3 Tangos arranged for orchestra

Muerte del Angel

Oblivion

Adiós Nonino

“For me,” Piazzolla once said, “tango was always for the ear rather than the feet” – which explains how he was able to extend the tango idiom in so many different directions and put it to so many different purposes. It is difficult to imagine anyone dancing a tango to the fiercely articulated rhythms of Muerte del Angel (Death of the Angel) which comes from the incidental music written in 1962 for a play by Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz, Tango del Angel.

The play, which takes its title from a Piazzolla piece, is about an angel who is dedicated to saving the souls of the underprivileged inhabitants of Buenos Aires but who is eventually killed in a knife fight. The violence of the outer sections of Muerte del Angel, which begins as a three-part fugue, is relieved by a comparatively short but engagingly melodious middle section. Muerte del Angel was later incorporated in Piazzolla’s Angel series, along with Milonga del Angel, also from the incidental music to the play, and Resurrección del Angel which was specially devised to give the series a happy ending.

Much more tempting to the feet, Oblivion was written for Marco Bellochio’s film version of Pirandello’s play Enrico IV. Like most of Piazzolla’s music, the original score features the bandonéon but, since the beauty of the piece rests not so much in its instrumental colouring as in its achingly nostalgic melodic line, it has been successfully adapted for all kinds of ensembles, with and without the bandonéon. If it is not the most dynamic of his tango inspirations, it is certainly, thanks not least to the discreet but persistent presence of the characteristic tango rhythm in the bass, one of the most popular.

Equally popular and even more prodigious in the number and variety of the arrangements it has engendered – some of them by Piazzolla himself who recorded several versions, all of them bewilderingly different in duration – is the composer’s own favourite, Adiós Nonino. It was written on tour in Puerto Rico in 1959 when he heard of the death of his father at home in Argentina. Born in Italy, the father was known in the Piazzolla family as “Nonino” (Italian for Grandpa) an endearment which the composer had used as a title for a piece he had written in Paris in 1954. Adiós Nonino (Goodbye Grandpa) draws partly on that earlier work but mainly on new material inspired by his grief.    He once said that, however hard he tried, he could write nothing better: “I suppose it’s because it has a mysterious air, a melody that contrasts with a very strong rhythmic component, then the change in tone and that glorious finale with sad denouement.”

Gerald Larner © 2011