challenge has now been met in today's video by Tatsuo Sasaki and Michiko Noguchi, who perform together as the Marimba Duo.

Concert d'aujourd'hui is the fourth movement in the Histoire du tango series composed in 1985 for guitar and flute. The first three are composed in the tango styles of 1900, 1930 and 1960, respectively. The fourth is meant to represent nuevo tango as conceived by Piazzolla. It is the most difficult of the four from both the perspective of the musician and the listener and for this reason it is the least frequently played - for every four performances of Cafe 1930 on YouTube, you will find only one of Concert d'aujourd'hui.

In addition to today's video, Marimba Duo have recorded two of the other Histoire series and they are available on their excellent CD, Riverdance. You can hear samples of these on YouTube here: Bordel 1900 and Cafe 1930. Sasaki and Noguchi only began playing together in 2009, but they have both long been stars in the marimba world. Sasaki is the Gary Burton of the classical world. He has performed around the world under conductors ranging from Leopold Stokowski to Zubin Mehta and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Julliard School. Ms. Noguchi has also performed around the world and has even played her marimba in the Japanese Imperial Court for the Emperor, his family, and nobles. In addition to her performing skills, she is also well known for her arrangements of a wide variety of pieces for marimba. The arrangement performed here of Concert d'aujourd'hui is hers and while her Histoire arrangements have not yet been published, you can find many of her other marimba arrangements published at Steve Weiss Music. Together, Sasaki and Noguchi certainly form one of the best marimba duos in the world.

Still missing from Marimba Duo is a performance of Nightclub 1960 to complete the Histoire series. Hopefully, we'll see that soon on YouTube or find it in their next recording.

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Bordel 1900 - Tango Factory

2011-03-05T11:35:00.002-05:00

Humor. Joy. Creativity. Brilliant musicianship. You will find them all in today's featured video of Bordel 1900 performed by Tango Factory. Bordel 1900 is the first movement of the Histoire du tango series composed by Piazzolla in 1985 for flute and guitar. It is one of the ten most frequently performed of Piazzolla's works with nearly 200 versions of it appearing on YouTube over the past two years. Almost all of the performances are by duos, although not always flute and guitar, but there are a few large ensemble performances. None of those come remotely close to the arrangement and performance by the Tango Factory quartet in today's video.

Tango Factory consists of Marcelo Nisinman on bandoneón, Chen Halevi on clarinet, Matan Porat on piano and Winfried Holzenkamp on contrabass. These are all virtuoso (and very busy) musicians. They are one of the most talented set of musicians ever to converge on Piazzolla's music. Except for Halevi, all have some Piazzolla roots. Nisinman is a talented composer and I believe the arranger of Bordel 1900 here. He grew up in a household where Piazzolla rehearsed his quintet around the family piano. Porat, also a composer, was recently featured in this blog for his piano arrangements of Piazzolla. Holzenkamp spent a year in Buenos Aires studying tango with such tango bass players as Hector Console (a member of Piazzolla's quintet) and Daniel Buono from the Rudolfo Mederos quintet. I don't know where Halevi got his tango chops but the klezmer twinge and enthusiasm he brings to his work adds a real spark to the quartet. Note the way the group navigates the tempo changes and unusual accents - these guys are good.

This is the most enjoyable performance of Bordel 1900 I have ever seen. I wonder what they can do with the other three movements of the Histoire?

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Laura's Dream - Gary Burton & Makoto Ozone

2011-02-25T09:29:00.002-05:00

I suspect it was a highlight in the lives of both men when Piazzolla first performed with vibraphone master, Gary Burton. The result of their collaboration was preserved in a recording which belongs in the collection of every music lover: The New Tango. This recording captured their performance at the 1986 Montreux Jazz Festival. Their performance of Laura's Dream was a highlight of that concert. Video of that performance was highlighted in this blog but the videos have since been removed from YouTube, presumably for copyright reasons. Fortunately you can still view Burton and Piazzolla performing Laura's Dream together at the Ravenna Jazz Festival in a two part video viewable here and here. That video was reviewed in this blog earlier.

Today's video features Burton performing Laura's Dream with pianist, Makoto Ozone. Burton and Ozone have collaborated for twenty years or more - most recently in a 2010 tour of Japan. They have recorded the version of Laura's Dream seen in today's video in the 1995 recording, Face to Face. Today's video was made that same year at the Münchner Klaviersommer jazz festival.

There are significant differences between the Burton/Ozone version and the original Montreux version. As a piece of music, Laura's dream is unusual Piazzolla. It is a long piece, more than ten minutes, rhythmically bland most of that time, and it is essentially serial as opposed to structural although the opening theme does return at the end. Presumably the title refers to a dream of Piazzolla's wife, Laura. And, indeed, the Montreux version opens with a haunting, meandering dream-like sequence but anxiety clearly enters the dream at the five minute point, interrupted briefly by a peaceful interlude at seven-and-a-half minutes before returning to anxiety at eight minutes in a very rhythmic, staccato section, to a polyphonic chase sequence at nine minutes, and a brooding bandoneón solo at ten minutes before drifting back to the original haunting, meandering theme as the piece closes. The original closes with the longest, most perfect glissando ever played by Suarez Paz. The original is very much a work featuring Burton's vibraphone and Piazzolla's bandoneón is in the background except for that brief solo at ten minutes. The version in today's video is clearly the same piece and Burton brings essentially all of his portion of the original score to the piece. Ozone fills in the rest and his work is masterful. In fact, I believe he brings some order and structure to the piece that is missing in the original. The final result is wonderful music that holds up as well to repeated listening as the original Montreux version.

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Libertango - Glass Duo

2011-02-17T17:38:00.005-05:00

It is a little known fact that the part normally played on flute in Donizetti's opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, was originally composed for the glass harp - so says Beverly Sills. It is not a fact that Piazzolla originally composed Libertango to be played on the glass harp, but today's video demonstrates that he could have.

The glass harp is but one of many members of the family of instruments known as crystallphones. The sound is created by gently rubbing a wet fingertip on the rim of a crystal wine glass - give it a try, preferably in a quiet restaurant. Typically, the set of wine glasses that comprise a glass harp are tuned by filling them with varying levels of water but the musicians in today's video, Anna and Arkadiusz Szafraniec who perform as Glass Duo, play a dry version of the glass harp where the glasses are specifically created to create the desired pitches while unfilled. The dry format was invented in the early 19th century but was popularized by Bruno Hoffmann who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the resurrection of the instrument in modern times and is also responsible for the name "glass harp" (there are many other names for a set of "singing glasses"). The set of glasses that Glass Duo play covers five full octaves and they suggest it is the largest glass harp in the world.

I was drawn to this video by the novelty of the instrument but it is the intense musicality of the performance that retained my interest. These are incredible musicians who have created a sensitive and unique arrangement of Libertango. Listen to the rhythmic complexity, the subtle dynamics, the pure harmonies - and watch the incredible synchronization of the performers. You are watching, I suspect, not just today's best glass harp musicians but quite probably the best the world has seen - ever. There are a number of performances captured on their YouTube channel. One of those is mandatory viewing for all readers of this blog: Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. They also have produced two CD's of their music available for purchase on their website.

I hope Glass Duo will branch out beyond the almost trite Libertango and explore more broadly Piazzolla's music. Many of his works would be most interesting played on the glass harp.

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Libertango - 55Ewcia

2011-02-13T21:16:00.002-05:00

Libertango is the most frequently performed piece composed by Piazzolla - more than a third of the Piazzolla videos posted on YouTube are performances of this song. This blog has covered twenty-seven versions ranging from horrible to sublime. I don't know how to classify today's featured video, but, as the only note on the video comments, it is ciekawe:)). It is one of thirty-eight such videos posted by the Polish songstress known only by her YouTube ID: 55Ewcia. Drawn like a moth to a flame, I sampled most of them and settled on her version of the hit, Jutro będzie dobry dzień, as my favorite.

