Bandoneon Concerto ("Aconcagua")

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 examining the music he had brought to Paris 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 told him to be himself, go back to Buenos Aires and concentrate on the tango. But, surely, even she could not have foreseen how successful he would be in developing the tango idiom into a complete musical language capable of extension into any dimension, including concerto and opera. His nuevo tango style might not have pleased the traditionalists of Buenos Aires but the concert pieces written under its influence are of such quality that they have fascinated musicians as distinguished and as diverse as Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniel Barenboim, Gidon Kremer and, more recently, Yo-Yo Ma.

As a boy Piazzolla didn’t like the tango. But his father did and, in an effort to get his son to share his enthusiasm, presented him with a bandoneon when he was eight or nine: “Astor,“, he said, “this is the instrument of the tango, I want you to learn to play it.” An accordion with buttons rather than a keyboard – 71 of them in the model preferred in South America – it is a difficult instrument to learn but Astor mastered it, apparently to play Bach at first but eventually, not least through his admiration for Elvino Vardaro, tango music. Before he was 20 he was playing bandoneon with the best tango orchestras in Buenos Aries and in 1944 he formed a new ensemble to perform his own tango compositions. At the same time, having studied composition with Alberto Ginastera, he was writing “classical” music, including the symphony that won him a scholarship to study in Paris in 1954.

Although Nadia Boulanger turned him in the right direction, back to Argentina and towards the nuevo tango, he did not abandon classical forms. The Bandoneon Concerto written in Paris in 1979 (and scored for solo bandoneon, strings, harp, piano, timpani and percussion) was the consummation of all his interests. The “Aconcagua” subtitle added after the composer’s death by his publisher – “this is the peak of Astor's oeuvre,” he said, “and the highest peak in South America is Aconcagua” – is not inappropriate.   

The form of the Bandoneon Concerto is classical only in its adherence to the usual (quick-slow-quick) succession of three movements. Construction of the individual movements, where such formal patterns as sonata form and rondo simply do not apply, is anything but classical. The Allegro marcato begins purposefully in a vigorously dissonant tango idiom of sharply accented syncopated rhythms with percussive piano and scratchy guiro sounds. The bandoneon is for the most part integrated into the orchestral texture at this stage, only occasionally emerging with a clear solo gesture. But then, about a third of the way through, it leads a complete change of direction, initiating a freely developing, sentimentally melodious episode where it elicits a sympathetic reaction from a solo cello and the rest of the strings. Another, equally sudden change of heart calls for a recall of the opening material and a briefly witty ending.

Opening the central Moderato with an extended, highly expressive solo, the bandoneon then lends its voice in support of a similarly reflective, at one point harmonically precarious episode featuring harp, violin and cello. The rest of the strings join in with increasing passion over a hint of tango rhythm on timpani, provoking another emotional entry from the soloist. An ostinato rhythmic figure, introduced by a brightly scored combination of piano and bandoneon, persists to the end of the movement.

The last movement begins in much same manner as the first except that this time the jagged rhythms on bandoneon are eventually, and most effectively, combined with a sustained melody on the strings. Again as in the first movement, there is a sudden change of mood, this one initiated by a smoochy piano and given a tuneful welcome by the bandoneon with a scraping guiro in the background. At this point, according to the composer’s own confession, he met a problem: “I didn’t know how to finish it.” He found the answer in a distinctive figure derived from the tango El Flaco Aroldi which becomes the obsessive subject of a thoroughly conclusive coda.

Gerald Larner © 2011