Astor PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992)
A Piazzola Trilogy
Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (1965-1969) (arr. Leonid Desyatkinov, 1996-98) [28:48]
Tango Études Nos 3-5 (1987) [10:23]
Histoire du Tango, for violin and guitar (1986) [23:04]
Stephanie Jones (guitar), Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire/Karen Gomyo (violin)
rec. June 26-27, 2020, La Cité de Congrès, Nantes, France; August 10-13, 2020, Kulturkirche Nicodemus, Berlin, Germany
BIS BIS-2385 SACD [63:03]
If one could make a Venn diagram of the various genres of music and then place composers within it as appropriate to their music, the name of Astor Piazzolla would surely be positioned in an area where classical music, Latin music and jazz overlapped. To put it at its simplest, beginning in the 1950s Piazzolla united elements from both jazz and classical traditions with the tango and produced what became known as ‘tango nuevo’.
Piazzolla had both the relevant skills and the experience to ensure that any such fusion of traditions which he produced was beyond possible suspicion of superficiality or the pursuit of a fashionable commercial success (indeed, as he evolved his tango nuevo in the 1950s it was much criticized in Argentina as a betrayal of the tango). His instinctive curiosity about the variety of musical languages is well illustrated by a story of his youthful years in New York. One day in 1933, when he was 13 and had been playing the bandoneon for a few years, he heard some fascinating music coming from the open window of a house in New York, where he lived with his parents from 1924 to 1936. This turned out to be the Hungarian pianist Béla Wilda (a pupil of Rachmaninov) practicing. The young Piazzolla was able to take lessons with Wilda, who encouraged him and, so the story goes, taught him to play Bach on his bandoneon. Piazzolla was later
to study classical music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in Argentina with Alberto Ginastera. The young Piazzolla’s years in New York exposed him to a good deal of jazz and he soon came to love many aspects of that musical idiom; after his family’s return to Argentina he worked (primarily as a player of the bandoneon, but also as an arranger and an occasional pianist) with many significant figures in the modern history of the tango, such as Anibal Troilo and Francisco Fiorentino. In 1946 Piazzolla formed his own Orquesta Tipica and began to incorporate more of his own innovative ideas. Alongside his work with his own tango orchestra, he listened to lots of jazz (favourite musicians included Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan – with whom he recorded the 1974 album, Summit – Chet Baker and The Modern Jazz Quartet) and also studied the music of composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky, Debussy and Prokofiev.
By the mid-1950s Piazzolla was beginning to find the conventions of the usual tango orchestra rather frustratingly restrictive. After his studies with Boulanger in 1954, on his return to Buenos Aires he formed his Octeto Buenos Aires made up of his bandoneon, another bandoneon, two violins, a piano, a cello, an electric guitar and a double bass. There is useful information on such matters in Le Grand Tango: The Life and Music of Astor Piazzolla by María Susana Azzi and Simon Collier (OUP, 2000). As Piazzolla reinvented the tango he largely dispensed with a vocalist and, in reducing the size of the ensemble moved the idiom closer to chamber music. Although it is an oversimplification, there is some truth in the often-repeated statement that Piazzolla changed tango from music to dance to into refined and sophisticated music to listen to, moving it, as it were, from the nightclub and ballroom into the concert hall. Such developments were controversial in Argentina and were met with much opposition and controversy (some taxi drivers in Buenos Aires refused to carry Piazzolla, regarding him as a ‘traitor’ to the tango).
The tango nuevo involved, for example, the use of instruments not hitherto familiar in tango, a more sophisticated harmonic language and the use of improvisation on the model of jazz. Piazzzolla’s new style of tango, while disliked by many traditionalists, soon found many admirers too, not least amongst musicians in the worlds of jazz and classical music. The jazz vibraphonist and composer Gary Burton, who toured with Piazzolla in the 1980s and recorded several alums with him or of his music, notably The New Tango (1986), Astor Piazzolla Reunion: A Tango Excursion (1988) and Libertango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla (2000), summed up the parallel between the two musics very lucidly:
“We can say that jazz is the national music of America and samba and bossa nova [of] Brazil. Usually a national music remains fairly simple and doesn’t progress on to become highly sophisticated and developed, [but] this happened to jazz and it happened to tango. And in the case of tango Astor was the principal figure that helped the transition” (quoted thus in Azzi and Collier, see above, p.164).”