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Entre Brecht et Brel - Saule Iskakova

2011-02-11T16:51:00.005-05:00

Entre Brecht et Brel was the finale of the famous Milva-Piazzolla concert at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris in September, 1984. Today's video features Saule Iskakova performing this rarely heard piece. It is a powerful, melodic canción tailored for the dramatic persona of Milva. The text is abstract but it seems to explore the nature of reality for the performer - is real life the character on the stage or the person remaining after the curtain closes? According to the sacem registration, the lyrics were composed by Angela Dania Tarenzi (wife of Piazzolla's agent, Aldo Pagani) and Alberto Favata (better known under his psuedonym of Simon Luca), presumably in Italian originally. The lyrics were adapted into french for Milva's performance by the well known french song writer, Claude Lemesle. All three are credited on the Bouffes du Nord recording. If that is not complicated enough, the piece was re-registered with sacem as Finale when it was performed by Richard Galliano and it is now known by both names, sometimes simultaneously. And, there is more: in the only other recording of the piece that I can find, José Angel Trelles performed the piece in 1993 on his Inedito recording under the title Final de función with the lyrics adapted into spanish by poet and lyricist, Horacio Ferrer. The differences in the lyrics are striking enough that I have included both the french and spanish lyrics below the video. I have not yet found the original italian lyrics to determine which adaptation is closest to the original but you can hear the lyrics in italian in this video by Mascia Foschi.

The vocalist in today's video, Saule Iskakova, is from Saint Petersburg, Russia. I believe that Ms. Iskakova is today's best Piazzolla vocalist outside of Argentina, and better than most in Argentina. She approaches Milva in both quality of voice and drama of presentation. The performance in today's video was captured in Petrozavodsk with a local tango band providing accompaniment. While I hear some good musicians in the band, they are clearly not familiar enough with the material to provide the accompaniment that such a high quality vocal deserves. You will find six other performances by Ms. Iskakova and the local band on MrTozi's YouTube channel - all of them are good, but I think the one featured here is the best.

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Lyrics as sung in french (from the Bouffes du Nord CD liner notes)

Un crépuscule artificiel joue "limelight"
Quand le silence des rappels éclate
Un n'est plus rien qu'une ombre pâle sur un plateau
Que polichinelle
Entre Brecht et Brel
Et balaie le tréteau
Quand un dieu coupe ses ficelles de pantin
L'artiste es nu comme un rebelle argentin
Quand les pleins feux le démaquillent et qu'il se réveille
Le lilliputien géant
Redevient l'enfant
Qu'il était la veille

Pont la nuit meurt
On a fait l'amour
On sort côté coeur, côté cour
C'est la vie de baladin
Lampe d'Aladin
Qui s'éteint aux portes du jour
Je vais chanter
Sur la voie lactée
Dans un rêve plein de ta voix
Et je vais me réveiller
Tout émerveillée
D'être encor ce soir avec toi

Un crépuscule qui annonce une aurore
Une éclaircie en réponse à la mort
c'est le spectacle, c'est la scène, et le rêve qui
m'ont donné des ailes
Entre Brecht et Brel
Entre l'ombre et l'oubli
je vais partir en emportant le décor
Je vais sortir en te criant "encore"
Moi Columbine qui salue et redeviens moi
Je me rentre dans ma peau
Et sous le rideau
Je dors avec toi

Lyrics in spanish from (Todotango.com)

Salió Chaplín a dirigir la orquesta.
La farsa estalla con su luz de gas.
Piensa Podrecca los aplausos de papel.
Seré Harpo Marx, mi amor, y por vos
daré la función.

Si el hilo corta el dios que da la letra,
la magia muere; pero, no llorés:
le rogaremos al autor unos versos más;
la ilusión revivirá, y en la escena tres
yo el amor te haré.

Fue nuestro novelón de abril,
vos de frac y yo de soirée.
Y era nuestro loco amor
bella inspiración
de un poeta que nos rimó.

Te amé y canté, extasiándome
en aquel final color vals.
Lararara,larará... Y soñar los dos.
Y jamás, jamás despertar.

¡Por Dios! Crispín trepó a encender el día.
¿Quién ya en las máscaras podrá creer?
Es el teatro, y el dolor de celofán.
Cruje mi galán y como un mal Gardel
me olvido de mí.

Incendia el sol nuestra escenografía.
Sangrando azul de candilejas vas.
Ay, Colombina, al caer, te saludaré.
Agonizo en mi disfraz. Ya bajo el telón.
Moriré con vos.

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Libertango - Matan Porat

2011-02-06T16:23:00.002-05:00

There are 88 keys on a piano and I think Matan Porat hits them all in his variation on Libertango in today's video. Morat is one of the world's most promising young pianists. He began his studies in his native Israel but has also studied in Portugal, at the Julliard in the U.S. and most recently with Murray Perahia in London. He has won numerous prizes and appeared as a soloist with a number of orchestras around the world. His performance of Libertango in today's video was as an encore from an appearance with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra earlier this week. As you might expect from the creativity shown in the video, he is also a composer who, in fact, won the Prime Minister's Award for composition in 2009.

Most pianists keep a portfolio of encores in their head - pieces that are light and showy that will leave a smile on the faces of the audience as they depart the concert hall. Libertango certainly belongs in that category but Porat also has a wonderful variation on Tom Jobim's One note samba in his portfolio - I encourage you to watch it here.

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El Bocha - José Angel Trelles

2011-02-04T09:05:00.003-05:00

Like Gilbert and Sullivan, Ferrer and Piazzolla created a set of beloved songs which have moved into the category of "standards." Less remembered is the fact that many of Gilbert and Sullivan's works faded quickly into obscurity at the time they were created only to be resurrected and revered by future generations who were rediscovering the music. One wonders if the same will happen to Ferrer and Piazzolla. Certainly a candidate for future resurrection is today's featured work, El bocha, sung by José Angel Trelles. If you, like me, don't own the CD, Piazzolla-Ferrer: Ineditos, you probably have never heard El bocha even if you are a Piazzolla fan. There is a fragment of El Bocha sung here by a younger Trelles but today's video provides the first time for me to hear the full song. While I am not sure the arrangement here is the best, the piece deserves to be heard more.

I am not sure when El bocha was composed, it is not listed in SACEM, but probably around 1975 when José Angel Trelles first joined Piazzolla's electronic octet as a vocalist. The lyrics created by Horacio Ferrer are available here but the score does not appear to be available. Since only Trelles has recorded the song and I find no traces of anyone else performing the song, the only copy of the score may reside in Trelles' collection of music. Trelles did not sing long with Piazzolla, 1975-76 and again briefly in 1982, but went on to become a major star who has toured the world singing the canciones of tango, including much of the Piazzolla-Ferrer catalog.

There are other relatively rare Piazzolla-Ferrer works which I have never heard on Trelles' Ineditos CD: Final de funcion, Existir, and Pepe Cascabel. Hopefully, these will eventually find their way to YouTube also.

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Piazzolla RTP Video

2011-02-02T09:25:00.005-05:00

In February, 2010 this blog highlighted an original Piazzolla performance of Michelangelo 70 which had been captured from a Rádio Televisão Portuguesa (RTP) television broadcast which originated in Lisbon, probably in 1982 (later reported to be 1987). The person who posted that video, Hugo Omar Viggiano, has now posted the entire broadcast - more than an hour of music and interviews with Piazzolla. The broadcast is spread across four videos, each of which is posted below.

To my knowledge, this video is not available from other sources. There are some audio quality and sync problems but even with those, the video is very interesting.

If the videos do not appear below click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, here for Part 3 and here for Part 4.

Note added 7 February, 2011: a fifth video from the RTP series has been added. That video reports that this concert was held in 1987 - not 1982 as I had originally suggested. If it does not appear below, click here.

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Piazzolla Caffé & Bar

2011-01-30T17:11:00.003-05:00

There is no Piazzolla music highlighted today but for European readers or travelers to Europe, we have a highlighted destination. The address is Rua Antonio José de Almeida nº52A in Cantanhede, Portugal. You will find there a very warm and friendly spot for food, spirits and music run by some genuine Piazzolla fans. It is called the Piazzolla Caffé & Bar, On the wall you will see a score of Adios Nonino and posters of Piazzolla. On Friday nights they have live bands but my guess is that on other nights, you might find Piazzolla music playing on their in-house sound system. You can see photos of people truly enjoying themselves at the Piazzolla Caffé here.

