2 movements from Histoire du Tango (1986)

Café 1930

Bordel 1900

One of the best pieces of advice offered by one musician to another was Nadia Boulanger’s to her Argentinian composition pupil Astor Piazzolla. After an examination of the music he had brought with him – “Here you are like Stravinsky, here like Bartók, here like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazzolla in this” – she toild him to be himself, go back to Buenos Aires and develop the tango into serious music. His “nuevo tango” didn’t make him popular everywhere in Argentina, least of all with fellow tango ccomposers and other traditionalists. But it did make his music an international cult. It also demonstrated that the tango could be as fruitful an inspiration as the waltz had been to previous generations of composers. It is true that a musical history of the waltz would not have it originating in a brothel as the tango does in Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango and as, in fact, it did. In this selection of two of the four movements of that work (originally written for flute and guitar) the charmingly tuneful Café 1930 precedes the not much less decorous Bordel 1900.