Other jazz musicians also became fascinated by Piazzola’s music, especially in the 1990s, one such was the guitarist Al Di Meola, a fascination perhaps finding fullest expression on the 1996 CD Di Meola Plays Piazzolla which gathers performances of Piazzolla’s music by Di Meola recorded between 1990 and 1996 and closes, movingly, with the guitarist’s own elegiac composition ‘Last Tango for Astor’.
Classical musicians were also attracted to Piazzolla’s music at much the same time. In 1992 Miroslav Rostropovich recorded ‘Le Grand Tango’, a piece Piazzolla had written for him (and dedicated to him) in 1986, and which he had rehearsed (with the Argentinian pianist Susana Mendelivich) under Piazzolla’s supervision, while in Buenos Aires in April 1990. Another great cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who loved this piece, going so far as to call it one of his “favourite pieces of music” recorded it (with Kathryn Stott) on his album The Soul of Tango (1997). The Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer’s album Hommage à Piazzolla (Nonesuch) was issued in 1996, and was followed by further recordings of Piazzolla’s music, including Astor Piazzolla: El Tango (Nonesuch, 1997), Astor Piazzolla: Tango Ballet (Nonesuch, 1999) and Tracing Astor (Nonesuch, 2001). Another particularly interesting ‘classical’ encounter with Piazzolla’s music around the same time is Los Tangueros (Sony Classical, 1997) piano-duo arrangements of pieces by Piazzolla, played by Emanuel Ax and Pablo Ziegler, Piazzolla’s regular pianist from 1978 until 1989, when Piazzolla retired.
More such recordings have followed, so Karen Gomyo is not without predecessors, but her interpretations are sufficiently distinguished not to be overshadowed by such earlier recordings. Throughout this disc she plays with disciplined passion and expressive soulfulness.
In a brief note by her, Gomyo explains how she was first introduced to Piazzolla’s music at the age of 14, when her jazz-loving mother brought home some discs by him. Of what she heard on these discs she declares “I was spellbound […] his music seeped into the depths of my inner world. I had never heard such a combination of sensuality, passion, playfulness, sadness and nostalgia.”
Ms. Gomyo begins her ‘Piazzolla Trilogy’ with Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas
(a porteño / porteña is citizen of Buenos Aires). What we now know as a suite of four pieces, its title usually anglicized as ‘Four Seasons of Buenos Aires’, seems not have been originally conceived of as such by Piazzolla. The four pieces were written over a span of some five years: ‘Verano Porteño’ was written in 1965 and ‘Otaño Porteño’ in 1969; while both ‘Inverno Porteño’ and ‘Primavera Porteña’ were written in 1970. All four pieces were originally scored for Piazzolla’s quintet of the time – made up of bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass. ‘Verano Porteño’ was written, and recorded, for use as incidental music in a play (Melanita de oro) by Alberto Rodríguez Muñoz. The first occasion on which Piazzolla and his quintet played all four pieces together was at the Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires on May 19, 1970. The suite has since been arranged for a variety of other ensembles – piano trio, guitar quartet, flute-piano-cello, solo harp, saxophone quartet, etc. Save amongst aficionados of Piazzolla’s own performances, the suite is now most familiar in the arrangement for violin and strings made by Leonid Desyatnikov for use on Gidon Kremer’s album Eight Seasons (Nonesuch, 2000) which coupled Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Piazzolla’s Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas. Though I have described Desyatkinov’s work as an arrangement, it might almost be called a re-composition. It incorporates rather more explicit echoes of and allusions to the Vivaldi Seasons than are to be found in Piazzolla’s original pieces.
