It may be that in a musical retrospective, based on a luxury of twenty-five years of critical retrospective, it is considered that Astor Piazzolla did in the 20th century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the 19th for the waltz. It is perhaps already an accepted position. With the waltz, Chopin took an established popular form and pushed the limits of it so that what audiences would have expected to be a little ditty was transformed to express heroism, sensuality, pride, or even occasional doubts. The little dance tune then, in Chopin’s slender hands, became an elegant, highly expressive art form, utterly romantic in its ability to convey human emotion.
The tango represents an apparently different proposition. Already sensual by definition, there are elements of the romantic that tango does not have to aspire to. If romanticism placed individual emotional responses on the pedestal of artistic expression, when tango aspired to true international currency in the 20th century, there was no longer any need to worry about an artist’s right to make a personal statement.
With the rise of serialism, neoclassicism and, later, minimalism, artistic customs were already heading, perhaps, in the opposite direction, towards a new commitment to rigor and structure. Emotion put into fists, like concepts plucked from the bottom of a matchbox, seemed to dominate cultural activities in the latter part of the century while, at the same time, Althusser and Derrida, allied with the populism of mass culture, seemed suggest that there were no new statements, let alone discoveries, to be made. He governed a spectral game of all against all, where distinctions of quality were suddenly both particularistic and individual to the point of exclusion. (This, of course, is necessarily a paradox for people who promote a populist pop culture, since they aspire to the mass consumption of a unique artistic vision, a statement that, by definition, cannot be worth more than any other, even a statement randomly selected). As a result, those who tend to deny a critic’s right to make value judgments must themselves assume that such judgments are perfectly valid in the marketplace. It’s a contradictory position, but an essential one for purveyors of pop, as they must continue to describe the form as popular, despite the fact that the vast majority of their products prove to be just the opposite.) . And then there was Piazzolla, an enigma par excellence.
On the one hand, Astor Piazzolla is the quintessential composer of the mid-20th century. Classically trained, a student of Alberto Ginastera and Nadia Boulanger, and inspired by the commercial and folk music of his own country, he could have fit alongside Villa Lobos, Ponce, or even Martinu or Copeland as a collaborator of the neoclassical of the century. paradigm of popular music. But what he did was very different.
He devoted his compositional energies to recreating and reinventing a popular language that was entirely specific to his own country, Argentina. The form, of course, was the tango. Furthermore, Astor Piazzolla concentrated on performance through his own ensembles and achieved considerable, albeit local, success until near the end of his life, throughout a career that spanned fifty years. But he expressed himself on the bandoneon, a pressure box that lends itself to staccato, a slapping attack, an instrument that is not peculiar to Argentina, but perhaps only well known by Argentines. He died in 1992, his national romantic heroism at best.
It was in the early 1990s that arrangements of Piazzolla’s music began to appear on “classic” shows. By the time a figure like August and Daniel Barenboim recorded their Tangos among friends, Mi Buenos Aires Querido, in 1995, they were already establishing themselves in the repertoire. I have personally heard interpretations of Piazzolla’s music for full orchestra, string orchestra, chamber orchestra, various chamber ensemble formats, piano trio, solo piano, solo harp, flute and guitar, solo guitar, violin and piano, string quartet, string trio and, of course, bandoneon. But surely it is the chamber group that best fits with this music. There is always a harshness to her apparent sexiness that tends to be exaggerated by big numbers from a full orchestra. Lack of volume, on the other hand, tends to accentuate the saccharin.
And if you want to find an exquisite combination between the hardness and the sensuality of the music, its durability versus its novelty, surely there is no better experience than the one offered by Camerata Virtuosi, a septet led by the violinist Joaquín Palomares and with the saxophonist Claude Delangle. . His recording of Piazzolla’s music features superb arrangements by Joaquín Palomares that capture the directness and beauty of the music while preserving its harshness.
A performance by Camerata Virtuosi at the Auditori de la Mediterrània, La Nucia in February 2008 featured all the pieces included in their recording of Piazzolla’s music. The group performed the four seasons as a sextet with two violins, viola, cello, bass and piano. These pieces offer Joaquín Palomares a perfect vehicle to show his virtuosity on the violin, which communicates the line of the music and at the same time decorates it with very effective jazz riffs. The rest of the pieces were played by a septet in which Claude Delangle’s perfect soprano saxophone bowed and made its way through lambent legato lines. He was playing of the highest quality.
Regarding the recording, particularly successful were Oblivion and Milonga del Angel. Oblivion is the Piazzolla par excellence, a popular song for manic depressives perhaps, and therefore not a rarity. But the simplicity and understatement of the piece always works beautifully, even when played twice in the same concert, as in La Nucia. Milonga del Angel is a different piece. Although superficially similar to Oblivion, in its six minutes it manages to unfold through its binary form, so that different movements create different moods within the same material. A real highlight.
Joaquim Palomares’s violin performance was, as always, more than elegant at all times and in the end the audience had once again experienced Piazzolla’s genius thanks to Palomares’s superb arrangements. Great music needs great performers, and Piazzolla has surely found one in Joaquín Palomares.