Cantanhede is a discovery to me. It lies in the heart of the Bairrada wine region and is only 25 kilometers from what are described as the very popular beaches of Mira and Tocha. For a town of less than 40,000 people, it seems a wonder to me that such an inviting spot as the Piazzolla Caffe exists. If you are traveling to Portugal and want to get beyond the usual tourist destinations of Lisbon and Oporto, plan a trip to Cartanhede.

And while it was not Piazzolla that led to my discovery of the Piazzolla Caffé, it was music and I have included the video below. I recognize the music as fado but do not know the name of the musician or the song, although it sounds very familiar. Perhaps a reader can help and leave a comment. The music is wonderful and it would be my dream to walk into the Piazzolla Caffé and encounter such a scene.

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Verano Porteño - Anders Miolin

2011-01-29T15:16:00.002-05:00

Fortunately for us, triskaidekaphobia is not a concern for Anders Miolin, the guitarist performing Verano Porteño in today's video, nor for Ermanno Chiavi, the luthier who built Miolin's 13 string guitar. The arrangement is no doubt Miolin's - arrangements for 13 string guitars are just as rare as such instruments - and while it is, I believe, derivative of the arrangement by Baltazar Benitez (which itself is derivative of the arrangement by Sergio Assad), advantage is taken of the additional range of the 13 string guitar through broader broken chords which open the sound of the piece. It makes for beautiful music.

As beautiful as the music is, I must admit it was the guitar that captured my attention. It is very interesting and I believe unique. There are harp guitars with 13 strings but what makes the word "harp" applicable to such instruments are the unfretted sympathetic or diapason strings which vibrate harmonically with the fretted strings as they are played and occasionally are plucked themselves to add a particular bass note. All thirteen strings on the Chiava instrument are fretted, although the lowest strings have only three fretted positions. The additional strings and frets extend the range of the guitar from the usual three plus octaves to a full five octaves. The strings may and do still vibrate sympathetically but they also may be fretted to provide a fuller range of low bass notes although any rapid fingering on those lowest strings must challenge the musician.

I think there is more opportunity for the combination of guitar, musician and Verano Porteño. I hope Mr. Miolin will listen carefully to Piazzolla's quintet version of the work and, with a clean sheet of staff paper, create an arrangement which will break the bonds of Assad/Benitez and truly show what Mr. Chiavi's instrument can do.

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Libertango - SummerRain Duo

2011-01-26T11:17:00.002-05:00

Today's video features a guitar duo in sharp contrast to the Meng/Yameng duo featured in a recent blog. Today's duo comes from South Korea and is known as SummerRain. Meng/Yameng excel in interpretation and execution. They play music that others have composed or arranged and to my knowledge do not address those tasks themselves. SummerRain, in contrast, arrange and compose in addition to performing. Meng/Yameng are clearly classical performers. SummerRain would be found in the New Age bins in an American shop although their technique suggests they are classically trained.

In today's video, SummerRain performs a medley of Carlos Gardel's Por una cabeza and Piazzolla's Libertango. This is music for listening enjoyment. Nothing is heavy or complicated, the arrangements are creative and the performance is flawless. The guitarists are Shim Hyun and Lim Seungmoon. Their biographical information is available but only in Korean and because of the way the text in their website in embedded in .gif files, it is inaccessible to the usual translation engines. As a result, I can share no information about the musicians. Their website lists two recordings and offers a number of mp3 samples. You can also find a good set of videos on the Seungmoonlim YouTube Channel. The performance of their own composition, Summer Rain, is very nice and reminiscent of the work of Brook Williams or William Ackerman although I cannot imagine either of those two guitarists performing Piazzolla's music.

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La Muerte del Ángel - Tango Ensillado

2011-01-25T10:35:00.002-05:00

It is always refreshing to find a new group of young musicians dedicated to bringing the authentic sounds of Piazzolla to new audiences. Tango Ensillado is such a group. The group is new enough that as I write this, their website is reserved but still unpopulated. They follow the tradition of other tango groups from their home country, Norway, of directing high quality musical training through apprenticeship with masters of the genre into a tight musical organization which can truly capture the sound of a Piazzolla quintet. Tango Ensillado is still developing their skills but as you can tell from today's video performance of La muerte del ángel, this is a group to watch for the future.

I believe members of the group are Andreas Rokseth on bandoneón, Rannveig Ryeng on violin, Christian Skår Winther on guitar, Håkon Magnar Skogstad on piano and Ole Herman Schøyen Sjölin on contrabass. All but Winther are veterans of the well known Norwegian orquesta tipica Tangueros del Norte. Winther is a strong electric guitarist - just the person they need to form an authentic quintet. The piece they are playing, La muerte del ángel, was composed as incidental music for the 1962 play, Tango del ángel, by Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz and is one of Piazzolla's most frequently recorded pieces.

Groups like Tango Ensillado tend to come together and then disappear a year or two later. I hope this group stays around longer than that - they could become one of the best.

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Libertango - Stoner Version

2011-01-24T10:23:00.003-05:00

Caution - today's video may be painful to musicians. In the past two years I have sampled over 14,000 Piazzolla videos on YouTube. Today's video featuring a performance of Libertango by the duo, Trash, is the worst I have ever seen. I must admit I have not watched the entire video but did watch long enough to confirm that there is a trace of the Libertango tune submerged in that steady stream of stoner sound.

We know very little about the musicians other than that they are prize winners - note the trophies on the top of the cabinet - and that the guitar is "tuned" in open C.

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Note added 25 January, 2011: This blog has clearly tapped some unexpected well of interest. It is one the most viewed, most commented upon blogs I have ever posted. I received a little more information in a private note from one of the musicians. The guitarist is Karl Lazaro and the drummer is Matias Bandini. They describe themselves as more poets than musicians. You will find their poetry under the links associated with their names in the previous sentence. Karl further suggests viewing of a second Piazzolla related video which includes his poetry reading. I recall this video well from the first time I saw it. The juxtaposition of audio and video is strikingly creative. You can watch it here.

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Tango Suite - Wang Yameng & Su Meng

2011-01-21T10:00:00.004-05:00

Repetition in pursuit of perfection is no vice. Therefore, today's video will repeat the performers and piece featured in this blog on 9 September, 2009. The performers are guitarists Wang Yameng and Su Meng and the piece is Tango Suite, composed in 1984 for Sérgio and Odair Assad. The Assad's recording of the work on the CD, Sérgio & Odair Assad Play Piazzolla, remains the standard against which all performances are compared.

In today's video, Wang Yemeng and Su Meng are noticeably more mature and more poised than in the 2009 video and their playing has gotten even better. They are technically perfect. I have never seen better precision in a guitar duo and they make it appear so easy - there is no straining, no suffering, no excess motion - just an amazing flow of notes. In contrast to the 2009 video, today's video features the full Tango Suite. The video is marred only by a very irritating abrupt cut-off before the end of the piece. All we needed was five seconds more music.

Both guitarists studied under the well known Chinese guitar artist, Chen Zhi. Professor Chen Zhi has been the center of the guitar world in China for many years. Both guitarists also play instruments built by Kim Hee Hong of Alma Guitars and they appear to be superb instruments albeit from an unlikely place. From what I read, there is only a years' waiting list for his instruments. For an instrument of such quality, that is not bad. If you are interested, you better get one ordered - the wait is only going to get longer.

Wang Yameng and Su Meng are clearly challenging the Assad's as the best Piazzolla guitar duo in the world. I find more passion in the Assad's performance but less precision. Passion remains the driver of Piazzolla's music so, for the moment, I will allow the Assad's to remain as standard bearers but they should be worried.

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Five Tango Sensations - Quatuor Terpsycordes

2011-01-20T13:41:00.004-05:00

Geneva, Switzerland based Quatuor Terpsycordes and bandoneónist, William Sabatier, have just provided what is certainly the definitive performance of Piazzolla's Five Tango Sensations on YouTube. Nothing else comes close.