Karen Gomyo performs the Desyatnikov/Piazzolla Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, conducted by the violinist herself and recorded in La Cité de Congrès in Nantes; the sound quality is excellent. The percussive sounds at the opening of ‘Verano Porteño’ (Summer) along with Gomyo’s sharp attack are very much in the spirit of tango nuevo. Gomyo’s sound is less ‘pure’ than that of, for example, Kremer, but this seems to me to do more justice to the paradoxical simultaneity of emotion in the music; her use of rubato is expressive without being overdone, and throughout this and the other movements of Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas there is a tang, a piquant bite, to her work that is both wholly appropriate and thoroughly engaging. The music is, in short, perfectly characterized. But Gomyo’s approach doesn’t prevent her from also shaping Piazzolla’s melodies very eloquently. In the first section of ‘Otoño Porteño’ (Autumn) there is a grave melancholy, sustained through some decidedly slow tempi. In this movement, the work of cellist Paul Ben Soussan also deserves special praise. Gomyo’s conducting makes the most of the movement’s contrasting tempi (there are three fast and two slow sections aurally reflecting, perhaps, that season’s reminders of summer and anticipations of winter. In ‘Invierno Porteño’ (Winter) the changes of tempi paint a picture of hurried movements seeking to get to a place of warmth, a duality of cold and heat which this performance evokes well. The contrapuntal writing at the beginning of ‘Primavera Porteña’ (Spring), which features the orchestra’s leader, Julien Szulman, its (unnamed) principal viola and Karen Gomyo, heard against/above a backcloth of percussive and indefinitely pitched sounds from the remaining strings, ushers in a movement which celebrates the energy of spring in Buenos Aires, full of new flowers and the purple blossom on the city’s many jacaranda trees. I find the slower middle section of the movement, with its plentiful rubato, suggestive of the renewed social life during evening walks in the plazas, and outside the cafes. It rounds off a fascinating work, here given a satisfying and memorable performance.
I have nothing negative to say about Karen Gomyo’s playing in the three ‘Tango Études’, though I find it disappointing there are only three of Piazzolla’s set of six etudes; there would surely have been room for the other three on the disc? My other quibble is that the études, which were recorded in the Kulturkirche Nicodemus in Berlin, rather than the Congress Hall in Nantes, are heard in inferior sound (though not disastrously so) compared to the Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas – the church acoustic robs Gomyo’s violin of a little of its clarity of sound. But Gomyo’s reading of these three études is very impressive (increasing one’s disappointment at the absence of the other three). These études were originally written for flute and there are good recordings on that instrument by, inter alia, Irmgard Toepper (Piazzolla: Complete Music for flute and guitar, Naxos 2000) and Laurel Zucker (Inflorescence II, Cantilena 2011). But for me they sound better when played on the violin. This is not surprising if one considers some of Piazzolla’s comments on the tango, such as one recorded in Natalio Gorin’s Piazzolla: A Memoir, (translated by Fernando Gonzalez, 2001, p. 144): “I play with violence, my bandoneon must sing and scream. I can’t conceive of pastel tones in tango”. Without the slightest indiscipline or looseness, Gomyo’s interpretations have the kind of violent emotions Piazzolla sees as the essence of tango. Listening to Gomyo play these études one is caught up entirely in her lyricism and intense emotion, forgetting the considerable technical challenges these pieces pose. The complex florid writing in No 3, which the player must articulate while also making the dance rhythms utterly clear, sounds so natural in Gomyo’s interpretation that one completely forgets the difficulties involved. In listening to No 4 one is so completely absorbed by the heartfelt melancholy of her playing that one doesn’t initially pause to admire how skillfully she makes use of what tango musicians call fraseo, a kind of rubato. In her accounts of all three of the chosen etudes Gomyo sounds completely at home with the musical idiom – it comes as no surprise to learn that she has worked with such acknowledged tango masters as pianist Pablo Ziegler, bandeonist Hector Del Curto and guitarist Claudio Ragazzi.
