In 2008 Estela Telerman performed Argentinean piano music in
New York and Washington DC, where she was a member of Jury for
the Washington International Piano Competition. With the benefit
of evident sympathy and great insight into the repertoire she
presents more than two hours of the Tango by serious Argentinean
composers.
To the first disc where a number of the many of the tangos sound
commercial. Nothing untoward in that. How many of these were
written to turn a pretty penny. Then again what do we expect
composers to do: starve. The piano stools of Europe were for
decades stuffed with the lightly or ill-considered offerings
of the great as well as the mediocre.
Some of these tangos are redolent of Gottschalk. Drangosch’s
1908
Don Pepe tango sounds a little like a Joplin rag.
The Buchardo
Coquito is a winsome piece. Drangosch’s
Aire
de Tango from the operetta
La Gruta de los milagros is
stiff-necked yet rather 1960s romantic. Giacobbe 's
Preludio
en forme de tango dates from the mid-1940s and is in a strangely
filtered sophisticated harmonic language. Gilardi's 1958
Tango has
the hammered sound of a pianola roll. Ranieri's
Encuentro is
a song for soprano and piano here sung by Silvina Martino. It
is rather dissonant and black-storm cloudy. A similar dissonance
echoes stonily around Urteaga's
Entonces. Norma Lado's
haltingly
Cristales Rotos (Broken Glasses) is inventively
fractured yet dissonant yet in touch with the tradition. From
the same year comes Jorge Pitari's
Invencion Tanguera No.
3 which marries tango with J.S. Bach's patterning and with
the serious-browed martellato of the pianola.
In the second and later CD Telerman shares the microphone with
many other musicians. The Hargeaves
La Rubia is workmanlike
but plain. The Gaos evinces a little more originality. He was
a Galician immigrant. The Sagreras pieces are for the guitar
are three honeyed and lovingly turned tangos with the middle
of the three being very Iberian indeed. Returning to the piano
we hear the thorny and awkward yet fresh music of Russian-born
Ficher. Giacobbe wrote many works for bandoneon and these are
warmly orated by Omar Aranda Lamadrid. Across these tangos Lamadrid
recalls three people who were major figures in his life. Washington
Castro employs a cello in
Dos Tangos. These are very intense
and not shackled to the tango tradition; rather taking it as
a launching point. Guastavino is now being recorded by others.
His
Horacio Lavalle stays within the bounds of an essentially
conservative language though there is a light dusting of dissonance
here too. Telerman is joined by the quavery tenor of Jose Luis
Sarre for the passionate
Volveran las oscuras golondrinas.
We go back to the guitar for the dark skies of Fernando Maglia's
Imagitango with
its whiplash asides over a gloomy ostinato. Audacity dissonantly
racks the tango representations of Abras and Baldini.
Everything here is lovingly turned by Telerman.
These two discs are only available separately and you may have
to work hard to track them down.
Rob Barnett
Estela Telerman (piano) 