Ken Hunts' liner notes for the 1989, Kronos Quartet CD, Piazzolla: Five Tango Sensations indicate that Five Tango Sensations was composed for the Kronos Quartet. That is not quite true. The correct story is to be found in the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango. Piazzolla composed the work in 1983 and recorded it on the album, Woe, with a quartet from the Graunke Orchestra in Germany. The same recording can also be found in volume three of the collection titled Piazzollissimo. In going from Woe to Tango Sensations, all the titles were changed - Sleeping becomes Asleep, Midnight becomes Loving, Desire becomes Anxiety, Woe Pass Away becomes Despertar, and Look Out becomes Fear. There are changes in the score but most changes are subtle. And, two movements were discarded completely, Woe and Awake. The loss of Woe is significant - it is a beautiful duet between bandoneón and cello and deserves to be heard.

The score for the work is readily available but it is not frequently performed. While there are many string quartets with the technical skills to perform the piece there are very few bandoneónist with the skill to meet the challenge. Most quartets turn to accordionists to cover the bandoneón part - but it is not the same. The timbre is different and mechanical differences between the two instruments lead to different phrasing. Quatuor Terpsycordes is fortunate to have found William Sabatier who has the technical skills and the knowledge of Piazzolla's music to provide, not a duplicate of Piazzolla's performance, but a completely valid and thematically consistent interpretation of the work. Likewise, the musicians of Quatuor Terpsycordes which includes Girolamo Bottiglieri and Raya Raytcheva on violin, Caroline Haas on viola and François Grin on cello, are superb musicians who, in most places, match the Kronos in the intensity, although not the flair, they bring to the music. You will find biographies of the musicians here. The performance was recorded at the Montebello Festival in Bellinzona, Switzerland on 8 July, 2010.

I have embedded only the first of Tango Sensations, Asleep, below. I encourage readers to also view Loving, Anxiety, Despertar and Fear to see the work as a whole.

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Adios Nonino - Live Piazzolla

2011-01-19T15:51:00.005-05:00

It is just a fragment, three-and-a-half minutes from a performance that lasted eight-and-a-half minutes, but an intriguing fragment. It's from a 1985 performance of Adios Nonino by Piazzolla with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège under the baton of Léo Brouwer. The sound from that concert has long been available in a recording titled, Hommage a Liege, but this is the first evidence I have seen that video also exists of that performance.

The performance was at the 5th International Guitar Festival of Liege which was held on March 15, 1985. The festival was founded and organized by famed guitarist, Guy Lukowski. I have read that it was for that festival that Lukowski created the idea for the Histoire du tango series which Piazzolla composed for flute and guitar. I have also read that Marc Grauwals created the idea. The truth is perhaps unknowable, but certainly, Lukowski and Marc Grauwals debuted the piece at the Festival. Interestingly, there are legal questions surrounding the long available Liege recording and Lukowski's website indicates that if you want to have the guaranteed, authentic, non-pirated version you need to download if directly from his website.

This video apparently originated on the Belgian TV network RTBF but I do not know if its use on YouTube was authorized. For a very short period, a related video fragment of Piazzolla and Cacho Tirao performing the Double Concierto for Bandoneon and Guitar was also posted but it was subsequently removed.

Hopefully, Mr. Lukowski, who evidently owns this video, will eventually issue a DVD of the entire 1985 concert at Liege. He has at least one anxious buyer right here.

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Note added 20 January, 2011: The fragment of the Double concerto for bandoneon and guitar has returned to YouTube and is embedded below. The poster of the video has told me that the videos have been posted with the permission of RTBF who hold rights to the video of the full concert.

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Libertango - The Swingle Singers

2011-01-13T08:59:00.004-05:00

Why wait? The Swingle Singers promised their new recording and video of Libertango would be out before Christmas but that day has passed and we are still waiting. They even issued a trailer to tickle our interest but still no video. While we are waiting for the real thing, you can watch one of several versions which have been "captured" at their live shows and posted on YouTube. The best of those just appeared this week, perhaps "captured" from a Russian television broadcast, and is today's featured video.

The Swingle Singers were formed in the early '60's in France by an American, Ward Swingle. In 1963, the first album, Jazz Sebastian Bach, from the eight member a capella group won a Grammy. The group moved to England in 1973, singers came and went, but they have existed as a unit almost continuously to today. In 2001, Tobias Hug, a beatboxer joined the group and revitalized the music. The new singers who have joined the group since 2007 have further enlivened the group and they promise to once again be a force in the music world. There have been and are many imitators but once again, the Swingle Singers are the best.

Libertango has long been in their repertoire and their website suggests it is their most frequently requested song. Curiously, they have never recorded it - that is until the recent recording which will no doubt be issued any day now. While you are waiting, take a look at today's video.

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Note added on 15 January, 2011: Here is the reason to wait. The official video has now debuted and is a visual and auditory treat. It will take some time but this video should move near the top of the YouTube Piazzolla "Most Viewed List." There were more than 1,000 views the first day it was posted.

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Four for Tango - Siam Saxophone Quartet

2011-01-12T09:54:00.003-05:00

In 1987, after the famous Central Park concert, Piazzolla attended a performance of the Kronos Quartet, met the quartet backstage afterward and began a relationship with the group that continued until his death. A few days after that meeting, Piazzolla had already composed a new piece for the quartet, Four for tango. The Kronos included it in their next CD, Winter was Hard, and according to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, they still play the piece in concert from Xerox copies of Piazzolla's original handwritten score. The piece is challenging both for the musicians and the listener and no quartet I have heard comes close to the Kronos performance.

Unexpectedly, the piece has mutated from a string quartet challenge to a saxophone quartet showpiece. That has happened thanks to a transcription/arrangement by Claude Voirpy which is available commercially from Henry Lemoine Editions. The transcription is very respectful of the original but saxophone brings quite a different feel to the piece than the strings. There are bebop moments in the saxophone version which are totally absent in the more layered string version. Although the piece was clearly composed as a contemporary string quartet piece, it works surprisingly well on saxophones.

There are a number of saxophone quartet versions of Four for tango on YouTube but this is the first that is of high enough quality to share in this blog. The Siam Saxophone Quartet is the leading professional saxophone quartet in Thailand and would be on my short list for best in the world. The musicians in the quartet are Supat Hanpatanachai, Promwut Sudtakoo, Wisuwat Pruksawanich and Anond Fuangfoo. These four young men have studied around the world and honed their skills at a variety of competitions and master classes. I don't find any recordings by them yet but you can find more of their good music on Pruksawanich's YouTube channel.

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Chiquilin de Bachin - Milos Stojanovic

2011-01-11T09:52:00.005-05:00

The performing artist is shown in the title but the star of today's video is probably Franck Angelis who did the arrangement of Chiquilin de Bachin performed here by Milos Stojanovic, a student at the Academy of Music in Skopje, Macedonia. My use of the word "arrangement" may be incorrect. Mr. Angelis titles the work, Etude sur le thème "Chiquilin de Bachin" drawing parallels to such pieces as Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and I am tempted to agree that it is more a work of variation on a theme than it is an arrangement.

Chiquilin de Bachin was composed by Piazzolla in 1968 and is one of the earlier collaborations with lyricist and poet Horacio Ferrer. It is one of the few waltzes composed by Piazzolla and celebrates a young boy who sold roses to patrons of a café, the Bachin, frequented by Piazzolla and his companions. It was first sung by Amelita Baltar and first recorded by her on a 1969 Trova lp (TS 33-741). That version is difficult to find but a second version, recorded the same year, is available on the CD, Amelita Baltar Interpreta Piazzolla y Ferrer.