Karen Gomyo’s Piazzolla Trilogy closes with the Argentinian’s Histoire du Tango. This is (currently at least) one of my particular favourites amongst Piazzolla’s more ‘classical’ compositions. It was originally scored for flute and guitar, but versions for violin and guitar and other instrumental combinations were soon produced. Piazzolla himself wrote some programme notes for the work. Of the first section, ‘Bordel 1900’, he commented “The tango originated in Buenos Aires in 1882. It was first played on the guitar and flute […] This music is full of grace and liveliness. It paints a picture of the good-natured chatter of the French, Italian, and Spanish women who peopled [the] bordellos as they teased the policemen, thieves, sailors, and riffraff who came to see them. This is a high-spirited tango”. Of the second movement, ‘Café 1930’, Piazzolla observes “This is another age of the tango. People stopped dancing it as they did in 1900, preferring instead simply to listen to it. It became more musical, and more romantic. This tango has undergone total transformation: the movements are slower, with new and often melancholy harmonies. The tango is sometimes sung as well”; and of the third, ‘Nightclub 1960’ he writes “This is a time of rapidly expanding international exchange, and the tango evolves again as Brazil and Argentina come together in Buenos Aires. The bossa nova and the new tango are moving to the same beat. […] This marks a revolution and a profound alteration in some of the original tango forms”. Of the last movement, ‘Concert d’aujourd’hui’, he tells the reader that “Certain concepts in tango music become intertwined with modern music. Bartók, Stravinsky, and other composers reminisce to the tune of tango music”(all quotes from the booklet notes to Quicksilver: Songs and Dances of the Americas, by Bonita Boyd, flute and Nicholas Goluses, guitar, Albany, 2010). As Piazzolla’s notes make clear, he understood the history of the tango not only in ‘purely’ musical terms but also in terms of the changing venues (with their related social implications) in which it was played: from brothel, to café, to nightclub and finally to the Concert Hall. The fine performance of Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango by Karen Gomyo and guitarist Stephanie Jones realises much of what Piazzolla’s music implies as well as what is made explicit in his notes, as quoted above; it respects both the underlying unity of these four ‘phases’ of the tango’s history and the individuality of each of the four pieces. So, the high spirits of ‘Bordel 1900’ are as clearly delineated as the “melancholy harmonies” of ‘Café 1930’.
This account of Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango owes its
success, in part, to the fact that Gomyo brings to it both a passionate,
informed and experienced commitment to the tango tradition and a considerable
range and weight of classical background (as detailed on her website
she has given concerts with, to take but a few examples, orchestras
such as the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Czech
Philharmonic, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the Chicago Symphony;
she has premiered works by Peteris Vasks and Samuel Adams; her concerto
repertoire includes Mozart, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich. The only recording
by her which I had previously heard was Carnival (BIS 1998)
on which, in partnership with guitarist Ismo Eskelinen she plays, brilliantly,
sonatas by Vivaldi, Locatelli, Corelli and Paganini. I was, I am sorry
to say, previously ignorant of the guitarist Gomyo works with on this
present recording, but I was immediately very favourably impressed by
her playing on Histoire du Tango. Subsequent investigation
online have revealed that Jones was born in Australia but is currently
based, like Gomyo, in Germany. She has an extensive presence on YouTube;
interested readers might like to hear her playing Piazzola, Albeniz
or Walton – all of which a search will readily find. And what
an accomplished guitarist she is!
I don’t remember ever hearing a more convincing and beautiful performance of Histoire du Tango than this by Karen Gomyo and Stephanie Jones. And there is much to enjoy and admire elsewhere on the disc. I would place it alongside Ksenija Sidorova’s Piazzolla Reflections (review) as the best of recent classical interpretations of Piazzolla’s music. Only the absence of those three Tango Études discourages me from giving this the official MusicWeb accolade ‘Recommended’.
Glyn Pursglove
