Astor Piazzolla was unique. As Max Miller used to say, “there’ll
never be another!” How true this is. Piazzolla was a man
alone, possessed, a real trail-blazer. He was also a thoroughly
nice chap. I had the great, good, fortune to meet him during
his British debut, at the Almeida Festival in June 1985. That
year the festival featured Tango and as well as Piazzolla and
his New Tango Quintet, Yvar Mikhashoff introduced his International
Tango Collection, which consisted of 48 virtuoso piano miniatures.
I was there, paging turning for Yvar, and indeed, am the only
person alive who was present at that meeting of minds, when
Yvar played Conlon Nancarrow’s Tango, a work which
to many would have borne no resemblance to the tango whatsoever.
Astor listened carefully, and at the end threw his arms in the
air exclaiming, “but it eeez tango!” He knew when
a composer had broken the bounds of tradition and created something
new. And Piazzolla should have known about turning a form on
its head and re-inventing it for that is what he did with the
tango, in the process inventing what is now known as New Tango.
Piazzolla’s musical pedigree is impressive. He studied
with Alberto Ginastera, then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger,
and it was she who recognised where his future lay, “She
kept asking: ‘You say that you are not pianist. What instrument
do you play, then?’ And I didn't want to tell her that
I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, ‘Then she
will throw me from the fourth floor.’ Finally, I confessed
and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She
suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: ‘You
idiot, that's Piazzolla!’ And I took all the music I composed,
ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.”
(from Ástor Piazzolla, ‘A Memoir’).
So, not for the first time, Nadia Boulanger sent into the world
a major musical figure whose work, like that of Copland before
him and so many afterwards, would enrich and delight us. Considering
that he toured with a variety of ensembles it’s a wonder
that he had the time to create a repertoire for them. Create
he did, there’s an astonishing amount of music and much
of it has been arranged for various combinations, from solo
piano, as here, to string orchestra, soloist with orchestra
and so on. If you’ve ever heard Piazzolla and one of his
many ensembles playing his music then you’ll never want
to hear this music any other way, for they are the very best
expositions of the works, played by the people for whom they
were created with the master in charge.
These versions for solo piano are very pleasing but lack the
essential bite of the music which is so noticeable in their
band forms, and no matter how good a pianist Delle-Vigne is,
and he is good, I cannot warm to his interpretations as I do
to the originals. That said, this is a good introduction to
Piazzolla’s music and with such good sound, and at the
price, it’s a bargain! Afterwards, go out and discover
the recordings of Astor and his New Tango groups.
Bob Briggs
see also review by Brian
Reinhart
Aquiles Delle-Vigne (piano) 