The Angelis' Chiquilin de Bachin Etude moves the beautiful and simple theme from Chiquilin de Bachin through multiple variations starting with something like a Buxtehude organ prelude, then through a French café to a dark, Mahleresque rumination finishing with a Quincy Jones soundtrack for a hero escaping across the rooftops of Paris. The piece is clearly a challenge for any Bayan or accordion player and Milos Stojanovic meets that challenge. References to the work in the web are invariably linked to performances in accordion competitions. If Mr. Stojanovic is preparing for such a competition, I have no doubt he will receive first prize - his playing is superb. Stojanovic's YouTube channel suggests he is from Serbia. I can find no other information about him but with a talent like his, it is surely only a matter of time before we recognize his name as an outstanding Bayanist.

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December, 2010 Review of Piazzolla Videos

2011-01-09T17:38:00.002-05:00

There were 1090 videos of Piazzolla’s music posted on YouTube in the month of December, 2010, an increase of 127% over the same month in 2009. 622 (57%) of the videos were performance videos featuring live performances. The others were videos which used Piazzolla’s music as a sound track for photo or video montages. I have highlighted my journey through these many videos in this blog.

Forty-five percent of the performance videos were in the classical mode, 13% in jazz, 17% in nuevo tango and 25% in pop.

Here are the most frequently performed pieces this month (Libertango was the most frequently played – 31% of the total; the others follow in order):

1. Libertango
2. Oblivion
3. Adios Nonino
4. Invierno Porteño
5. Verano Porteño
6. Milonga del ángel
7. Histoire du tango – Nightclub 1960
8. Otoño Porteño
9. Histoire du tango – Bordel 1900
10. Histoire du tango – Café 1930

The top three on this list seem to be fairly stable month-to-month but the bottom seven change every month.

The performance videos came from 60 different countries. Argentina posted the most videos: 98. The top ten posting countries are listed in order here:

1. Argentina
2. Italy
3. Spain
4. Russia
5. USA
6. Japan
7. Brazil
8. Greece
9. France
10. Netherlands

There were six Piazzolla originals posted. Three had been previously posted but three were new to YouTube. Two of those were from the movie, Queréme así, piantao, also known as Astortango. One of those featured a symphonic performance of Adios Nonino, the other contained no Piazzolla performances but did include some Piazzolla family photos not available elsewhere. The third video was from Brazilian television and contained fragments from a quintet performance of Invierno Porteño and an Amelita Baltar performance with the quintet of Balada para un loco.

Quality of performance varied from excellent to bizarre. My choice for Best of the Month is the flute/guitar duo of Marco Ferraguto and Andrea Pace playing Otoño Porteño.

The choice for most bizarre this month is a song and dance performance of Libertango which I find quite appealing but inexplicable.

I have put a table with links to all 1090 videos as well as some more information on the videos on the December, 2010 page in my Piazzolla on Video website.

If the videos don't appear below, click here for the best and here for the most bizarre.

Best Video of the Month

Most Bizarre Video of the Month

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Michelangelo 70 - Pablo Ziegler & Regina Carter

2011-01-05T17:08:00.004-05:00

Once again Pablo Ziegler demonstrates his ability to attract jazz stars to the Piazzolla world. Just a few weeks ago we featured Pablo Ziegler in a performance with Branford Marsalis and now in today's video we feature Ziegler and his quartet with the superstar violinist, Regina Carter, playing Michelangelo 70. The performance was captured just last month, either December 4 or 5, at the Jazz Standard club in New York.

Regina Carter, like Piazzolla, is one of those musicians who is impossible to put in a single musical box. She is trained as a classical violinist and has soloed in that role with some of the best symphonies in the world. She has excelled as a jazz musician, something rare on the violin. She has composed - you will find her works on the eponymously titled CD, Regina Carter. She has explored World Music - Latin flavored in the Danilo Perez album, Motherland, and African flavored in her latest release, Reverse Thread. She is one of the few musicians to have received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. She is also one of the few violinist granted the opportunity to play Paganini's famous "Cannon" violin - not just once but twice. The second time was captured in the wonderful CD, Paganini: After a Dream. That recording contains a sublime version of Oblivion played on Paganini's Cannon.

Today's video is, to my knowledge, only Regina Carter's second encounter with Piazzolla (Oblivion with the Paganini violin being the first). The quintet starts with a standard Piazzolla quintet reading of Michelangelo 70 and I am starting to think she is out of her element here - she reads the music but it doesn't sing under her bow the way it does for Fernando Suarez Paz. Two minutes into the video, the group leaves the script and Claudio Regazzi provides the best solo I have ever heard from him, Ziegler follows with a perfect piano break and then Carter brings her violin to the front. Tentatively at first, but she soon finds a groove and captures me with her creativity and musicality. The group closes a little awkwardly - Carter is a millisecond behind - but it is a most enjoyable jazz performance leaving me wanting to see what Carter would do with something like Escualo.

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Note added 6 January, 2010: After the above was written a related video was posted featuring Regina Carter playing Libertango with Ziegler's quartet. You can view it here. I know my tastes for Libertango have become jaded from having viewed so many interpretations but I find Ms. Carter's break a bit pedestrian here. Michelangelo 70 is the better of the two performances. I also conclude that Mr. Ziegler is, by far, the best jazz musician on this stage. He continues to find new riffs in music he has played thousands of times and never losses the thread of the theme. Remarkable.

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Fracanapa - Polly Ferman & Camerata Romeu

2011-01-04T15:46:00.002-05:00

Camerata Romeu, headquartered in Havana, Cuba, is one of the best chamber orchestras in the world and certainly the best in the specialty niche of Latin American chamber music. It is the creation of the remarkable Zenaida Romeu and has been made famous through the movie, Cuba Mia. You can learn more about the Camerata and see their performance of Libertango in this earlier blog posting. Camerata Romeu is joined in today's video performance of Fracanapa by Uruguayan pianist Polly Ferman and Italian accordionist, Antonio Peruch.

Ms. Ferman, currently a resident of New York City, is well known around the world for her piano interpretations of music not only of "serious" Latin American composers but, more recently, also of classic tango music. The latter has been captured in her latest touring show, Glamour Tango, which will at the Teatro Maipo in Buenos Aires in March and April of 2011. If you are fortunate enough to be able to attend a performance of Glamour Tango you are guaranteed to hear some superb classic tango as well as some nuevo tango from Piazzolla and Daniel Binelli. Ms. Ferman has an impressive discography but if you must limit your collection, the one to buy is Imagenes: Argentina y Uruguay, which she recorded with Binelli in 2001.

The performance in today's video was captured live in a performance at the Amadeo Roldán, the most important musical venue in Cuba. The notes attached to the video suggest the performance was in February but this review from the Havana Times suggests it was held on March 6, 2010. Perhaps there were multiple performances. That same review indicates the concert also included performances of Melodia en la menor and Aconcagua (more properly known as Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta). It would be a real treat to see those also but they have not yet made it to YouTube.

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Nightclub 1960 - Dizi

2010-12-30T20:07:00.005-05:00

While most of our blog series about Piazzolla on unusual instruments have featured Libertango, today the series expands to include Nightclub 1960 from the Histoire du tango suite originally composed for flute and guitar. The instrument is unusual in the western world but is quite common in the Chinese world. It is a bamboo flute, the dizi (pronounced Dee Zzzt – like a bumble bee sound). The musicians in the video are Diao Peng (dizi) and Xu Weiting (piano) and I would guess that they are students. Their YouTube channel suggests they are from Taiwan. Both are fine musicians. For a simple instrument, the dizi is played here not only with precision and agility but also with a remarkable level of expression. Note the well done "slides" at 4'30"into the video. A very enjoyable performance.

The dizi has six finger holes and is blown from nearer the middle of the instrument than the western flute. But the most unusual feature is a seventh hole, located between the embouchure and the first finger hole, which is covered with a thin membrane called a dimo). At higher breath pressures, the dimo vibrates adding a buzzy distortion to the tone (anticipating the electric guitar distortion pedal by 2,000 years). Managing the distortion becomes another part of the musicians art in the music. Note that Mr. Diao taps the dimo before he starts playing - I guess to make sure it is working. And it does indeed work. You will hear the unique timbre throughout the piece.

Dizi's come in a dizzying (sorry about that) variety of sizes and keys - you can see them all at Eason Music.

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Note added 28 April, 2011: The original version of this blog incorrectly identified the musicians. I believe it is correct as now shown above.

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La Bicicleta Blanca - Francisco Llanos

2010-12-30T09:32:00.003-05:00

Some singers are magicians - they not only sing the song, they transport the audience to another place. Such is the case in this performance by Francisco Llanos. The conditions are not ideal - a municipal salon in Rio Cuarto which has probably seen more press conferences than concerts; no live band, just a recording for accompaniment through a sound system with a little too much reverb. But Llanos, born in Rio Cuarto, has his home town audience spell-bound and visibly moved in his part recitation, part singing performance of La bicicleta blanca.

La bicicleta blanca was composed by Piazzolla in 1971, with lyrics by Horacio Ferrer. The music is almost incidental to the lyrics, which you can find here in the original Spanish and with an English translation. It is one of those poems full of symbolism and levels of meaning that literature professors love to ask students to interpret. It was first recorded by Amelita Baltar in the album titled La Bicicleta Blanca but popularized largely in these versions by José Angel Trelles and Raúl Lavié. From the perspective of just singing the song, all three of those performers may surpass Llanos but for sheer magic, Llanos wins the prize.

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Three Piazzolla Originals

2010-12-26T14:02:00.006-05:00

Today features three videos, all new to YouTube and all with important original Piazzolla content. The first video includes several minutes from the July 11, 1983 concert at the Teatro de Colón which the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, describes as "Piazzolla's apotheosis." Piazzolla and the Colón orchestra under the baton of Pedro Ignacio Calderón closed the concert with Adios Nonino and took five bows during a ten minute standing ovation. The voice-over in the video is Piazzolla's. The full concert can be heard on the difficult to find recording, Astor Piazzolla: En El Teatro Colón. Much of the concert can also be heard on the reissue CD, Concierto de Nácar, but unfortunately, Adios Nonino is not on that CD regardless of what it says on the label.

The second video contains no Piazzolla performances but does contain a Piazzolla voice-over and a priceless selection of Piazzolla family photographs. The video is a dramatization of Piazzolla's creation of Adios Nonino. The traditional story has Piazzolla composing the piece in the kitchen on a bandoneón, not on the piano as in this video. I believe that this video and the first video of the Teatro Colón performance are from Eliseo Alvarez's 1997 movie, Queréme así, piantao (also known as Astortango in Britain and the U.S.A.). To my knowledge, this movie has never been issued as a DVD but it apparently has been broadcast on HBO as a made-for-TV movie. Hopefully, we will see more from this movie in the future.

The third video captures fragments from a 1974 television broadcast on TV Tupi from São Paulo, Brazil. The first fragment features the Piazzolla quintet playing Invierno Porteño. The second fragment is Balada para un loco with Amelita Baltar doing the vocal. This is the only video I am aware of featuring the "re-formed" first quintet which existed briefly in 1974-75. It may also be the only video of Piazzolla performing with Baltar and is almost certainly the last since they separated, professionally and personally, shortly after this video was made. The pianist in the "re-formed" quintet was Osvaldo Tarantino but the pianist in this video does not appear to be Tarantino. Nor does he resemble Danti Amicarelli (see photo here) who sometimes substituted for Tarantino in the quintet. I might speculate that the pianist is Luigi Giudici who recorded with Piazzolla in Brazil during this period on his recordings with Ney Matogrosso but I find no photos of Mr. Giudici on the internet. It is a mystery. I am hoping a reader can help identify the pianist in the video and leave a comment below. Hopefully, more of this television appearance has survived and we will see it in its entirety in the future.

Note added 27 December, 2010: Mystery solved. The pianist is indeed Dante Amicarelli. Thanks to Daniel P. for the positive I.D.

If the videos do not appear below, click here for the Teatro Colón performance, here for the Adios Nonino story, and here for the video from São Paulo.

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Christmas Eve Duet - Romero and Di Meola

2010-12-26T11:42:00.004-05:00

What do the great jazz guitarists Hernan Romero and Al Di Meola do at home on Christmas eve? They play a little Piazzolla. Today's video captures an informal moment with these two artists playing "unplugged" in someone's home. From the gold records on display behind them, I would guess it is one of their homes and since Romero posted the video, it is probably his.

The two have a long history of collaboration with ten recordings together including Di Meola Plays Piazzolla, which belongs in every Piazzolla lover's collection. Interestingly, I believe the piece they are playing, Vuelvo al sur in today's video, has never been recorded by either of them. Perhaps this is an informal rehearsal for an upcoming recording? Let's hope so.

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Adios Nonino - Walter Rios

2010-12-19T11:23:00.003-05:00

Magnificent and moving: two words which best capture for me the Walter Rios interpretation of Adios Nonino in today's video. This is perhaps the best orquesta típica arrangement of the piece I have ever heard. Adios Nonino, while not performed as frequently as Libertango, is still arguably Piazzolla's most famous composition. The Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, suggests that Piazzolla wrote at least twenty arrangements of Adios Nonino and those range from solo bandoneón to full orchestra. The arrangement he provided for his famous duo concert with Osvaldo Pugliese would qualify as an orquesta típica arrangement but Rios has captured the breadth of the composition even better here and even includes a little salute to Pugliese in one of the more joyous moments in the arrangement.

Adios Nonino was composed in 1959, at the time of the death of Piazzolla's father - known to Piazzolla's children as Nonino (translates approximately as "little grandfather"). It was based on a joyful tango he had composed earlier, titled Nonino, but contrasted that melody with musical expressions of the sorrow felt strongly at the time. The best arrangements always capture both the joy of remembrance and the sorrow of passing and Rios does that beautifully here. The poignancy communicated in the bandoneón solo at roughly five minutes into the video is just perfect.

While I believe this performance is new to YouTube, it is actually from a famous August, 2005 performance at ND Ateneo which included many of the most famous tango musicians of the day. It was a complicated arrangement in which the musicians alternated through roles of performer, arranger and conductor - sometimes doing all three as Rios does in this video. In addition to Rios, members of the orquesta tipica are Ernesto Baffa, Horacio Romo, and Pablo Mainetti on bandoneón; Mario Abramovich, Eduardo Walczak, Mauricio Marchelli, Damián Bolotín, Pablo Agri, and Miguel Angel Bertero on violin, Mario Fiocca on viola; Diego Sánchez on cello; Horacio Cabarcos on contrabass; and Nicolás Ledesma on piano. The beautiful violin solo which Rios generously acknowledges was by the reigning dean of tango violinist, Mario Abramovich.

This performance is available as Seleccion Nacional de Tango: En Vivo in both CD and DVD formats.

My thanks to the poster of the video, Carla Romma, for the additional information which made this blog posting possible.

If the video does not appear below, click here.

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Fuga y Misterio - Branford Marsalis & Pablo Ziegler

2010-12-16T16:26:00.002-05:00

There is no more famous family in the jazz world than the Marsalis family: father Ellis and sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason. They released a new family album in 2010, Music Redeems. It's full of great music and the proceeds from sales of the album go to support their music education foundation which is part of the New Orleans Musicians' Village. With that public service announcement taken care of, we turn to today's video in which brother Branford brings his saxophones and joins Pablo Ziegler's quartet on stage at New York's Jazz Standard club for some Piazzolla in the jazz mode. Fortunately for us crmusica was there to capture it on video.

The work they cover is Fuga y misterio, one of the instrumental interludes from Piazzolla's operita Maria de Buenos Aires. Ziegler is there with his current quartet: Claudio Ragazzi on guitar, Hector DelCurto on bandoneón, and Pedro Giraudo on bass. This quartet has been reviewed before in this blog and they are worth reviewing again but it is Branford Marsalis that makes today's video special. Marsalis joins them first with his tenor sax and then switches mid-piece to the soprano sax. We are treated to solos on both instruments. Ziegler has no doubt played the piece hundreds of times but his sound is still fresh and creative. I supposed that Marsalis was new to the piece - you may note he is checking music or charts as he proceeds. But, I was wrong. Ziegler and Marsalis visited Fuga y misterio together at least once before in 2005 at a gala for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. I suspect that encounter was the direct precursor to the meeting in this video which happened only about two weeks ago.

Ziegler will never qualify for membership in the Marsalis family but the Ziegler-Marsalis duo certainly qualifies for more Piazzolla together. Wouldn't it be interesting if Branford brought his brothers along for the gig?

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Maria de Buenos Aires - Cambra XX, Again

2010-12-15T16:21:00.003-05:00

In May of this year, this blog enthused about Pablo Zinger's 2009 production in Valencia of Piazzolla's operita, Maria de Buenos Aires. Zinger brought the production back on stage last month at the Teatro Serrano in Gandia and the videos of that production have just started to arrive on YouTube. I won't repeat here what I said in the May blog but just remind you that this may well be the best production of Maria since the original in 1968. Zinger just keeps getting better and better.

The Gandia production appears to be very similar to the one in Valencia. The vocalists are the same, staging seems the same and most of the orchestra is the same. But there are differences: a new narrator, Leonardo Granados - he's good, but a narrator with a little more gravitas would be better; new dancers and choreography - more aggressive and interesting; and, an oboe has been added to the orchestra - not an instrument found in Piazzolla's original production but Zinger has orchestrated it in beautifully and I view it as an improvement over the original.

As I write this, there are six videos from the production on YouTube and I hope there will be more. The entire production is not there yet. You can find the set of videos on Robert Turlo's YouTube channel (incidentally, Turlo is the artistic director of the production and also the oboist). I have chosen to display the introductory video below because it includes an introduction by Zinger but most of the music resides in the other five videos. The quality of the video is quite high, suggesting perhaps a DVD is on the way. I certainly hope so - I would like to add it to my permanent collection.

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Rhapsody Harmonica Ensemble

2010-12-14T10:40:00.005-05:00

The harmonica and the bandoneón are first cousins - related through the bisonic reed arrangement they share. And, performances where the harmonica replaces the bandoneón are not uncommon; but, the Rhapsody Harmonica Ensemble seen in today's videos goes beyond that and uses harmonicas to replace not only all of Piazzolla's quintet but also all of the Kronos Quartet.

I am not sure of the harmonica group's name: Google Translate suggests the group is called Crazy Ring Harmonica Orchestra but a related Facebook page suggests the name, Rhapsody Harmonica Ensemble. Under either name, these are special harmonica players who play a large variety of music, much of which can be seen on konekome's YouTube Channel. I believe the leader of this Taiwan ensemble is Chen Sheng Yi and if he is responsible for the musical arrangements and the training of the group, he is to be congratulated.

Two videos are included below. The first is Fear, the last of five movements of Tango Sensations which Piazzolla composed for the Kronos Quartet in 1989. He and the quartet recorded the work on one of Piazzolla's last recordings: Piazzolla: Five Tango Sensations. It is a difficult piece, even for an experienced string quartet, and I am amazed at the audacity of a harmonica ensemble to even attempt to play the piece. The ensemble handles the difficult fugues well and only stumbles once in one of the middle transitional sections. The second piece is Invierno Porteño, played here by a trio of harmonicas. The musicality these three put into the piece with such simple instruments is just astounding. If you watch nothing else, watch they way they end the piece starting with Piazzolla's salute to Vivaldi at six minutes into the video.

If you, like me, can't quite get enough of such unexpected artistry, also take a look at this samba.

If the videos do not appear below, click here for Fear and here for Invierno Porteño.

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Michelangelo 70 - Trivella Piano Duo

2010-12-13T20:27:00.004-05:00

Perhaps there is a touch on the sustain pedal somewhere in this 4-hands-1-piano rendition of Michelangelo 70 by twin brothers, Davide and Daniele Trivella, but it eludes my ears. This is some of the most precise and well synchronized keyboard work you will ever see. Rarely is key release managed as well as it is here by the Trivellas and the result is an energetic and driving version of Michelangelo 70 which makes most other readings of the piece sound almost casual in comparison.

Michelangelo 70 is particularly popular with jazz artists and just misses making the list of the twenty most frequently played Piazzolla compositions. It was written in 1969 or 70 to honor the move of a favorite performance venue, the Michelangelo, to a new location in San Telmo. You can watch Piazzolla and his quintet perform the piece in this video. One might argue that the Ziegler/Ax duo piano version found on the CD, Los Tangueros is closer to the original but I believe the Trivella duo arrangement is more appropriate for piano.

As much as I enjoyed the video, I would have enjoyed it even more if the video editor had been more sparing with the video effects - they detract from the music. Fortunately, you can enjoy the music without the video by buying their CD, One and One - Are One.

If the video does not appear below, click here.

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November, 2010 Review of Piazzolla Videos

2010-12-12T21:04:00.002-05:00

There were 1028 videos of Piazzolla’s music posted on YouTube in the month of November, 2010, an increase of 58% over the same month in 2009. 607 (59%) of the videos were performance videos featuring live performances. The others were videos which used Piazzolla’s music as a sound track for photo or video montages. I highlighted my journey through these many videos in this blog and in Twitter.

Thirty-nine percent of the performance videos were in the classical mode, 15% in jazz, 19% in nuevo tango and 27% in pop.

Here are the most frequently performed pieces this month (Libertango was the most frequently played – 34% of the total; the others follow in order):

1. Libertango
2. Oblivion
3. Adios Nonino
4. La muerte del ángel
5. Invierno Porteño
6. Verano Porteño
7. Primavera Porteña
8. Histoire du tango – Café 1930
9. Balada para un loco
10. Histoire du tango – Nightclub 1960 / Le grand tango (tie)

The top three on this list seem to be fairly stable month-to-month but the bottom seven change every month.

The performance videos came from 55 different countries. Argentina posted the most videos: 94. The top ten posting countries are listed in order here:

1. Argentina
2. USA
3. Italy
4. Spain
5. Brazil
6. Netherlands
7. Russia
8. Japan
9. Germany
10. Mexico

There were nine Piazzolla originals posted. All but one had been previously posted. The new video featured Piazzolla and Julien Clerc in a performance of Balada para un loco.

Quality of performance varied from excellent to bizarre. My choice for Best of the Month is the Pan Am Symphony's performance of Fracanapa. This is just one performance from a full evenings performance which seamlessly integrated a nuevo tango quartet with a chamber orchestra.

The choice for most bizarre this month is a performance of Adios Nonino chosen for its consistent use of avant-garde harmony.

Best Video of the Month

Most Bizarre Video of the Month

I have put a table with links to all 1028 videos as well as some more information on the videos on the November, 2010 page in my Piazzolla on Video website.

Igudesman and Joo

2010-12-11T17:23:00.002-05:00

John Malkovich joins the fun with Igudesman & Joo. Be patient, Piazzolla enters the party shorty before the beautiful, naked, Argentinian girl arrives.

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Adios Nonino - Eric and Solene Le Van

2010-12-10T17:26:00.002-05:00

As a performance of Adios Nonino, today's featured video may not provide the best; but, as a showcase for musical talent, it will be difficult to find better. The musicians are father and daughter: Eric Le Van and his twelve year old daughter Solene. Le Van is an American born pianist, well recognized for his technical talents but perhaps even more so for his interpretive skills. His recordings are limited but his readings of Brahms and Liszt are judged highly by the critics. His destiny, though, may be to become known simply as Solene's dad or Sarah's dad or Sean's dad. The Le Van's are a musical family - a professionally performing musical family whose work can be sampled in this video. The talent in the family appears natural and considerable.

The younger daughter Solene, already a prize winning violinist, is featured in today's video. The video opens with Eric performing the introduction to Adios Nonino which Piazzolla wrote for Dante Amicarelli - one of several pianists who played in Piazzolla's first quintet. Piazzolla wrote at least three piano introductions for Adios Nonino - Amicarelli's is the best known and an extended version of it, known as the Adios Nonino Rhapsody, is sometimes played as an encore piece. In the original Piazzolla recording, found on the famous Trova recording, Amicarelli plays the intro in 2'40" - Le Van adds another thirty seconds of drama in his reading but is otherwise faithful to the original. The following duet portion is original in content and enjoyable but, for me, the real interest arrives 5'45" into the piece when twelve year old Solene volunteers a cadenza, presumably of her own creation. The cadenza is creative, appropriate to the theme and technically well performed. Consistency is always the counter weight to creativity and suffers a bit here but at this stage of her career, the cadenza is a remarkable accomplishment. The father-daughter duo close the piece conventionally leaving this listener anxious to hear more Piazzolla from the pair - perhaps the Histoire du tango series?

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His Master's Voice

2010-12-07T09:10:00.002-05:00

It's cold and quiet but the audience is attentive. The music is good and the video totally captivated me.

The music is Adios Nonino. I don't know the dog's name but the musician is Pablo Corradini. Corradini has appeared in this blog before - he is the bandoneónist for the best tango-rock-fusion band in the world: Oblivion Quartet. The text accompanying the video suggests the evening was boring. I don't think so.

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Libertango - Maresch-Johns-Konzert

2010-11-23T20:23:00.002-05:00

The song is definitely Libertango, there are definitely two pianos, but I am not absolutely sure how many pianists there are. I count eleven, but there might be more .. or, there might be less. It is one of the more unusual presentations of Libertango I have seen as pianists come and go throughout the piece.

The event is the 2008, Maresch-Johns concert at the Kunstuniversität Graz in Graz, Austria. This concert series was created in 2000 to honor the memory of pianist and staff member at the University, Barbara Maresch. In 2006, following the untimely death of Klaus Johns, a pianist and tango enthusiast who was a stalwart of the Maresch series, the concerts became the Maresch-Johns-Konzert. The concerts are not your standard piano recital - they are marked by spontaneity and interaction and a wide variety of music, but all focused on the piano. Proceeds from the concerts go to charity.

The unusual jazz arrangement of Libertango in today's video is the work of Uli Rennert - the second pianist you see in the video, the one who hits the piano strings with his hand. I cannot identify the other pianists for sure but a related video of the same arrangement, done in the same rotating pianist style include Rennert and eight other pianists: Almira Emiri, Aris Feslikidis, Zoltan Füzessery, Simona Solce, Claudia Micheletti, Bernd Ludescher, Andreas Woyke, and Helmut Iberer. These same pianists are presumed to be in today's video but by my count, there were two other pianists who joined in - perhaps spontaneously. I have no idea who they are. Perhaps a reader can identify them and add a comment. Such surprises are part of the charm of the Maresch-Johns-Konzert.

The music is a treat. All the pianists are excellent and the transitions were all skillfully done. If this is an example of the quality and character of the Maresch-Johns-Konzert series, the Graz audience is to be envied.

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La Muerte del Ángel - One to Five

2010-11-21T17:32:00.006-05:00

La muerte del ángel was composed as incidental music for the 1962 play, Tango del ángel, by Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz. It was frequently played by Piazzolla in concert and he recorded it on at least fourteen different occasions. On more than half of those, Pablo Ziegler was the pianist in the recording. Ziegler continues to perform La muerte del ángel providing more than thirty years of continuity to the composition. What follows is a one to five salute to Ziegler's contribution to the work, La muerte del ángel.

One: First comes the man, Pablo Ziegler. He joined Piazzolla's second quintet as it was formed in 1978 and was the pianist for the quintet throughout its existence. According to the Azzi/Collier book, Le Grand Tango, Ziegler was viewed as the outstanding young jazz pianist in Argentina at the time and came highly recommended by Oscar Lopez Ruiz, the initial second quintet guitarist and long time friend of Piazzolla. Ziegler is a talented jazz improviser as well as a disciplined pianist and creative composer. Piazzolla's influence on Ziegler is apparent in his work, for example in the excellent 1998 CD, Asfalto, but I suspect that Ziegler also influenced Piazzolla to incorporate more of the jazz idiom into the performances of the quintet.

Two: While to my knowledge, Ziegler never recorded a solo piano version of La muerte del ángel (I am sure he could and wish he would), he and Emanual Ax did record what has become the gold standard piano duo of the work in the 1997 CD, Los Tangueros. While I do not believe a video of Ziegler and Ax playing La muerte del ángel exists on YouTube, Ziegler's arrangement has been published by Tonos and it is frequently performed by piano duos in concerts all over the world. The arrangement is highly derivative of Piazzolla's original and a fusion of classical and tango styling. Most pianist playing the arrangement perform it in the context of classical music. As an example, I have include below one of the better performances you will find on YouTube by tangopuntodos (Ángel Huidobro Vega and Jorge García Herranz).

Three: Ziegler does, however, appear in a video with a trio format. Joined by Quique Sinesi on guitar and Walter Castro on bandoneón, the trio version opens in nuevo tango mode but around the 2'30" point, the group loosens and enters a not particularly inspired improvisational section before returning to the "original" at 3'45". You can hear more of this trio in the 2005 CD, Bajo Cero.

Four: More recently, Ziegler along with Hector del Curto on bandoneón, Claudio Ragazzi on guitar and Pedro Giraudo on contrabass provided a quartet arrangement of La muerte del ángel at the 2009, Fujitsu Jazz Festival in San Francisco. Once again, improvisation enters at about 2'30" but this time extends for a full two minutes. In contrast to the trio, the musicians in the quartet enhance the music with the improvisational skills - Ziegler is particularly on his game in this performance. To my knowledge, this quartet has, unfortunately, not yet produced any recordings.

Five: For Ziegler in a quintet performance of La muerte del ángel, we turn to Piazzolla's quintet performing the work at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1984. Ziegler and Piazzolla are joined by other quintet members Oscar Lopez Ruiz on guitar, Fernando Suarez Paz on violin, and Hector Console on bass. This performance is available on both DVD and CD and represents one of the peaks of the second quintet's success.

Interestingly, a similar "one to five" overview of Ziegler's work may be on the way to a stage near you. He has scheduled performances in New York City on April 23, 2011 and in Sacramento, California on April 29th which are described with these words on the Ziegler website, "Pablo Ziegler Beyond Tango progresses from piano duo, through trio, quartet, quintet and finally larger chamber ensemble." Let's hope the videographers bring the concert to YouTube or, better yet, to a DVD.

If the videos do not appear in the above, click here for the piano duo; here for the trio; here for the quartet; and here for the quintet.

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Bordel 1900 - Marc Grauwals & Astoria

2010-11-11T09:06:00.002-05:00

Today's video features flute player Marc Grauwals as a guest with the tango quintet, Astoria, playing Bordel 1900 as arranged by Astoria accordionist, Christophe Delporte. Grauwals has a special relationship to this piece. Piazzolla dedicated his Histoire du tango series (Bordel 1900 is the first in that series) to Grauwals; Grauwals premiered the piece in 1985 with guitarist, Guy Lukowski; and, later that same year made the first recording of it, again with Lukowski, on a Teldec lp. That performance, which is still available on the reissue CD, Hommage à Liège, remains today the definitive performance of the Histoire series.

Today's performance is quite different from that of 1985 - you notice it almost immediately with the sound of a police whistle joining that of the flute on the fourth note of the piece. And then it gets really interesting. The melody moves around, percussion adds tasteful highlights, the piece bobs and weaves and then comes home with a smile. The Histoire series were written for flute and guitar but have been arranged for many combinations of instruments including full orchestra. Delporte's arrangement is the best, by far, of any transmutation of the guitar/flute combination to another set of instruments I have ever heard. The musicians are spectacularly good but the arrangement is a work of true creative genius. You will find this Bordel 1900 and the other three sections of the Histoire on Astoria's new CD, Histoire Du Tango. This is the third Astoria recording devoted to the music of Piazzolla (Tiempo del Angel in 2006 and Adios Nonino in 2008 were the first two). Astoria has never sought to duplicate the quintet sound of Piazzolla but have always been true to the spirit and foundations of the music. With each released recording, they have become a little more free with their interpretations and now have a voice which is unique in the Piazzolla world. And it is a voice which deserves repeated listening.

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